1807-1815.
For things we never mention,
For Art misunderstood—
For excellent intention
That did not turn to good.…
Kipling.
It was, however, not without secret apprehension Maturin went forth to realize his literary aspirations. The unfortunate conflict between his bent and his profession—as understood by the multitude—asserted itself at the very beginning of his career; ‘Maturin’s friends,’ as a biographer[23] puts it, ‘being a little evangelical, he could not risk offending or scandalizing them by appearing publicly as a writer of novels.’ He was, accordingly, compelled to choose a pseudonym, and lighted upon the rather unhappy one of Dennis Jasper Murphy. So, at least, it was judged afterwards by those who were interested in Maturin’s productions. A writer[24] describing a visit he paid to the novelist in the days when his fame was at its highest, says, with reference to this nom de plume:
I remarked that his assumed name of Dennis Jasper Murphy, from its vulgar and merely Irish sound, must have injured the character of ‘Montorio’ and his other romances. In this he seemed to agree with me, observing, that at the time he was inexperienced, and in some instances badly advised.
That the author was an Irishman, and without any ‘literary friend or counsellor,’ is explicitly stated in the preface—the last-named circumstance remaining, for the future, a constant theme of lamentation for Maturin. No doubt there is an air of helplessness about the publication of Montorio. Being unable to dispose of the copyright, Maturin had no choice but to publish it at his own hazard; and the bookseller again, at his hazard, thought it proper to embellish the title of the book by adding the words The Fatal Revenge, the name intended by the author being only The Family of Montorio. In the preface to Women (1818) Maturin mentions this, admitting the addition to have been ‘a very bookselling appellation;’ but how bookselling it was is best seen by the fact that the book did not reach a second edition before 1824.
The Gothic Romance, the school of fiction founded upon ‘the passion of supernatural fear,’ was already in disrepute at the time Montorio came out. In the preface, therefore, Maturin presents an eloquent defence of this style of writing, which, though much abused by ‘vulgar and unhallowed hands,’ he still maintains to be most fit for artistic treatment:
I question whether there be a source of emotion in the whole mental frame, so powerful or universal as the fear arising from objects of invisible terror. Perhaps there is no other that has been at some period or other of life, the predominant and indelible sensation of every mind, of every class, and under every circumstance. Love, supposed to be the most general of passions, has certainly been felt in its purity by very few, and by some not at all, even in its most indefinite and simple state.
The same might be said, a fortiori, of other passions. But who is there that has never feared? Who is there that has not involuntarily remembered the gossip’s tale in solitude or in darkness? Who is there that has not sometimes shivered under an influence he would scarce acknowledge to himself? I might trace this passion to a high and obvious source.
Here, in a few words, is expressed the peculiarity of the Gothic Romance.[25] Its soul is terror; terror, preferably, if not always, arising from a cause of supernatural import. It is often considered as a crude precursor of the magnificent revival of the English letters with the romanticism of the early 19:th century, nor can it be denied that in some instances the threads of the two currents are interwoven, and that certain details from the one are taken up and ennobled by the other. The Byronic hero, for example, who was to influence the poetry of Europe, has his prototype in the Gothic Romance. Yet in its essential nature this movement is different from all others, and, instead of coalescing with romanticism, it is developed apart from and alongside with it, Maturin’s Melmoth, which is unquestionably the greatest production of the actual Gothic Romance, appearing as late as 1820. According to this distinct character of its own, the present writer would be disposed considerably to restrict the range usually allotted to the Gothic Romance. Especially with regard to works in which the use of supernatural agency is eliminated, the limit has sometimes been fixed with obvious arbitrariness; if the occurrence only of startling incidents or violent and extraordinary characters[26] were to be the criterion in this respect, the Gothic Romance would include, not only a collection of rubbish, but a great many productions which English literature has cause to be proud of. It is the main and only purpose of the work which must be kept in view, and that, as in all Gothic romance, is to appeal to the reader’s sense of fear. The terrible and revolting elements are introduced entirely for their own sake—not, for instance, to lend force to the total impression, or give depth to the study of character; ghastly crimes, torture, and painful situations form the very aim of the book, that for which it was written. It is evident that this kind of composition was not likely to attain any artistic excellence. A good example of it is Shelley’s youthful story of Zastrozzi (1810), probably one of the most worthless things ever fabricated by a great poet in a moment of misdirected energy. A book like John Moore’s Zeluco (1786?), on the other hand, can hardly be classed among the productions of the Gothic Romance, although it is habitually mentioned together with them; it is a dispassionate, rather didactic display of a very vicious character, totally lacking those qualities that are calculated to make nervous readers afraid of going to bed.
The occurrence, however, of really or seemingly supernatural elements, is the chief characteristic of the Gothic Romance. These elements are always treated seriously; they form the part on which the reader’s attention is meant to be centred, the fearful sensations created by these means being, again, what the writer aims at—as expressed in Maturin’s preface quoted above. Another vital point there alluded to is that the ‘passion of supernatural fear’ is intended to come home to the reader by way of his own recollections of moments when he has involuntarily shivered in solitude or in darkness. In other words, the unearthly incidents about to be told are to take place among ordinary people, in environs more or less resembling real life. This, in fact, is admittedly a requisite to the Gothic Romance;[27] and, that being so, a tale like Beckford’s Vathek (1781?) ought to be excluded from the Schauerromantik, the meaning of this word being limited to the definite literary movement now in question. In Vathek the course of action is, from the beginning, raised to the realm of a fairy tale from the Arabian Nights; here, consequently, the supernatural becomes ‘natural,’ never being startling or unexpected in its mere capacity of supernaturalness, nor in any way connected with experiences which the reader might be familiar with.
The denomination ‘Gothic story’ was invented and introduced by Horace Walpole, who furnished his Castle of Otranto with this sub-title. The wonders themselves, in this romance, are crude and primitive in the extreme, such as statues found bleeding, and portraits walking out of their frames. The Castle of Otranto was, however, greatly admired by Scott,[28] who points out that in this crudity lies a deliberate artistic purpose of re-calling the ideas of the distant times, when the things related would have been ‘received as matter of great credulity.’ In its attempt at time-colouring the Castle of Otranto really stands alone among the Gothic romances where, as a rule, personages of any time or country speak the language and express the ideas of 18:th century England. In the present age, indeed, the success of this effort seems very indifferent, and the tedious horrors of Walpole proved too much even for his direct imitators. Clara Reeve, in her Champion of Virtue (1777), afterwards called The Old English Baron, which she candidly confesses to have been inspired by Walpole, prudently keeps aloof from his copious use of supernatural elements. Yet the childish character of all these inventions could not long satisfy the public taste for horror, which grew very intense in the last decade of the century. Originality was soon sacrificed to the demands of power and suspense; The Monk (1795) of Matthew Gregory Lewis, which is the best known—and probably the worst written—of all the more famous productions of the school of terror, consists, for the most part, of plagiarisms from foreign sources. Only his manner of handling his readers’ nerves without gloves was, at that time, a novelty in English fiction. The unearthly elements in The Monk comprise popular legends of ghosts that find no rest in their graves, and one of the principal personages is a female demon sent forth by the devil himself to corrupt the morals of the monk Ambrosio. Compared to the nursery-bogeys of Walpole and Clara Reeve the preternatural world in The Monk is, of course, much more imposing in itself, although the author’s treatment of his subject-matter is exceedingly blunt and coarse. With regard to the occurrence also of situations physically revolting and disgusting, the school of terror celebrates one of its doubtful triumphs in the romance of Lewis.
About the same time, however, the movement took another course in a gentler direction, with the appearance of Mrs Ann Radcliffe within the province of imagination. She refrains altogether from representing anything actually supernatural; whatever is made to appear so throughout the tale, is finally explained as proceeding from some natural cause. This innovation in the mode of composition by no means marks an improvement from the artistic point of view. In a story written in the Radcliffe style a certain want of dignity is constantly felt, the reader being, to use the words of Scott,[29] ‘cheated into a sympathy’ with horrors shown, at last, to be connected with very petty and trivial circumstances, while the ‘explanation’ tendered is often as improbable as would be an appeal to supernatural forces. Nevertheless there still remains a sort of halo about the work of Mrs Radcliffe. She was indeed a far cleverer writer than either Walpole or Lewis, possessing, in a considerable degree, the rare art of suggestion, so important in novels of suspense. Another innovation introduced by Mrs Radcliffe into the Gothic Romance is an intense, romantic feeling for natural scenery. In her tales a moonlit landscape is as indispensable as a half-ruinous castle, and to the dreamy, sentimental atmosphere which prevails throughout her works, her enormous popularity was, no doubt, partly due. It was under her influence Maturin started his career as a novelist; Montorio is, as far as its construction is concerned, composed in the typical Radcliffe style. That he was entirely in sympathy with his subject is already seen from the preface, and the warmth with which he speaks of Mrs Radcliffe even twelve years later,[30] clearly demonstrates that he must have been, in his youth, one of her most ardent admirers, and thoroughly acquainted with her works and all their peculiarities. The following extract from Maturin’s article deserves to be quoted all the more so because of its being one of the ablest and most beautiful characterizations of the once famous authoress ever written:
— — — her romances are irresistibly and dangerously delightful; fitted to inspire a mind devoted to them with a species of melancholy madness. The very light under which she paints every object, has something fatally indulgent to such an aberration of mind in its early and innocent, but mournful stage: her castles and her abbeys, her mountains and her valleys, are always tinged with the last rays of the setting sun, or the first glimpses of the rising moon; her music is made to murmur along a stream, whose dim waves reflect the gleam of “the star that bids the shepherd fold”; the spires of her turrets are always silvered by moonlight, and the recesses of her forests are only disclosed by flashes of the palest lightning; a twilight shade is spread over her views of the moral, as well as of the natural world: her heroines are “soft, modest, melancholy, female, fair”; they have no struggles of energy, no bursts of passion—they are born to tremble and to weep;—their love, from its very commencement, has a tinge of despair, and their susceptibility of nature (which seems always their strongest feeling) has all the character of a religious resignation of its charms to the solemn duty of extracting melancholy from its scenes; they hang on the parting beauties of an evening landscape, and their tears fall in solemn unison with the dews of heaven; they are revived only by the toll of a sepulchral bell, and wander among the graves of their departed friends, as if the intercourse of human existence were suspended, and the living were to seek not only recollection, but society, among the dead. The works of this writer lead us for ever to the tomb; but the wand which she bore was gifted only to call up the milder and unalarming spirits: we listen to her charms as we would to the incantations of a benevolent enchanter, whose “quaint apparitions” may soften and solemnize, but neither terrify nor hurt us. Her spirits were those who
By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make
Whereof the ewe bites not, and those whose pastime
Is to make midnight mushrooms, who rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew—
and “weak masters though they be”, their melody hovers round us as sweet as the air-borne songs of Ariel, and when we wake from the trance into which they have plunged us, “we cry to dream again”—
In spite of similarity in construction it will be seen that the general atmosphere of Montorio differs greatly from the feminine gentleness of Mrs Radcliffe—as much as it does from the crude straightforwardness of Lewis; and it speaks much for Maturin’s originality that he at once succeeded in preserving a tone so distinctly his own among patterns so highly admired.—
Lastly, a third class of the novel of terror is that in which the marvellous or seemingly supernatural phenomenon is represented as a result of scientific or quasi-scientific occupations, and, consequently, within the limits of possibility. Instead of receiving a ‘natural’ explanation à la Mrs Radcliffe, the reader is referred to the effects of mesmerism, hypnotism, or some other suggestive and incompletely known branch of natural science. This class, of which Edgar Allan Poe was to become the most brilliant representative—and in which the elements strictly Gothic are often dispensed with—was the latest developed of the three. At the time Montorio was written, it had been touched upon in some of the tales of the American Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) which, however, it is very uncertain whether Maturin was acquainted with. Closely related to novels of this class are the so-called Rosicrucian stories, which deal with alchemic pursuits; the most celebrated of these, the St. Leon of William Godwin, to which Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer is largely indebted, appeared in 1799.
The plot in Montorio is sufficiently intricate to necessitate a commencement of the analysis from the end and to reveal the mystery at once.
The ‘fatal revenge’ is perpetrated by Orazio, count of Montorio, upon his brother, who has, in a diabolical manner, caused the death of his (Orazio’s) wife and the ruin of all his family. Orazio and his younger brother are, some twenty years before the commencement of the story, the only surviving representatives of a house which for centuries has been one of the most illustrious in the kingdom of Naples. Orazio is of a brave and enthusiastic disposition, and warmly attached to his unworthy brother; the latter is incapable of holding any of the commissions procured for him by Orazio, and finally marries a woman whose family are on a decidedly hostile footing towards his brother. At the same time Orazio himself marries a beautiful and distinguished lady called Erminia di Amaldi, whom, with his usual impetuosity, he drags to the altar almost by main force. Very soon it becomes obvious to him that his love is not reciprocated, and all the goodness and gentleness of his wife cannot conceal the fact that she feels profoundly unhappy. Now Orazio is reconciled to his brother and invites him to the castle of Muralto, the family residence. The brother, coveting the title and estates of Montorio, determines to avail himself of the apparent depression of Erminia, whom he hates, being a rejected suitor of hers, while his wife, who is equally depraved, eagerly abets him in his intentions. He conceives a plan of exciting the jealousy of Orazio, which, considering his vehement nature, he rightly conjectures will be of fatal consequence. The plan is easily executed. It is generally known that a young officer of the name of Verdoni has been in love with Erminia before her marriage; and with the assistance of a rascally servant dismissed by Verdoni and taken up by the younger Montorio, the suspicions of Orazio are awakened and successfully kept alive by means of continual hints and allusions. Letters written by his wife to Verdoni are thrown into his way, and at last it is even proved that Erminia is in the habit of meeting Verdoni at the house of a peasant, where there is a little child who is the object of the tender care of both. Orazio’s rage knows no bounds. Verdoni is treacherously assaulted and brought to Muralto, where Orazio lets him be murdered before the eyes of Erminia; which horrible sight puts an end to her life also. Well-nigh deranged with sorrow and fear, Orazio leaves the country and finds a solitary refuge on a small isle in the Grecian archipelago, which is believed to be haunted and is never visited by the people of the neighbouring islands. Here his ‘propensities and habits cease to be those of humanity,’ and his bodily strength and perseverance likewise grow almost superhuman. His tranquillity is unexpectedly disturbed by a boat landing on the shore, with two men in it, whom he understands to speak Italian. From a part of their conversation which he overhears, he gathers that they are assassins sent out by the present count of Montorio, who cannot feel at ease while his brother is alive. In the night he is attacked by the men but easily dispatches both of them. By the corpse of one he finds some letters containing an account of the tragedy at Muralto, which clearly demonstrates the innocence of Erminia. It appears that she had been attached to Verdoni from her earliest youth. Her father being opposed to their union, they were married privately, and the following year Erminia was delivered of a daughter at the house of a relative. At the same time reports were spread of Verdoni’s death while on an expedition, and in the meantime Erminia’s father had compelled her to accept Orazio. When Verdoni had returned, Erminia was the unhappy but faithful wife of another.—Such are the tidings Orazio learns in his solitude, and to them are added those of the death of all his children. He lingers long in a state of stupefaction, but at length his energies are roused and inflamed into their former fury, whereupon a thirst for revenge is the only feeling which fills his soul, night and day. The revenge is to fall upon the whole family of his guilty brother, whose children, according to Orazio’s idea of combining justice with vengeance, are to be made the punishers of their father. Before, however, starting to put his purpose into effect, Orazio undertakes an extensive journey to the East where he becomes an adept in secret and magical studies, and during which his mental and physical abilities are developed to the highest perfection. Thence he returns to Italy and enters a convent under the name of father Schemoli. As he knows how to give himself an air of particular sanctity, he is soon called to the castle Muralto, to be the confessor of count Montorio, who has, by this time, become a rigid devotee.—
The story begins with a description of the family residing at the ancient castle. The gloomy retirement in which the count and countess pass their days is in no wise brightened by the presence of the confessor who is their only companion. Their eldest son, Ippolito, lives at Naples, as the admired and brilliant leader of the pleasures and dissipations of its jeunesse dorée, while the younger, Annibal, who is of a timid, melancholy, and suspicious disposition, is an inhabitant of Muralto. The members of the family have, from time immemorial, been noted for their love of magic and the preternatural. It is subsequently upon this inclination which the young men, otherwise so different, have in common, that the monk bases his scheme of inducing them to destroy their father. The story is one of a continuous, unrelenting process of strong mental suggestion, operating through its victims’ readiness to believe in supernatural agency. The plot goes forward alternately at the castle and at Naples; the adventures of Annibal are told by himself in letters to his brother. Muralto is furnished with everything required for a scene of ‘Gothic incidents.’ There is an old, uninhabited wing of the castle, with a cemetery-chapel partly in ruins, and no end of secret doors, intricate passages, and subterranean vaults. It is the delight of Annibal to ramble about in these desolate places; he has heard that a mystery is connected with the sudden and tragical end of the late possessor of the castle, whose fate greatly excites his curiosity. He attaches himself to an old servant who apparently knows more than he dares disclose. Much against his will the old man is persuaded to accompany Annibal on his nocturnal visits to the deserted part of the building—nocturnal, because the count is suspected to be very unfavourably disposed towards this kind of occupation. With difficulty they open the long-shut door to the apartments used by count Orazio. A portrait of the countess Erminia makes a profound impression upon Annibal, who feels assured that the original is still in the land of the living; he makes a copy of the picture, which he always carries about him. These excursions are exactly what Schemoli would wish, it being very easy for him, with his familiarity with all the recesses of the building, to awaken superstitious fear in the visitants. At times they see a human figure issuing, as it were, directly out of the wall; they hear mysterious steps and observe strange lights moving around them. Blood is detected on the floors, and in a cavity of the wall a skeleton is discovered. Once the old man disappears, for a while, as if swallowed up by the tombs. Shortly afterwards he dies, without being able to reveal what he has seen among the dead; he merely repeats that ‘the house of Montario must fall!’ Attended by a nephew of the old man, called Filippo, who now becomes his companion, Annibal continues to explore the ruins, until one night they are surprised by the count and Schemoli. The count, in a fury which betrays him to be conscious of a crime, has Annibal imprisoned in a lonely chamber in the castle, where, for some time to come, he beholds no face but that of the monk. At this stage Schemoli deems it fit to commence his work. He never speaks to the prisoner, or heeds his queries, by day; but every night at twelve he emerges from his castle of silence and sallies forth to Annibal’s room, where he serves up a fantastical story which he pretends to be allowed to relate at that hour only. He tells that he is the spirit of the dead body discovered by Annibal in the chapel. His life has been wild and sinful, and he has suffered a violent death. The body Annibal now sees before him is one two thousand years old, re-animated to become the abode of his spirit, until his real body is properly interred and vengeance wreaked upon his murderer. This task an implacable fate has destined to be executed by Annibal; and he is made to understand—although it is never distinctly uttered—that the criminal he must punish is his father. Annibal repudiates the idea with indignation, but Schemoli calmly repeats that his fate is inevitable, and that he is compelled to pursue Annibal everywhere until the deed is done. The mind of Annibal is already beginning to give way under the regular pressure of Schemoli, when these midnightly visits are suddenly interrupted. Annibal has, for some time, been permitted to enjoy the society of Filippo.—The count had promised to send Filippo to another of his estates, while the ruffian who was to be his guide had received a secret commission to murder him on the way. After a marvellous escape, however, Filippo had boldly returned to the castle and offered himself to act as a spy upon Annibal.—As he is really devoted to Annibal, he has the difficult task of operating as a double spy; but in this he succeeds so well as to find out that his master is to be poisoned by the monk. Through the dexterous management of Filippo, the draught prepared for Annibal is swallowed by Schemoli himself, after which the prisoners make their escape from the castle. Annibal determines to proceed to Naples to his brother, but on arriving there he learns that Ippolito has just left the town in a state of desperation.—
Interesting as are Annibal’s letters to his brother, Ippolito pays them but little attention, being wholly absorbed by business of his own. He has run across a stranger who exercises a mysterious, irresistible ascendancy over his mind. This stranger, otherwise father Schemoli, introduces himself to Ippolito in a manner calculated to excite, by degrees, his interest and curiosity; speaking, at first, but little at a time and then disappearing. Ippolito is usually called to meet him by letters which he finds in his room, none of his servants being able to explain how they get there. Soon it is generally observed that Ippolito is in the habit of spending his nights at some unknown place whence he always returns with a pale and haggard appearance; and when at times he takes part in his former amusements, he does so with the wild despair of one who wishes to escape his own thoughts. His young page, Cyprian, who takes tender care of him, endeavours, by every means, to keep him at home; sometimes he reads a diary to him, partly in verse and partly in prose, written by a nun and dedicated to some one she is hopelessly attached to. The gentle influence of Cyprian, however, is no match for the miraculous power of Schemoli. When midnight arrives, Ippolito departs. Once he has invited a company of friends to his house, but at the usual hour a gigantic figure, with his face concealed in a mask, appears among them, beckoning to Ippolito, who submissively follows him. Their destination is a subterranean vault, whither Ippolito is always conducted blindfold, and the purpose of these excursions is to impress upon him that he is ordered, by fate, to commit an extraordinary deed. Just as in the case of Annibal, the monk enjoins upon Ippolito that he himself labours under the same fate, and that his is no voluntary service; and the credulous mind of Ippolito soon proves susceptible to the imposture. One night he is informed that ‘the hour is come.’ He is again conducted to the vaults where he is received by several figures fantastically attired; after a multitude of mysterious rites and ceremonies he is shown, by a pantomimic display, that he is destined to commit a murder against his will, and also who is to be his victim. Like Annibal he is seized with violent indignation, but the serenity of Schemoli remains unperturbed. In great despair Ippolito leaves Naples at the very time Annibal arrives there from Muralto.
Ippolito roams about in the neighbourhood of Naples, without any definite object in view. His journey, however, soon becomes very painful. It appears that rumour has travelled ahead of him and spread news of his magical pursuits and his supposed alliance with the devil. Everywhere he is received with maledictions and threatened with the Inquisition; and, worst of all, he seems to be followed by the dreaded figure of his persecutor. Once he passes a night in a large, deserted building, where strange voices and footsteps induce him to descend into a subterranean locality of vast dimensions. There he is joined by Schemoli, who reminds him of the uselessness of trying to avoid his fate. He then leaves Ippolito to wander about in darkness, until he discerns two figures advancing before him in the dim light of a lantern. One of them is Schemoli, and the other a monk who carries the lifeless form of a young female. After a while the former is seen to depart, and the monk, with apparent hesitation, prepares to plunge a dagger into the breast of the lady; frightened by Ippolito he releases her and makes his escape. Ippolito seizes the lady and, following the course taken by the monk, emerges at last into the garden of a cloister. In fresh air the lady revives and learns with joy the name of her preserver. She informs him that she has been forcibly separated from his brother Annibal, and implores him to save her. There is a river flowing through the garden; seeing a boat Ippolito springs into it, but before he has time to assist her to follow him, the river is disturbed by an earthquake, and the boat is borne along with great rapidity. After a perilous course Ippolito gets safely ashore, and his ramblings begin again. Yet the suspicions entertained against him are gaining strength every moment, and at last he is imprisoned by the members of the Inquisition. He is repeatedly examined, but nothing worse happens to him so far as the Holy Office is concerned. Schemoli, however, regularly visits him in his cell. Ippolito’s power of resistance has nearly vanished, when he is once more released by another earthquake, which rends asunder the prison-tower of the Inquisition. With the few surviving inhabitants of the town he embarks for Sicily, but the bark is wrecked and Ippolito drifts ashore where he is received by Schemoli. Now he passively yields to the will of his persecutor, who conducts him first to Naples and then to the castle of Muralto.—
Annibal, not finding his brother at Naples, betakes himself to Puzzoli, to seek protection with a relative of his mother, a distinguished ecclesiastic, who lives at enmity with his father. On his way he arrives at a small town by a river which, just then, threatens the inhabitants with an inundation; the nuns of an Ursuline convent are arranging a solemn procession to induce the saint to prevent the impending calamity. In that procession Annibal detects the original of the picture which he still cherishes as his dearest treasure. In ecstasies he rushes to the lady, beginning to address her—to the strong resentment of the nuns—when the flood suddenly comes on with terrible force. Annibal is separated from the object of his rapture, but, in the general confusion at last finds her and succeeds in saving her from the water. She is taken back to the convent, but Annibal contrives clandestinely to meet her. It appears that she is a novice called Ildefonsa, and is forced to take the veil much against her inclinations. Annibal now writes to his relative to request him to interfere on behalf of Ildefonsa. His effort is crowned with success in so far as a letter really arrives from the bishop of the diocese, ordering the removal of Ildefonsa from the convent; but shortly before this Annibal has seen the well-known figure of Schemoli glide past him, and from that moment he is plunged into desperate gloom which nothing is able to dispel. Nor is he mistaken in his forebodings of evil. The messenger bringing the bishop’s letter is sent back with the intelligence that Ildefonsa is dead. Assisted by his faithful Filippo, however, Annibal finds out that this is not the case; accordingly, at the funeral procession, he steps forward accusing the abbess of having arranged a mock funeral, after immuring Ildefonsa in the dungeons of the convent. The abbess allows him to remove the pall, and, to his astonishment, he sees the lifeless form of Ildefonsa. The indignation of the public is now directed against Annibal; he is even imprisoned on account of his extraordinary conduct. Ildefonsa, however, who is not dead but only rendered insensible by a strong opiate, is conveyed to the vaults where Ippolito accidentally saves her from the hands of her enemies. The earthquake which separates Ildefonsa from Ippolito, reunites her with Annibal, whose prison is crushed to pieces. After some time spent in close retirement they venture to set out for Puzzoli. Their guide proves to be bribed by Schemoli, and they are attacked by his attendants, whereupon Annibal is severely wounded. When he comes to his senses he finds himself in the power of his persecutor. By this time he is also a broken man, and bereft of all further power of resistance he consents to all the propositions of Schemoli. He only expresses a wish that there might be another human being in the same condition as himself—and Schemoli has no reason to conceal that there is one: his brother Ippolito. Annibal follows Schemoli to Muralto, where he unexpectedly finds Ildefonsa lying on her death-bed. He has no opportunity, however, to inquire into her fate, for the fatal night draws on apace. That same night the count Montorio is, more than ever, beset by pangs of conscience. He dare not be left alone for a moment, although his wife is quite unable to soothe him. At last he summons the confessor to give him absolution, and now, for the first time, confesses to him that he has tried to palliate his crime by rearing the children of his unhappy brother as his own: Ippolito and Annibal are the sons of his brother Orazio.... The confessor rushes out to the youths, but is powerless to utter one articulate sound. Nor would it be of any avail; in a trance-like condition they enter the count’s apartment, and their swords meet in his body.—
At the moment of the young men’s arrest, Orazio surrenders himself to justice, protesting that he alone is guilty. He asks permission to compose a written account of what has happened, and in this he reveals his identity, relates the story of his early misfortunes, and explains the method adopted by him to carry out his vengeance, which is fatally visited upon himself, his own children becoming murderers at his instigation.—As for Ildefonsa, she is the unacknowledged daughter of Erminia and Verdoni, and the very picture of her mother. Montorio destines her for a convent to get rid of her; when she is brought to the castle by Schemoli’s attendants, we are told that Montorio, ‘on beholding her, felt a long extinguished passion for her mother revive. To gratify a romantic illusion of posthumous passion she was arrayed in fantastic splendour by the count, and to appease fear and jealousy, was poisoned by his wife.’—Ippolito is, in his prison, visited by his former page, who tu rns out to be a woman called Rosolia di Valozzi. After seeing him once, in the days of his splendour, an irresistible passion had made her quit her convent and enter his service; the diary she used to read to him referred to herself and her attachment to Ippolito. Now her health is undermined, and she expires shortly after her secret is revealed.
Ippolito and Annibal are finally released, but banished from the country for ever. Orazio is condemned to death; but at the last interview with his sons he bursts ‘one of the larger vessels’ and dies, rejoicing that ‘the last of the Montorios has not perished on a scaffold.’
In a short introduction to Montorio it is narrated how two young officers enter the French service at the siege of Barcelona 1697, and distinguish themselves as much by their reckless intrepidity as by their melancholy aloofness from their comrades. When the city is taken both of them perish; and an Italian officer, who is the only person acquainted with their history, relates all that follows.—
It would not be possible to give an account of all the windings of this intricate production, which is said[31] to contain ‘sufficient sparkle and movement for half a dozen ordinary romances.’ An extract from another critic[32] likewise goes to show—besides the fact that Montorio had its admirers—that it is not such a very easy matter to trace even the bare outlines of Maturin’s first story:
In the “House (sic) of Montorio” there is a vast exuberance of all the impulses of humanity,—the young passions, fantasies and aspirations, dancing and eddying like the waters of a gushing fountain, and sparkling in the coloured light of romance. Plot, sentiment, character, and description, in an abundance that seems to mock the anxious effort of ordinary genius, and to perplex the youthful author with his own riches, mark the entire of this extraordinary production.
Yet all these riches, unfortunately, rest on an unsubstantial foundation. The Radcliffe style of composition requires, in fact, the prudence and moderation practised by its originator, in order to preserve anything like an artistic balance. It follows from the very nature of a story of this kind, that the more the scope of action is enlarged, the more unsatisfactory is the inevitable explanation, and the greater the disappointment felt at the implausibility of the solution. In Montorio the disproportion between cause and effect is nothing less than prodigious; and such elements as would actually be grand and imposing in the plan itself, are, in the course of execution, sadly affected by the air of charlatanism inseparable from a plot constructed in the Radcliffe manner. It would be different, and far more satisfactory, if the brothers were, for instance, represented as acting under a kind of hypnotic influence. As it is, the scheme of Orazio is, essentially, carried out by means of talking sheer nonsense to two full-grown people; and facilitated by accidents and singular coincidences which are as incredible as would be the appearance of all the legions of the supernatural world. The wonderful talents of Orazio, above all his capacity of swiftly covering great distances, become almost unnecessary, considering the never-ending maze of secret passages and subterranean recesses at his disposal; there are no two apartments, far or near, unconnected by these means of escape, if need be, and the strangest thing of all is that Orazio, after an absence of twenty years, still is the only person perfectly acquainted with them, wherever they are. For him there is no more difficulty in smuggling letters to Ippolito’s room at Naples, than in suddenly turning up in the prison-cell of the Inquisition. Among other extraordinary circumstances contributing to the success of Orazio’s enterprise, the occurrence of two earthquakes with the same issue, the liberation of a person from his prison by crushing its walls, is the most unfortunate. This repetition of an event which, even if introduced singly, makes unusual claims upon the reader’s credulity, seriously cools his excitement even at the first perusal. As for any recurrent enjoyment, it has very appropriately been pointed out by Scott,[33] that a composer of Radcliffe romances cannot expect his productions to be relished twice or oftener. When everything mysterious and suggestive is carefully explained, there is nothing left to excite curiosity or keep the mind in suspense a second time, as is often the case with powerfully told supernatural incidents which receive no explanation whatever. It is almost intolerable to re-read Montorio, from beginning to end, in spite of the many impressive passages it contains. However, as it is unavoidable in a story constructed in accordance with the principles of Montorio, that the elaborate fabric collapses at the final revelation of the ‘truth’ and the placing side by side of causes and effects, it must still be considered as a success in its kind if this does not happen too soon; and in Montorio the reader is, until the explanation of Orazio, really kept believing that the incidents related are of a preternatural character. Hence the ‘passion of supernatural fear,’ though capable of being inspired only once, is as genuine as that which any Gothic story is likely to create. As far as the purely terrific element is concerned, it has justly been observed[34] that ‘Montorio surpasses all the excellences of Ann Radcliffe and Godwin combined.’ An atmosphere of intense suspense is brought about by the parallel development of two actions, always broken off at the most interesting point, and the vigour, vivacity, and youthful freshness of the style also leaves far behind all that which had been produced, up to 1807, within the Gothic Romance.
Of the two actions the adventures going on at Muralto form the happier one, the tricks of Orazio being, in this instance, far more probable. In the gloomy surroundings where the very air is filled with surmises of some mysterious and horrible secret, it is not unnatural that Orazio should succeed in appealing to the superstitious tendencies of the melancholy-minded Annibal, nor is it astonishing that he is thoroughly acquainted with all the localities of his own castle. The fearful expectations with which Annibal looks forward to his nightly excursions, are cleverly transferred to the reader:
The hour is approaching—a few moments more, and the castle bell will toll. The hour that I have longed for, I almost begin now to wish more distant. I almost dread to hear the steps of Michelo.... Hark! the bell tolls—the old turret seems to rock its echo; and the silence that succeeds, how deep, how stilly!—would I could hear an owl scream across me! Ha! ’twas the lightning that gleamed across me. I will go to the casement; the roar of the elements will be welcome at such a moment as this.... The night is dark and unruly—the wind bursts in strong and fitful blasts against the casement. The clouds are hurried along in scattering masses. There is a murmur from the forests below, that in a lighter hour I could trust fancy to listen to; but, in my present mood, I dare not follow her wanderings. Would my old guide were come! I feel that any state of fear is supportable, accompanied by the sight or sound of a human being.... Was that shriek fancy?—again, again—impossible! Hark! there is a tumult in the castle—lights and voices beneath the turret.... What is it they tell me?
Every night some new discovery is made, ingeniously calculated to increase his curiosity, and the marvellous occurrences become more and more startling, until the climax is reached in the night-scene where Orazio suddenly drags the old servant after him into the vault, and there addresses him ‘in the hollow voice of death.’ The mind of his victim being thus sufficiently prepared for his purpose, Orazio rouses the count, and Annibal is conveyed to his lonely prison. The tale which Orazio here unfolds to him is one of the boldest flights of ‘terrific’ imagination: a description of the abode of unblessed spirits, where he has been condemned to linger before entering the ancient body kept unconsumed amid magical flames—in which shape his doom then is involved into Annibal’s. A comparison of this fantasia to the mummery by which Ippolito is informed of his fate is of interest as a proof of the injustice Maturin did to his own talents in applying them to the Radcliffe style of composition. With Ippolito the means resorted to are as follows. Orazio takes into his service a number of professional impostors who, in the subterranean vaults into which Ippolito is conducted, act the part of beings of another world. Masks, modelled in wax, are procured of Ippolito and the count, so that, in the figure which suggests to him the idea of a murderer, Ippolito recognizes himself. Then he is induced to plunge his poniard into the breast of another waxen figure whose face, when disclosed, reveals the features of his father. Now all this, when subsequently explained, appears extremely cheap; but even the account of the performance itself has none of the unearthly power of the tale told to Annibal. That tale is the only passage in the book in which Maturin gives rein to his imagination and which has the enduring merit of being subjected to no trivial explanation, certain to destroy every impression. The reader is also much more disposed to accept as a fact that Annibal believes what is only told to him, than that Ippolito is convinced of what he is made actually to experience. The plot laid at Muralto is, moreover, interspersed with scenes powerful in effect, relating to the state of the conscience-stricken count Montorio. That he has committed some formidable offence is clear from the very first, though it is, of course, merely mentioned allusively. The characters of the count and his wife—who are never haunted but by their own thoughts—are those most vividly depicted. Montorio is totally broken down by fear and repentance, and clings anxiously to the offices of religion; his nights are passed in raving under the pressure of hideous dreams, represented with great zest and spirit. The countess, on the other hand, is as strong as he is weak, and outwardly as calm and proud as he is restless and dejected. Without uttering a complaint she undergoes a penance of her own invention, wearing a sharp iron belt around her waist. This contrast between her self-restraint and his cowardly despair is, upon the whole, skilfully effected. Otherwise characterization, in Montorio, yields place to adventure, for under the exceptional circumstances in which the principal personages find themselves, they act by necessity rather than by choice. Yet the difference said to exist between Ippolito and Annibal also clearly asserts itself when their wanderings begin. Annibal, who has the deeper mind of the two, is fully persuaded that his persecutor is a preternatural being; and thus, though he is apparently more composed, his calmness is more dangerous than the impetuosity of Ippolito, and he is far nearer to surrendering himself. Ippolito does not debate whether the powers by which he is beset be human or superhuman; following his first impulse he goes on to treat them with ‘sallies of rage and convulsions of resistance.’ From this difference in their characters, by which their subsequent adventures are fixed, it follows that those of Annibal are, even henceforth, more satisfactory from an artistic point of view. His encounters with Orazio are simple and natural, there being no further need of any extraordinary tricks for his bewilderment. The draught emptied by the confessor at Muralto he firmly believes to be poison, while it is only a strong opiate, from the effects of which Orazio easily recovers. Consequently it is sufficient for Annibal to see Orazio glide past him in the garden of the convent, in order to disperse the last shadow of doubt as to his superhuman character; and when he again falls into the hands of Orazio after being separated from Ildefonsa, he could not reasonably be expected to offer any further resistance. Ippolito, on the other hand, before his strength is exhausted, continues to be hurried through subterranean passages without end and marvellous experiences defying all natural explanation of any kind.
The productions of the Gothic Romance, owing to its limited range and peculiar character, naturally present obvious similarities among themselves. The fundamental principle of them all is an appeal to the same source of emotion;—from their very appellation we may deduce a common background to most of them, and the motifs with which the ‘terrific’ imagination loves to occupy itself are always less remarkable for variety than for suitability to imitation, according to the special genius of each successive writer. In Montorio there is as ample proof of Maturin’s indebtedness to his predecessors within the school of terror, as of his unquestionable originality. The idea of a supernatural imposture of intricate apparatus and vast dimensions Maturin might have received from Der Geisterseher (1789) of Schiller, of which a translation was much read and relished at that time in England. In Schiller’s story a mysterious Armenian possesses the same surprising familiarity with other people’s concerns, and the same exaggerated facility of appearing when and where he chooses, as Orazio. There is also a Sicilian necromancer, a ghost-seer by profession, who gives a minute description of the tricks he and his compeers are in the habit of practising while trading upon people’s credulity, which affords a parallel to the performances of the hirelings employed by Orazio at Naples. Complications like these are, at all events, foreign to the novels of Mrs Radcliffe, of which especially The Italian (1797) is often called to mind by Montorio. In this romance the principal plotter and schemer is a monk called Schedoni, and he, as regards external appearance at least, is distinctly a precursor of Orazio, alias father Schemoli.[35] They have the same large, gaunt figure, hollow voice and unearthly appearance in general, and both enjoy a reputation of uncommon sanctity, very little deserved by either. However, Schedoni has, in his former life, been a villain of an ordinary kind, who possesses none of the grandeur of spirit by which Orazio is distinguished, nor are his machinations pursued on a scale at all comparable to that invented by Maturin’s hero. The simpler adventures of Annibal, on the other hand, are typically Radcliffeian: in The Italian, too, mysterious footsteps allure inquisitive young men to dangerous places, ghastly voices disturb the stillness of ruinous chapels, and nocturnal flights are undertaken through sombre forests. Yet this is not the only point of contact between the two romances. A general characteristic shared by Gothic stories with very few exceptions, was the placing of the scene in the Mediterranean countries, in this case in the South of Italy. Besides the romantic charm those regions always suggest to a northern imagination, they possessed the special merit of admitting the introduction of the Inquisition with all its horrors, and affording an opportunity of penetrating the walls of a convent. To Maturin, with his strong anti-catholic tendencies, the theme of ecclesiastical cruelty was doubly welcome, and in his treatment of the subject there is always a tone of genuine indignation, distinct from all aims of a literary character. The absolute power of the Holy Office and the abuses of monastical authority were, in a forcible manner, illustrated already in Lewis’s Monk, nor were these attractions withstood by Mrs Radcliffe. The passages in The Italian, relative to the prison of the Inquisition at Rome, are among the greatest triumphs of her method of arousing the reader’s anxiety only to be soothed again. The hero is several times brought to the utmost point of being submitted to torture; at one time he is already fastened to the rack, but the procedure is always suspended. The examinations of other less fortunate prisoners are suggested only by feeble groans and expressive allusions, still by these scanty means a most gruesome atmosphere is created. Maturin, in Montorio, follows The Italian in so far as bodily torture is not resorted to—it would, indeed, be very much out of place, the plan of Orazio tending to subdue Ippolito by working upon his mental faculties. Maturin even, contrary to Mrs Radcliffe, represents the chief inquisitor as a man of some humanity; but at the same time he takes care to give a powerful picture of the demoralizing influence a superstitious religion exercises upon the people. The report of Ippolito’s heretical inclinations spreads like wild-fire, and wherever he arrives he is viewed with hatred and abhorrence. In vain he approaches man or woman; all refuse to listen to his protestations, to which the sole answers are curses and maledictions. Here, evidently, a literary impulse outside the actual school of terror asserts itself. Ippolito’s situation is as desperate and as passionately depicted as Caleb’s in Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), when he is accused of robbery by Falkland and appearances are strongly against him; he is regarded as the ‘opprobrium of the human species’ and is allowed no opportunity to defend himself, nobody deigning to lend an ear to his demonstrations. Caleb and Ippolito are both, at last, driven to seek the mercy of an old man of mild and venerable aspect, and both, alike, are sadly disappointed. In Godwin the old man calls the unfortunate youth ‘a monster with whom the earth groans,’ and deplores that he has ever seen him or uttered a single word to him; in Maturin he laments at having lived too long being thus forced to behold Ippolito, and declares that his grey hairs are defiled by the appeal Ippolito makes to them. This pathetic description of the involuntary isolation of a man among his fellow-beings, this heart-rending agony of his upon seeing the ties broken that unite him to his species, is born of the spirit of a time in which feeling was raised to the seat of honour. A strong sense of loneliness, of some sort or other, is an essential feature of the romantic literature of the period, and will often be seen to recur in Maturin’s writings. Here, under the influence of Godwin, it is expressed in its most painful aspect. Caleb Williams is a protest against the ‘despotism by which man becomes the destroyer of man;’ while Godwin directs his attacks against wrongs in the existing state of social institutions, Maturin traces the source of evil in misapplied religious ideas. The result, however, is the same, and Caleb might well have uttered the words in which Ippolito sums up the state he is reduced to:
Then I am outlawed of nature. I am divested of the rights of being. Every ear is deaf, and every heart is iron to me. Wherever I tread the sole of my foot dries the streams of humanity.—
An incident, in Montorio, of monastic oppression, is represented by the episode of Ildefonsa. A young lady held in a convent against her will was a special favourite with the novelists of terror; the episode in question is, no doubt, suggested by the history of Agnes de Medina in The Monk. For the liberation of Agnes, also, an appeal is made to high ecclesiastical authorities, whereupon the tyrannical abbess compels her to swallow an opiate which plunges her into a death-like state, arranges a mock funeral and has Agnes conveyed to the hideous dungeons of the convent. In The Italian, too, the heroine is placed in a convent where she feels but ill at ease under the government of an unkind prioress; however, she succeeds in escaping with her lover. Mention is also made of a stone chamber ‘within the deepest recesses of the convent’ where disobedient nuns have sometimes been confined—but thither the gentle authoress forbears to conduct her readers.
Yet another episode in Montorio is inspired by ‘the powerful and wicked romance of the Monk,’ which was, in Maturin’s opinion,[36] ‘the most extraordinary production’ of the time of its appearance. It has been told that Annibal’s servant, Filippo, incurs the displeasure of the count for assisting at the investigations of his master, and is sent away from Muralto. His guide conducts him into a large house where they are expected by a party of bandits. Filippo is ushered into a room on the upper floor and there finds out that he is to be despatched during the night, yet effects a hair-breadth escape by a passage below the apartment. The episode, though of considerable length, is completely detached from the main plot and introduced solely for the sake of delineating Filippo’s sensations when threatened with horrible and immediate death. Lewis relates, with the same laudable purpose, how Don Raymond and some other travellers pass a night at the house of a man who turns out to be the leader of a gang of robbers, and how they, too, succeed in eluding the danger. Differently as the adventures are made up, still one conspicuous detail in Montorio comes very near direct plagiarism. In the first as well as in the second story the victim is made aware of his danger by the hostess of the house, who, though of a surly aspect, appears to disapprove of the impending proceedings. The robber’s wife, in a whisper, warns Don Raymond to look at the sheets of his bed, which are stained with blood; Filippo is called by the hag who manages the household of the bandits, to examine a particular corner of his room which he, also, finds to be blood-stained. Otherwise the episode in Montorio is certainly much more exciting than the one in The Monk.
Aside from these instances of immediate influence from some of the most admired productions of the Gothic Romance, Montorio exhibits many minor traits characteristic of the school in general. Among these is the committing, either consciously or unconsciously, of great wrongs against near relations. The happiness of Orazio is destroyed by his brother, and Orazio himself unwittingly ruins the life of his sons. Of secondary characters, both attendants of Annibal at Muralto are very typical of a genuine Gothic story: the old and decrepit domestic who, in a provokingly imperfect way, attempts to satisfy the curiosity of the hero, and the young and ready-witted fellow, who stoutly follows him in his breakneck adventures. Yet in one vital point Montorio occupies an almost exceptional place within the Gothic Romance, namely, with regard to the highly tragical issue of all its incidents. In spite of its blood-curdling qualities, the novel of terror by no means excludes a happy end for the hero and the heroine; the reader may be made to wander about in charnel-houses for ever so long, but finally he is led to a nuptial chamber as infallibly as in other stories that have boasted of a wide and merited popularity. This rule was, rashly enough, disregarded by Maturin; when Helene Richter[37] says that ‘alle Schauerromane haben ein glückliches Ende, und würde es auch an den Haaren herbeigezogen,’ she evidently forgets Montorio. Maturin adhered faithfully to the programme he had fixed for his romance—to found it upon the passion of the supernatural fear alone, not troubling himself about the traditional compensation for the horrors. There is, in fact, no heroine in the book; it was not without cause that Montorio, as Maturin states in the preface to his next work, was pronounced to be ‘deficient in female interest.’ Ildefonsa is there to fill but a short episode, and is, moreover, discovered to be Annibal’s sister. As a type she is modelled according to the innocent and persecuted young ladies in Mrs Radcliffe’s stories, being in no wise remarkable among the female characters Maturin has depicted. Still less likely is Rosolia to satisfy the demands for a heroine. Matters never develop to an understanding between her and Ippolito; her sex is not even revealed before it would be too late to invent a happy solution. Rosolia is introduced into the story, in the development of which she takes no part, merely in order to intersperse it with her lyrical effusions. A character like this is not uncommon in the Gothic Romance. It may be mentioned that Don Raymond, in The Monk, also has a page who composes ballads which he, like Rosolia, subjects to the benevolent judgment of his master. The diary Rosolia presents to Ippolito is rather unsubstantial in matter, but some of the prose passages are exquisitely graceful and truly Maturineian in style.—
There is, however, within the compass of Montorio, one complete and consummate story where female interest is also attended to. Orazio’s account of his early misfortunes—immediately preceding the disheartening explanation of the details of his revenge—admittedly contains the best parts of the book.[38] The progress of the violent action is admirably concentrated, and the rapidity and poignancy of the style is powerfully indicative of the anguish felt by the writer. The character of Orazio, before he becomes the superhuman being known as father Schemoli, is illustrated with a few vigorous strokes. The motif itself—a tragedy ensuing from the groundless suspicions of a jealous husband—is not original. Mangan[39] points out that the idea had been utilized by Edward Young in The Revenge (1721), though, he adds, ‘Maturin has contrived to invest it with a new and overpowering interest.’ In Young’s tragedy the revenge is taken by a Moor called Zanga upon his master, a distinguished Spaniard, who has wronged him. Zanga helps him first to marry the lady he loves, and then ingeniously awakens his jealousy by means of forged letters and pictures deposited in suitable places. The lady, upon finding herself suspected, commits suicide, and her husband, when undeceived, follows her example. The plot of Orazio’s narrative certainly bears similarity to The Revenge, and it is not impossible that Maturin may have received an impulse from Young, although it seems somewhat far-fetched to refer to this comparatively little known play, as long as Othello remains the great prototype of a tragedy of his kind. In this respect, at least, Maturin shows originality, that he allows Orazio to remain alive and only after a long interval be informed of his fatal mistake. Fantastic as is Orazio’s situation on the islet, it required unusual imaginative power to treat it so as to render it credible; however, Maturin was equal to the task. Here are to be found the most splendid proofs of his prose-style—compared to which the metrical pieces scattered through the work are of very great inferiority—showing to what degree of excellence it was capable of rising even at that early period. It is most pathetically described how the innocent victims of Orazio’s rashness are never out of his mind—how they seem to threaten him when nightly tempests are roaring around him and how, at moments of fortuitous tranquillity, he endeavours to imagine them in a state of glory:
The dreams of the night are easily dissolved, and strange shapes are sometimes seen to shimmer through the twilight of a cavern; but I have met them at noon on the bare sunny shore. I have seen them on the distant wave when its bed was smooth and bright as jasper; the curtained mist that hung on mole and breaker, and mingled with the sheeted spanglings of the surf floated back from them, did not throw a fringe of its shadowy mantling on their forms. I could not be deceived. Sometimes the light was glorious beyond imagination. Towards sunset I would sometimes see a small white cloud, and watch its approach; it would fix on a point of the rock that rose beside my cave; as twilight thickened it would unfold, its centre disclosing a floating throne of pearl, and its skirts expanding into wings of iris and aurelia that upbore it. By moonlight the pomp grew richer, and the vision became exceeding glorious. Myriads of lucent shapes were visible in that unclouded shower of light which fell from the moon on the summit of the rock; myriads swam on its opal waves, wafted in a fine web of filmy radiancy, canopied with a lily’s cup, and inebriate with liquid light. Among them sat the shadows of the lovers, sparkling with spheral light, and throned in the majesty of vision, but pale with the traces of mortality. There sat the lovers in sad and shadowy state together; so greatly unfortunate, so fatal, passing fond. Sometimes when stretched on my cold, lone bed, I have heard her voice warbling on the wind touches of sweet, sad music, such as I have heard her sing when she thought herself alone and unheard. I have risen and followed it, and heard it floating on the waters; I listened, and would have given worlds to weep. On a sudden the sounds would change to the most mournful and wailing cries, and Erminia, pale and convulsed as I saw her last, would pass before me, pointing to a gory shape that the waves would throw at my feet. Then they would plunge together into the waters, and where far off the moon shed a wan and cloudy light on the mid wave, I would see their visages rise dim and sad, and hear their cry die along the waste of waters.—
There are, in the prefaces to Maturin’s both second and third work, hints that his first romance had been subjected to unfavourable criticism on the part of the reviewers. In the leading periodicals of the time, however, no such are to be found. The only article upon the book, that of Scott in the Quarterly Review, did not appear until three years after the publication of Montorio. It is not quite so panegyrical as maintained by some of Maturin’s biographers, although the conspicuous talent of the rising novelist is readily admitted. Severely condemning the Radcliffe manner as little better than humbug, the reviewer speaks of Mr. Murphy’s adherence to it with disapproval and regret:
— — — Amid these flat imitations of the Castle of Udolpho we lighted unexpectedly upon the work which is the subject of the present article, and, in defiance of the very bad taste in which it is composed, we found ourselves insensibly involved in the perusal, and at times impressed with no common degree of respect for the powers of the author. We have at no time more earnestly desired to extend our voice to a bewildered traveller, than towards this young man, whose taste is so inferior to his powers of imagination and expression, that we never saw a more remarkable instance of genius degraded by the labour in which it is employed. — — — He possesses a strong and vigorous fancy, with great command of language. He has indeed regulated his incidents upon those of others, and therefore added to the imperfections which we have pointed out, the want of originality. But his feeling and conception of character are his own, and from these we judge of his powers. In truth we rose from his strange chaotic novel romance as from a confused and feverish dream, unrefreshed, and unamused, yet strongly impressed by many of the ideas which had been so vaguely and wildly presented to our imagination.
This article was to become of the greatest consequence to Maturin’s literary career, and will be returned to further on.
The Family of Montorio brought to its author nothing more substantial than fame in his nearest environs, for, notwithstanding the pseudonym, it was universally attributed to Maturin.[40] His income thus remained as scanty as ever, whilst his family kept on increasing; his son William Basil, afterwards a well-known member of the Irish Church, was born in July 1807. Nonetheless Maturin resolved to try his luck once more and produced, in 1808, a romance titled The Wild Irish Boy. This time his task was executed under circumstances peculiarly embarrassing; harassed by clamouring duties in every direction, Maturin was often forced to ‘borrow from the hours of night to complete his story.’[41] The book was intended, more directly than most of his productions, to bring in some remuneration and by every means to attract the attention of the reading public. Its very title was chosen with a view to exciting curiosity, suggesting a counterpart to Lady Morgan’s (then Miss Owenson’s) story of The Wild Irish Girl, which had appeared the previous year and proved an eminent success. Another attempt in the same direction was a lengthy dedication to Lord Moira[42]—written in very bad taste and containing the hopeful assurance that the work in hand would now determine whether the author possesses talent or no; for, if he does, the book cannot fail to secure his lordship’s notice. At the same time Maturin was fully aware that his talent was here by no means displayed to its advantage. Montorio was written in a spirit which he felt to be his special power; The Wild Irish Boy was calculated to please all—except the author himself. That the audience appealed to was not the most cultivated part of the public is rather candidly alluded to in the preface. Maturin states that his head is full of his country, but that he can perforce not give vent to his thoughts, being compelled to resort to other material, better relished by the public:
The fashionable materials for novel-writing I know to be, a lounge in Bond-street, a phaeton-tour in the Park, a masquerade with appropriate scenery, and a birth-day or birth-night, with dresses and decorations, accurately copied from the newspapers.
He who writes with an hope of being read, must write something like this. I say must, because this species of writing, not exacting a sacrifice of principles, but of taste, the public have reasonably a right to dictate in. He who would prostitute his morals, is a monster, he who sacrifices his inclinations and habits of writing, is—an author.
At the same time, it is desirable to look forward to the time, when independence, acquired without any sacrifice of integrity, will enable a man to consult only himself in the choice and mode of his subject. He who is capable of writing a good novel, ought to feel that he was born for a higher purpose than writing novels.
From the last sentence it has, naturally enough, been inferred that Maturin entertained but a mean opinion of novel-writing. Yet his prefaces cannot be taken literally. The tone of apology which, more or less, pervades nearly all of them, is much akin to the passing humility following close upon the heels of intoxication; and as prefaces are always composed after the conclusion of the respective works, these were written in moments of weariness attendant upon great mental exertion and extravagant sallies of imagination. Maturin was not lacking in literary ambition, nor did his poetical vein ever flow more richly than during his short period of, not exactly independence, but something like tolerable circumstances. His unfavourable judgment of novel-writing, in the present case, was probably due to the fact that he was not himself pleased with The Wild Irish Boy.
This, of course, is no excuse for the book, which indeed shows inferior work to a degree truly astonishing. Were it not for certain episodes where genuine power is displayed, and for the fact that the book was entirely a work of imagination, without any hidden aims of personal import—it would not fall very short of that species of composition, the producers of which Maturin once characterized[43] as ‘infamous and ephemeral scribblers, who pander for the public lust after anecdote that vilify the great, debase the illustrious, and expose the unfortunate, under the titles of a Winter, a Month, or six Weeks at the metropolis or some place of public resort.’ The Wild Irish Boy is brimful of august personages, lords and ladies, represented in a most unfavourable light, distorted and exaggerated by the feverish imagination of one who knew nothing of his subject. The fashionable world is condemned as sinful and utterly demoralizing, high life consists but of high vices, described and investigated from every side; while the kind of pure, old-fashioned, religious, home-like existence that is recommended as its contrast, is not found interesting enough to be illustrated otherwise than by very imperfect glimpses. Extravagant as the tone is, it becomes perfectly absurd when the moralist comes into conflict with the patriot. The author appears to have feared that the feelings of the public whose taste he is trying to gratify, might be offended by too much abuse of the British aristocracy—the pride of the nation!—and occasionally the tendency bursts into quite an opposite direction. The young fool of a hero—whose autobiography the book represents—has been painting the whole lot in the blackest of dyes, indulging in the grossest of dissipations and capable of the most contemptible baseness; yet once, seeing them all collected at a royal birth-day, he hits upon comparing them to the ‘courtiers’ of Napoleon—whom he has never beheld—with the result that he is ‘elated with confidence, with exultation, with pride,’ and feels satisfied that the English upper ten yet ‘loved their king, and worshipped their God,’ and, with many vices, ‘yet were the first on earth in national virtues.’ The sense of national superiority in the English public is flattered by a sweeping condemnation of everything foreign—it is clear that the glorification of Ireland must consequently be rather loose and rhapsodical—; especially are all Frenchmen and -women represented as monsters of malignity and immorality, and Voltaire and Rousseau mentioned with Puritan abhorrence. It was in vogue at that time to introduce into a ‘fashionable’ novel discussions about the leading writers of the day, and this duty is also carefully fulfilled. These passages are to be considered among the most interesting in the book, although they have no bearing upon the story proper. Among wicked writers who corrupt both taste and morals are Goethe (Werther), Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Miss Edgeworth, on the other hand, is enthusiastically lauded as the author of Belinda. It is curious to see Maturin here defy the mental parents of his own production, and make ineffectual efforts to free himself from that which has, even in the present work, too strong a hold upon him: without Rousseau and Werther the opening chapters of The Wild Irish Boy, containing a series of letters from a young lady attached to the hero in a thoroughly romantic fashion, would never have been written; whereas there is not a single page for which Miss Edgeworth would have been willing to take the responsibility. As for Godwin, he was of all the writers of the age the one who exercised the strongest influence upon Maturin’s work.—The purity of the manners and descriptions of Southey is gratefully admitted, while the literary qualities of his epics are subjected to vigorous criticism, very uncommon at the time, but agreed to by the judgment of posterity. The Anacreon of Moore, as might be expected, does not escape censure. The following passage is an example of the nonsensical style which prevails in the book; it is uttered by a boy of eighteen, who has just been cured of a desperate passion for his own mother-in-law:
I speak of him (Moore) with real sorrow: he might have done much, he has done nothing, but what I hope he will yet wish undone. — — — for the attempt to communicate what he must have felt the injuries of himself, for the attempt to add seduction to pleasure, and teach impurity a new system of sentimental logic, to add an impulse to the lapse of vitious feeling, and modulate the death dance of vice with the harmony of a lyre strung by heaven; for this—there is, there can be no excuse, even at the bar of literature; and if he carries the cause to an higher court, I doubt still more tremblingly his acquittal there.—
But the story, involved as it is, remains to be told. The book opens with a letter to one Miss Elmaide St. Clair from an old maiden aunt, who, possessing some knowledge of her niece’s character and the pernicious tendencies of the age, warns her against false sensibility and fancies too romantic. Then follow the letters of Elmaide herself, who at once informs her correspondent (not the aunt) that the admonitory epistle was received too late: she is already, and irrevocably, in the fetters of a romantic attachment to the hero, a young man, almost a boy, whose wild and dissipated habits the whole of Dublin is talking of. She is fully persuaded of the hopelessness of her case, understanding that he suffers himself to be led into such a mode of life in order to forget an unfortunate love-story of his own, the subject of which is a woman living at present somewhere in Western Ireland. That woman is widely celebrated for
fashionable folly and vice, without an equal or rival, till her reign was extended over subjects of a second generation, whose beauty triumphed over nature, and whose wit is unimpaired by time, whose sons have entered into public life, whose daughters have married, whose grand children form a numerous family already, and whose beauty is still as distant from decline as from competition.
The retirement of Lady Montrevor—such is her name—has taken place under extraordinary circumstances. Her husband, a statesman of much influence, has illegally held the title and fortunes of the earldom of Westhampton for thirty years; at last the legitimate heir, long pursued and oppressed by the usurper, has made his appearance and laid claim to his own. To the usurper naught else remained but the title of Montrevor and his Irish estates, whither his lady, who was wholly ignorant of the story, has accompanied him. Here the hero of the tale has met her and subsequently become fatally infatuated; he has then been sent to Dublin in the company of a relation who introduces to him that class of pleasure which now forms the torture of Miss St. Clair. Her correspondence ends with the intelligence that he has unexpectedly set out for the West.
Now the hero, whose name is Ormsby Bethel, rises to speak. It appears that he has returned to the neighbourhood of Dublin and lives somewhere on the coast. Miss St. Clair, happening to move near the place, hits upon the expedient of leaving anonymous letters addressed to him, in a recess amongst the rocks where he is in the habit of strolling. In these she requests him to tell her all about his life. He complies and places letters for her in the same recess.
This is mentioned in letters from the parties concerned, but at this point the story itself commences: an autobiography of the hero, written to an un-named friend, which he begins by the narrative he has written to Miss St. Clair.
His birth and childhood are involved in a deep mystery. Born in France, he has faint reminiscences of having been hurried from place to place, until, at the age of seven, he is taken to London and committed to the care of an old and wealthy couple. Here he also visits a school, where he enters into friendship with a boy called Hammond, who subsequently plays a certain part in his story. One day he hears his father mentioned and after this knows no rest; his health declines, and he is sent to a parson in Cumberland, where he pursues his studies and improves both in mind and body. His stay here is interrupted by a message from his father, who announces his desire that Ormsby is to set out for Ireland and forthwith to graduate at the University of Dublin; from his father’s letter Ormsby learns that he is illegitimate. After having spent some time in the Irish capital, he is summoned to join the family in the West. He travels there with his father’s confidential servant, a Frenchman, from whose very impious conversation he gathers that his father is a worn-out libertine. Mr. Bethel is, indeed, a wretched invalid, who is constantly tormented by the memories of pleasures he has lost the power to enjoy, and who regards his son with feelings of envy because of his youth and strength. The rest of the family consists of his daughter Sybilla, a gentle and pure-minded girl, and her gouvernante, a Miss Perceval, an atheist and admirer of French writers; one episode occurring in the family life is that Miss Perceval tries to prevent Sybilla from reading the Bible, and would even be on a fair way to succeed but for the intervention of Ormsby. Among his neighbours he finds his school-fellow Hammond, whose father, an old drunkard, owns an estate in the vicinity. The most remarkable person there, however, is an elder brother of Mr. Bethel, called De Lacy. He leads a life in the style of an ancient Irish chieftain, but, unlike most ‘Milesians’ he is rich, and Ormsby at once becomes his favourite and heir-apparent.—Upon this the Montrevors put in their appearance, and turn all the country upside down with their splendid fêtes and assemblies. Ormsby has been interested in the brilliant and unhappy Lady Montrevor even before he has seen her, and when he actually meets her he is perfectly overwhelmed by her attractions. Her husband, for his part, only expects to be called back to England as soon as his recent scandal has been forgotten and his talents and influence are required again. Meanwhile he employs his time in canvassing votes for his son, and pretends, to that end, to be intent upon proposing all sorts of reforms and improvements for Ireland. There is no love lost between him and his lady, who, in opposition to his suavity and courteousness, treats her neighbours with capricious ridicule. Among their younger children there is Miss Athanasia Montolieu, whose French gouvernante is doing her utmost to corrupt the soul of her charge with the literature of her country.—The whirl of pleasures comes soon to a tragical end as far as the Bethel family is concerned. One night Miss Perceval insists on following Ormsby and his sister to a grand entertainment given by Lord Montrevor in some public place. Ormsby is sitting with Lady Montrevor and her daughter, when a gentleman approaches and requests the ladies to allow him to escort them away from the place, the house being unfit for them, as there is a woman present who is the mistress of Mr. Bethel; she is recognized by the speaker himself and another gentleman, with whom she has formerly been on intimate terms. A violent scene ensues, and the fête is broken up. The following morning Ormsby receives a visit from a relative who confirms his worst doubts, namely, that Miss Perceval is not only the mistress of his father, but is also Ormsby’s and Sybilla’s mother. He declares that a duel seems inevitable, but that Ormsby is disgraced for ever if he takes part in it; the consequences must fall upon his father, whose age and feeble health may, perhaps, excuse him from sending a challenge. Ormsby is convinced of the justness of his argument and keeps away the whole day, but on returning he sees the thoughtlessness of his conduct. His father, greatly astonished at his absence, has been engaged in a duel, burst a blood-vessel, and now lies dying. His uncle, the old Milesian, who is also convinced that Ormsby has refused to fight a duel, has disowned him and forbidden him his presence. Miss Perceval has taken refuge in the house of the adversary in the recent duel, her former acquaintance. Upon Ormsby falls the painful duty of taking her off by main force, but, incorrigible as she is, she flees and takes with her the greater part of Sybilla’s money. Fortunately, Sybilla has been secretly married to Hammond, but as his father, too, leads a life which the son must blush for, he cannot take her to his home; he succeeds, however, in procuring her a refuge elsewhere. Ormsby, standing now alone in the world, resolves to leave the country, yet an unexpected event changes his plans.—In a solitary tower in the neighbourhood lives a mysterious person who never speaks to or visits any one except the poor, whose misery he endeavours to relieve. The night Ormsby prepares to depart he is stopped by the stranger and exhorted to save his uncle. His striking manner induces Ormsby to yield to his exhortations; he hastens to the castle of the Milesian and arrives just in time to save the old man from the hands of a murderer. Upon this a reconciliation takes place. Ormsby is again acknowledged as the heir of his uncle, and the castle becomes his home. His hopeless attachment to Lady Montrevor, however, makes him profoundly unhappy, and at length his uncle sends him to Dublin in company with the relative who gave him the ill-fated advice about the duel. In Dublin his life is what the letters of Miss St. Clair, in the beginning of the story, indicate with so much pain. His disappearance, the mention of which puts an end to her correspondence, is caused by the news that his uncle has been arrested for Ormsby’s debts. Ill as he is, he sets off on his journey in a delirious condition, is once more forgiven by the old man and sent back near the capital where, as has been told, he begins to write down his recollections to his unknown correspondent, Miss St. Clair.—In a letter to his uncle Ormsby confesses that the cause of his dejection may be traced to Montrevor-House, in answer to which the old man summons him back, informing him that he has ‘worked wonders’ in his favour. Though unable to understand the meaning hidden in his uncle’s message, Ormsby sets out for the castle of Montrevor and, on arriving there is, first of all, greeted by the Milesian who draws forward Miss Athanasia Montolieu and places her hand in Ormsby’s. It occurs to Ormsby that this, in fact, was the only rational way of interpreting his letter, but now it is too late for any explanation. He is married that very night; Lord Montrevor, whose star has re-risen in England, entertains the intention of immediately returning there with all his family. Shortly afterwards the old Milesian dies, leaving Ormsby in possession of a large fortune.—The rest of the story is mainly a fulfilment of what was promised in the preface. The company is divided between Bond-street and fashionable entertainments, most of which are held within the family-circle. Lord and Lady Montrevor have several daughters, one of whom has, strangely enough, married the present Earl of Westhampton—an uneducated man of blunt manners—whom her father has treated so infamously. The principal amusement at these entertainments, aside from questionable gallantries, are cards, at which they attempt to rob and even cheat each other. Ormsby before long gambles away every shilling of his property as well as of that of his wife, and once more he comes face to face with ruin. A depraved woman of fashion, Lady Delphina Orberry, the greatest enemy of Lady Montrevor, falls violently in love with him. Ormsby, who fortunately has become amorous of his own wife, is insensible to attentions of this character, yet Lady Orberry contrives to become his sole creditor, thus to get him, economically at least, at her mercy. Lady Montrevor, at this time, contemplates a retirement from the world altogether. She has met a man who has loved her in her youth, before she was a woman of fashion, and whom she wantonly rejected; now they discover their feelings to be unchanged. The situation, however, becomes acute in the extreme, when Lord Montrevor, who hates his wife, determines to prosecute Ormsby for adultery with her, and appearances are against them. Lady Montrevor attempts to commit suicide; Ormsby bursts into her room, and tears the laudanum from her, upon which, it is said, ‘all recollection forsakes him.’ When he regains his self-possession, all complications are quickly and wonderfully unravelled. Lady Delphina Orberry takes poison and dies, confessing to Ormsby that she had a daughter who was educated in Ireland in separation from her mother; she gives him some letters whence it appears that her name was Elmaide St. Clair. Lord Montrevor falls in a duel, his wife becoming thus free to unite herself with the lover of her youth. The dramatis personæ once more retire to Ireland, for Lady Montrevor’s lover turns out to be the identical inhabitant of the solitary tower, and, still more strange, the father of Ormsby, a third brother of De Lacy and Mr. Bethel. Miss Perceval had been his mistress shortly before she became Mr. Bethel’s, and Ormsby was believed to be the son of the latter. Ormsby’s affairs are forthwith cleared up. It appears that the often-mentioned relative, who has been his agent, has secretly hated him because of the frustration of his hopes of becoming De Lacy’s heir himself, and thus he has been trying to rob Ormsby of his property and, moreover, to seduce his wife; but so far from succeeding in his designs, he has, at last, shot himself. Athanasia now presents Ormsby with a child, and the book ends with this paradoxical sentence: ‘Let those who cannot feel my felicity, attempt to describe it.’—
From the short précis above it ought to be evident that the story is diffuse and clumsily constructed; that it contains certain good suggestions that are not made the most of, and cleverly built-up situations which lead to platitudes or are forcibly and implausibly dissolved. The cause of this, no doubt, may be traced to the manifold and contradictory considerations Maturin imagined himself to be bound to observe while writing his second book. The autobiography does not attach itself quite naturally to the correspondence that precedes it, and the intrigue, when it once commences, is continually interrupted by discussions and episodes. From the latter, however, is to be sought what interest the book is capable of arousing. The correspondence of Miss St. Clair is, in itself, an instance worthy of note. It has been admired by a critic[44] for ‘its method of pure suggestion of character without incident;’ and the character revealed is that of a heroine typically romantic.[45] Her love is soft and dreaming, made to live on sighs and tears, too platonic and ethereal even for the vicinity of its object:
But he has seen me, and has felt, as if he looked on vacancy; and it is better, much better so. I can hardly bear his sight, I could not bear his voice speaking to me; his rich and angel tones would madden me; no, I cannot woo him. I will hide myself in the solitude of pride and despair. Perhaps when he treads on my grave, he may pause, he may ask—Oh! let him not, let him not; shall I not rest in a grave?
This self-denying feeling, it is seen, has reached a degree where every positive aspiration ends. The writer is herself aware that she leaves far behind her the sentimental novels she has read:
They never loved who wished to be near what they loved. Werther talks of dancing with Charlotte, of holding her in his arms; what feelings men have! Such a time is with me, a time of fear and blindness. I love to be so far from him, that it is requisite for me to watch and devise how I may catch a glance or a tone from him. I would not be nearer if I might; a glance, a tone is enough, is too much for me.
The story of Elmaide St. Clair is given as a warning example of overwrought sensibility and its fatal consequences, and it might be supposed that this quality in her is, therefore, deliberately exaggerated. Yet that part of the book, most of all, impresses the reader with the genuineness of its conception; it is written with obvious inspiration, and there is absolutely nothing of parody about the style. It is one of the few instances where the author seems to be in perfect sympathy with his subject, and he actually excels in the very kind of composition he at the same time pretends to condemn.—Another of the better episodes is neither romantic nor ‘fashionable,’ but foreshadows Maturin’s best attainments in realistic description of ordinary life of a certain kind. Whether it was an individual trait of Maturin, or whether it belongs to the Irish temperament—few English writers have displayed so intense a horror of a narrow, monotonous existence without any sort of excitement or interest. In The Wild Irish Boy, in Women, in Melmoth, this aversion is expressed more and more powerfully each time. In the present work this feeling is given an outlet in the case of the old couple in London, with whom Ormsby is placed while a child. They have retired from business in order to pass the remainder of their days in quietness; but instead of enjoying an agreeable rest, they are seized by an intolerable tedium, and by and by their life, as it were, develops into a stagnant pool:
The morning was passed by Mr. Sampson in examining books of obsolete accounts, which he had brought with him from the city “against a rainy day,” as he said in totting up sums, whose numbers he could by that time tell blindfold, and when he had found the amount, yawning and beginning again; sometimes he strolled about the house, examined locks that did not want repairing, shook his head at the weather-glass, and projected a removal of the clock from behind the parlour door, where its ticking made him melancholy after dinner. His wife retired to her room, examined the contents of old drawers, discovered that things grew yellow by lying by, and resolved to expose them to the sun some day in the following week; at a certain hour she visited the kitchen, watched the intrusion of strange cats, and detected the turnspit in his many contrivances to escape from duty, by which she boasted, dinner was prevented from being five minutes later than the time. They dined early without appetite, and retired early without drowsiness; sometimes a walk was proposed, on the appearance of a fine morning, but then the weather-glass was examined, till the time for walking had passed away; and looking wistfully at each other, they sunk into their easy chairs, and counted how many minutes till dinner.
The great bulk of the book, as has been said, aspires to treat of modern life in higher circles, of which Maturin, at the time, knew little or nothing. The descriptions, consequently, lack all atmosphere of reality, nor does the characterization augment the value of the whole. The worst of it all is that the hero is so uninteresting, and does not in the least fulfil the expectations roused by the effusions of Elmaide St. Clair. A very self-exulting tone is generally not in keeping with an autobiographical form, yet Ormsby Bethel does nothing to suppress the eulogies lavishly bestowed on him by well-meaning people, eulogies which he certainly does not deserve. He calls himself wild, but wildness is merely an embellishing name for weakness; there is nothing in him of real, refreshing wildness, or youthful recklessness; he is always in an unnatural state of exaltation, either of virtue or repentance. A preacher of morals and defender of religion as he aspires to be in a society that cares for neither, he displays, when emergency arises, no more strength of mind than his neighbours. What is it but a deplorable weakness in a man to publish about himself the letters of Elmaide St. Clair on the pretence that they treat of a period of his life of which he ‘could not speak in the first person?’ It is very doubtful whether Ormsby Bethel ever became popular among the public of circulating libraries. That the reader cannot feel sympathy for the hero is, of course, in itself no fault in a book, but in this case it is only too evident that it is the author’s intention he should.—The wholly imaginary character of Lady Montrevor is too superlative and violently exaggerated, and her wonderful accomplishments, of mind and body, are endlessly repeated in a most extravagant language. Her daughter Athanasia is more interesting; she is one of those delicate and ethereal beings Maturin always succeeded in designing, and of which there are no two quite alike. Athanasia is, like Byron’s Aurora,
—a fair and fairy one,
Of the best class, and better than her class[46]—
and, like her, she is also in possession of a portion of common sense and strength of mind, being eventually cured of the malady under which Elmaide St. Clair breaks down. At first, indeed, her case seems desperate. She is grown up into an ‘early, and exquisite, and dangerous maturity;’ she has been educated ‘without example but of vice and folly,’ and left to form her ideas from improper literature, until she is ‘dying to be the heroine of a mad and wicked tale of a Rousseau, of a Goethe, of a Wolstonecraft.’ And to become such a heroine she imagines it necessary for her to have both a husband and a lover. Therefore she encourages the attentions of the relative of her husband, who otherwise is quite indifferent to her. Yet at the bottom of her heart there is a yearning for fidelity, honourable love and quiet happiness, and when difficulties are gathering around her husband, this yearning grows stronger and stronger. At last she understands that the duties of life differ greatly from those of romance, and in a candid and touching letter—which her husband reads while she is sleeping!—she renounces the relative for ever. Now this argumentation would be very well if the aforesaid writers actually did maintain the views ascribed to them; but it is unquestionably a very childish way of understanding them to long for a forbidden attachment even in case you happen to be united to the man you love. Considering that Athanasia has grown up in an environment so corrupt as Maturin tries to depict it, it is certainly too far-fetched to throw the blame upon Julie and Charlotte. Yet it is never explicitly stated that Athanasia has misconceived what she has read; the opinions pass as those of the author. This curious anti-romantic freak of Maturin, whatever its cause, was not of long duration: eight years later accusations of the same kind were brought against himself, in connection with his tragedy of Bertram.—Among the secondary characters in the book that of Lady Delphina Orberry has been pointed out[47] as representing ‘a type of woman rare in English fiction.’ She is introduced as a rival of Lady Montrevor and is her contrast in every respect; her weapons against that lady’s dazzling brilliancy and sparkling wit are ‘soft, seducing manners,’ a ‘timid silence,’ and ‘melting whispers.’ Behind, however, this unterrifying exterior there is a mind totally depraved, whereas the heart of Lady Montrevor is discovered to have remained uncorrupted, in spite of her position in society. Undoubtedly how Lady Orberry clings to Ormsby like something too soft for him to shake off, gently but irresistingly involving her fate with his, is well described, and how she understands to excite his compassion by representing herself as unjustly suspected of that which she most wishes, in her relation to him. But the end, again, is forced and unnatural; it is only because the hero must be got out of his difficulties that she takes poison, confesses all her crimes to him, and gives him the letters of her unhappy daughter.
Notwithstanding all that can be said against The Wild Irish Boy, it is of considerable interest in Maturin’s earlier production, when regarded as a kind of preparatory study to Women, one of his masterpieces. Many of the characters and situations present obvious similarities, and it will, therefore, be necessary later on to refer to the present work. A few words are still required to define its character as an Irish novel, one of the first where elements typically Irish are brought forward.
Anything finished or complete these Irish ingredients do not form; that Maturin longed to speak of his country but felt himself prevented by other considerations has already been pointed out. Of the attempts to treat of Ireland, her past and present, only some diffuse discussions remain here and there, without being naturally introduced into the story. The first idea of Ireland is introduced in a surprising and poetical way. During his solitary wanderings in the mountains of Cumberland, in his earliest youth, Ormsby sometimes amuses himself by imagining a people whose destinies he is to lead and whose sovereign and benefactor he is to become:
I — — — imagined them possessed of the most shining qualities that can enter into the human character, glowing with untaught affections, and luxuriant with uncultivated virtue; but proud, irritable, impetuous, indolent and superstitious; conscious of claims they knew not how to support, burning with excellencies, which, because they wanted regulation, wanted both dignity and utility; and disgraced by crimes which the moment after their commission they lamented, as a man laments the involuntary outrages of drunkenness. I imagined a people that seemed to stretch out its helpless hands, like the infant Moses from the ark, and promise its preserver to bless and dignify the species.
These fancies he discloses to the good parson, his tutor, who immediately answers that he has ‘accurately described the Irish nation.’ Shortly afterwards Ormsby is sent to Ireland. He might now be expected to come into some contact with the people of his dreams, but this material is, unfortunately, allowed to run to waste. His first stay in Dublin is occupied by a tedious discourse upon the University, and by a description of a Calvinistic set among the students, who endeavour to draw Ormsby into their circle. In Maturin’s days these passages possibly might have excited some local interest, yet to a modern reader they form a most unexhilarating digression, from the like of which all other works of Maturin are exempt. Ormsby’s second sojourn at Dublin, that which he otherwise avoids speaking of in the first person, contains a lengthy comparison between the Irish and English character. This is somewhat more to the point; but even at that time, when but little had been written about the former, observations of this kind were hardly original:
The Irish are more ardent lovers, the English better husbands. The Irishman is more exhilarating in society, the Englishman’s comforts are more domestic. One is formed to give more delight, the other more tranquil and rational happiness to life. The Irishman approaches you with facility and attaches himself to you with ardor; the Englishman it is difficult to conciliate as an acquaintance, and more difficult to obtain for a friend, but once obtained, the prize is beyond all labor.
Now and then the political state of Ireland is mentioned: ‘her depressed trade, her neglected populace, her renegade nobility, her dissipated, and careless, and unnational gentry’—but almost always in the form of a discourse, apart from the story. Events and personages throwing light upon the state of Ireland and her national character, are not allowed to speak for themselves; when the discourse is finished, the reader again finds himself in the drawing-room of Lady Montrevor. In a few instances only the descriptions present a glimpse of Irish life freed from comment. There is a dinner-party at the house of the elder Hammond, of a riotous and disorderly character, the account of which, a note informs us, is taken from real life. The other is an instance of so-called ‘paddyism,’ unique in the production of Maturin who, unlike most older Irish novelists, was not at all fond of depicting the lower classes with sympathetic humour. The night the Montrevors arrive at their castle, the tenantry are gathered to receive them, having shortened the tedium of waiting by indulging in a drop of whiskey, with the result that the approaching family are hailed with an Irish cry that frightens their horses and endangers their very lives. Their intentions were all the best, as is explained by an old man:
But as we were all tenants to this great new lord, and old followers to the family, though they never lived among us, why we all loved him as we did our eyes, though we never set them upon his face till last night. So we thought it would be but right to go out and give him a shout of joy, when he was coming to his own house, that he never was in before; and we all set out, and we were early enough to see him, for the devil a bit of him was there, and so says I to them, there’s no good at all in waiting to see a man in the dark, and we are perished standing here in the bog, with nothing to warm us but the rain and wind; and so let us step into Paddy Donnellan’s that is within a step of the gate, and take a drop of whiskey, and when we hear the carriage wheel, we’ll all come out as fresh as daisies, and give him an Irish cry that he never heard from them English spalpeens in his life.
This is one of the preludes to the innumerable scenes of Irish boisterousness and characteristic blunders, found in the pages of later writers, Carleton, Lover, Lever, and others.
The ancient glory of Ireland is touched upon in the figure of the old Milesian.[48] The type had been introduced into fiction by Miss Owenson; her story of The Wild Irish Girl is the first patriotic Irish novel of a predominantly romantic colouring, and essentially influenced, as will be seen, Maturin’s third book. It is an immature and extravagant, but not undelightful tale of an Irish chieftain, the prince of Inismore, whose ancestors, in the Cromwellian wars, lost nearly all their estates to an English soldier, the same estates still being in possession of the English soldier’s descendants. The present prince of Inismore lives in solitary retirement with his chaplain and his daughter, a beautiful, gifted and accomplished young lady, whose only ‘wildness’ is her naturalness of manners and purity of heart. The head of the English family has made several attempts at reconciliation, his advances having always been proudly rejected. Nevertheless both he and his son visit the prince without revealing their identity, at the same time also concealing their respective visits from each other; both succeed in securing the friendship of the old man, and both fall in love with his daughter. A tragedy is avoided by the father voluntarily retiring and leaving to his son the girl and all his Irish estates. This intrigue, however, is merely a setting for the real tendency of the story, which is to make Ireland known. The colloquies held at Castle Inismore form the principal part of the book; they treat exclusively of the past of Ireland and are furnished with notes and quotations from Walker, Ware, Young, and other historians, all tending to prove the oriental descent and great antiquity of the Milesian race, its attachment to poetry and music, as well as its other noble qualities and high standard of civilization at a very early period.
In spite of its promising title, Maturin’s second book contains no loans from The Wild Irish Girl except the venerable Milesian with his inevitable chapelain de maison, and even this figure has undergone a change. De Lacy is a rich man who has travelled much in foreign parts and is, in every way, more modern and less romantic than the prince of Inismore. The latter always appears in a dress ‘strictly conformable to the ancient costume of the Irish nobles;’ De Lacy wears ‘the English habit of fifty years ago,’ with only an Irish cloak to remind one of his nationality. But their notions of their race and their country are the same, De Lacy also assuring us that ‘he who shakes my belief in the antiquity of my country, must first shake my belief in the beatitude of the immaculate Virgin Mary.’
The Wild Irish Boy appears to have met with the very fate Maturin had hoped to avoid by trying to please all: it attracted but little attention, or, if the statement of a writer[49] is to be relied upon, that the book was ‘admired, talked of, praised,’ the attention probably was confined to the literary circles of Dublin. In dedicating his third book to the ‘Quarterly Reviewers’ Maturin says that they had been pleased to notice his romance of Montorio, but there are no indications of his second book having been subject to public review. As a means of brightening the economic outlook of its author, The Wild Irish Boy failed completely; it was, like Montorio, published at his own risk, and the success was not distinct enough to induce any publisher to purchase the copyright. Discouraged from an immediate renewal of the attempt, Maturin, for four years to come, devoted his leisure hours exclusively to some less precarious occupation, which, in all probability, consisted in the enlargement of and still closer attention to his boarding-school. What support he might hitherto have had from his father now also ceased, for about 1810 Maturin senior was dismissed from his situation. One biographer,[50] alluding to this deplorable event, says that Charles Robert was ‘roused to poetry by disappointment,’ which would antedate the event in question by about 5 years. There seems, however, to be more reason to believe Alaric Watts, who, writing in 1819, states that William Maturin was dismissed after a service of 47 years, adding the following particulars: ‘The day of his dismissal he was pennyless: it is singular, that though the commissioners of inquiry, who sat repeatedly on the business pronounced this unfortunate gentleman wholly innocent of the charge (of fraud) brought against him, he has been suffered to linger for nine years since, without redress, without relief, and without notice.’ Whether this be correct or not, there is no further intelligence about Mr. William Maturin; but in any case his last years must have cast a gloom over all the family, and exercised a further pressure upon the toiling life of his son.——
In 1810 appeared Scott’s critique on Montorio, ending with this passage:
If the author — — — be indeed, as he describes himself, young and inexperienced, without literary friend or counsellor, we earnestly exhort him to seek one on whose taste and judgment he may rely. He is now, like an untutored colt, wasting his best vigour in irregular efforts without either grace or object; but there is much of these volumes which promises a career that may at some future time astonish the public.
As Maturin had, somehow or other, come to know who this friendly reviewer was, he availed himself of the opportunity to write to Scott and solicit him to become his literary friend and counsellor. This gave rise to an intimate, lifelong correspondence, during the course of which Scott faithfully assisted the poor Irishman with good advice and, sometimes, even in a more substantial way. His epistolary intimacy with the great novelist Maturin always counted among his greatest distinctions, and although the two men never met, their friendship continued warm and sincere until Maturin’s death.[51]
There are no more details available with regard to Maturin’s life at that period, but he was undoubtedly successful in his vocation as a teacher, for when he again turned to literature, he did so in rather a hopeful state of mind. His biographer[52] says that when Maturin was writing The Milesian Chief—which was published in the beginning of 1812—his genius was ‘elastic and ardent, his knowledge of composition improved with the errors of his former works before him, and an increasing desire to do something worthy of fame: he was at the age and under the circumstances that are calculated to improve and correct the taste.’ Colburn paid 80 pounds for the copyright, which was the first success of this kind Maturin had ever experienced; and full of confidence he finishes his preface—in which he does not care to enlarge upon his second book—:
In my first work I attempted to explore the ground forbidden to man; the sources of visionary terror; the “formless and the void”: in my present I have tried the equally obscure recesses of the human heart. If I fail in both, I shall—write again.
The preface is in the form of a dedication to the Quarterly Reviewers, whom Maturin accuses of writing reviews merely to make a display of their own cleverness and neglecting to speak of the works they are to judge:
Seriously I read the Reviews for information, and information I could get none—about myself. All I learned was that I was a bad writer, but why, or how, or in what manner I was to become better, they graciously left to myself.
The tone is throughout very different from that of the preface to The Wild Irish Boy; herein speaks the artist to whom a literary reputation is by no means indifferent. Here also is found the much-quoted sentence where Maturin defines his characteristic powers:
If I possess any talent, it is that of darkening the gloomy, and of deepening the sad; of painting life in extremes, and representing those struggles of passion when the soul trembles on the verge of the unlawful and the unhallowed.
Of the work now at hand Maturin adds:
In the following pages I have tried to apply these powers to the scenes of actual life: and I have chosen my own country for the scene, because I believe it the only country on earth, where, from the strange existing opposition of religion, politics, and manners, the extremes of refinement and barbarism are united, and the most wild and incredible situations of romantic story are hourly passing before modern eyes.
All this material is, very likely, not attended to in The Milesian Chief, yet it is certainly by far the noblest of Maturin’s three earlier romances.—
The Milesian Chief is Connal O’Morven, a young man of an ancient and formerly potent Irish family, now reduced to extreme poverty. Their castle and estates have been sold to an Englishman, Lord Montclare, and Connal lives with his aged and insane grandfather in a ruined watch-tower, subsisting chiefly on memories of bygone glory. The old man, in his frantic rage against England, conceives a plan of insurrection, for the liberation of Ireland; and Connal, young and inexperienced as he is, engages himself to be the leader of it. In the meantime Miss Armida Fitzalban, the daughter of Lord Montclare, whose beauty and talents have struck all Europe with amazement, arrives at the castle, and a violent passion flames up between her and Connal. Fully comprehending the impossibility of success in his enterprise, Connal is determined to dissolve the conspiracy, but the treacherous conduct of Armida’s unsuccessful lover, an English officer called Wandesford, who happens to get wind of the plan, compels him to take up arms. Armida renounces everything and follows Connal and his band to a remote island on the Atlantic coast. The government troops, however, track them even there, and as the cause of the rebels is hopeless, Armida is conducted back to her home. Becoming now a prey to the machinations of an unnatural mother, she ends her days by taking poison; Connal surrenders himself to the government and is sentenced to death.
By the side of this love-story there is another, equally unhappy, but bizarre rather than gloomy, curious rather than grand: of Connal’s younger brother Desmond, and Armida’s younger sister Ines. The last-named, for family reasons, is, by her mother, given out as a boy; and being very young and innocent she never suspects her sex but imagines herself to love Desmond as brother loves brother. At last the secret is revealed and they are married for a short time, but subsequently Ines is also implicated in the schemes of her mother, and dies of a broken heart in a state of insanity.
The destinies of these four people form the contents of the book. It is a record of human passions which are incalculable from the external basis upon which the incidents take place, and the interest is absorbed by the sufferings and inner conflicts of a few figures powerfully domineering at the expense of the milieu. This is, indeed, the case with all Maturin’s Irish stories; a dissection of the social state of Ireland, with a comprehensive view of the different classes, something in the style of Gerald Griffin’s well-known tale of The Collegians (1828), it would hardly have been within his capacity to create. In The Milesian Chief the political state of the country and the insurrection, instead of being the main subject of the story, form but a background to the personal tragedy of Connal O’Morven, which becomes only the more poignant as he fights for a cause in which he does not believe. He is the first to comprehend that it is ‘impossible for Ireland to subsist as an independent country,’ and the masses he has at his disposal are in no way calculated to heighten his confidence. The Milesian spirit so highly admired Maturin finds only in a few surviving descendants of the noblest families; his ideas of the people are tinged with the somewhat aristocratic notion which makes one of the distinctions between the typical 19th century romanticism and its pioneers in the preceding one. In some of his sermons Maturin clearly expresses his opinions on this point:
It is an absurd and mischievous prejudice that supposes the existence of vice confined to the higher classes of life, and virtue (as they call it) the everlasting inhabitant of a cottage—it is a prejudice originating in utter ignorance of life, cherished by the silly illusions of pastoral poetry, and inflamed by the wild and wicked ravings of political enthusiasts, without any reason in nature and in life.
This, it must be added, Maturin does not find to be entirely the fault of the people:
The root of the wretchedness of the lower orders of this country is in their depravity, and the root of their depravity is for the most part in their ignorance; they are wicked because they are uncultivated, and they are uncultivated because they have been shamefully, abominably neglected; more neglected than the people of any civilized country under heaven.
But much ‘sinned against’ as the lower classes are, in the opinion of the clergyman, to the romantic they remain unattractive; and here is the basis of the fact that the Irish peasantry occupies, upon the whole, so inconspicuous a place in Maturin’s production, and never—except in the opening chapters of Melmoth—gives him the inspiration to his most interesting work. On the other hand his treatment of the subject is never undignified; if he has not created anything like the dark and impressive pictures of Irish rebels and outlaws found, say, in the pages of John Banim, neither does he give way to the popular habit of representing the Irish peasant as a cross between a fool and a jester, which idea was so keenly resented in the Irish literary circles in the fifties.[53]
Yet The Milesian Chief must be considered, in a way, a national tale, and it is even extremely characteristic as such; the plot, in its roughest outlines, is the identical one used by Irish novelists up to this day with a persistence which cannot escape any student of Anglo-Irish literature. These rough outlines are as follows. A person of eminence arrives in Ireland; he (or she) possesses every qualification for a rich and interesting life, yet nothing noteworthy has ever happened to him, and he is full of spleen until, once there, he is dragged into a whirl of undreamt-of adventures; his former habits, prejudices and ways of thinking suddenly give way to an all-absorbing passion, which irresistibly hurries him towards bliss or destruction, as the case may be. In the predilection of Irish novelists for an intrigue of this description there is something more than a natural partiality to a theme which aptly lends itself to literary aims; it is the revenge of a subdued and oppressed country upon her masters. In the field of fiction the conquered becomes the conqueror, and the first come in as the last. Connal O’Morven, unreal and idealized though he be, is the embodiment of all that is great and proud in the Milesian spirit, which spirit here subjugates the most brilliant representative of the happier race. This, again, does not hinder Armida’s infatuation from being quite individual in character, limited only to the person of Connal. His princely ancestry of which he is so proud, the ancient glory of Ireland, her poetry and music, are all indifferent to her, and Irish scenery, in all its grandeur, only makes her sigh for the sunny regions she has quitted. As Connal is persuaded that he could never be happy out of Ireland, their love is born under most unpromising auspices, and its tragic issue is necessitated by the circumstance of their having nothing in common.—
Armida and Connal—and Wandesford, too—are all nearly related. This fact is made no mystery of, but plainly communicated to Armida by her father, on their way to Ireland. At the time of the ruin of the Irish family, and upon the estates forthwith becoming the property of Lord Montclare, his sister has married Mr. Randal O’Morven, son of the old Milesian. The latter has never forgiven his son, any more than Lord Montclare has forgiven his sister; but shortly before her death Mrs O’Morven has written to her brother and disclosed the extreme misery of their condition. Lord Montclare has, consequently, appointed her husband to be his land-steward, and offered her sons commissions in the army. The younger, Desmond, has accepted the offer, while Connal prefers to starve with his grandfather.
The family has, it is true, been shrouded in a real mystery, but this also is shortly afterwards revealed by Lord Montclare, when lying at death’s door to which he is brought by the unexpected arrival in Ireland of the rest of the family, whose existence Armida has been wholly ignorant of. Her father has, long ago, contracted a marriage, having in view the sole purpose of excluding the O’Morvens from the property, by begetting a son. Armida, however, is the only child remaining alive, whereupon Lord Montclare, exasperated by his misfortunes, confines his wife in an obscure place and spreads the report of her death; this is done with the assistance of an Italian monk called Morosini, who subsequently turns out to be in the service of two masters. Before Lord Montclare has time to form another connection, his lady is delivered of a son. Under the circumstances he cannot acknowledge his heir without acknowledging his imposture, and threatened and persecuted by Morosini he flees from land to land, too feeble in courage to reveal the secret. Wandesford—who is the son of his younger sister—is the only person acquainted with the actual facts of the case, and therefore Lord Montclare eagerly presses Armida to accept his proposal. At last he is determined to give the matter publicity in Ireland, for the consolatory reason that in this country ‘the judgment of his character was indifferent to him from his contempt for its inhabitants.’ Before, however, he has accomplished his purpose, his death is caused by the sudden arrival of his family, who make their appearance at Castle Montclare, attended by Morosini and Desmond O’Morven. Desmond has come from Italy by the same boat as Lady Montclare, and has had an opportunity of saving her son from drowning, after which a very tender friendship has sprung up between the two.—
The commencement of the story in Ireland is preceded by two prologues, representing ‘Armida in Italy’ and ‘Armida in England.’ The first describes a banquet given by Lord Montclare at Naples, where Wandesford also makes his appearance. Armida has, for the occasion, arranged some tableaux in which her manifold accomplishments are dazzlingly displayed. In one of these the scene
represented the garden of an oriental palace: the sides filled with flowers, whose lofty and luxuriant clusters seemed to rise above the height of the apartment, and whose deep and sunny hues were softened by the magic diffusion of the lights; and the perspective terminated in an arch, beyond which was caught a view of the ruins of Persepolis. — — — Armida advanced on the stage alone: she was in the oriental dress, and she had an instrument in her hand resembling the lute. Wandesford gazed with astonishment: the pale, slight, simply clad girl he had lately seen was transformed into the most brilliant female in the world. The colour which applause brought to her cheek mantled richly through the tinge of rouge she had put on to conceal the effects of her exertions. — — The torrent of sound that she now poured forth, the height to which she soared, the rapidity with which she traversed intervals that connected the widest extremes of human voice, the precision with which she marked their minutest subdivisions, and, above all, the ease of attitude and expression which she preserved amid her exertions, like a skilful charioteer, who commands and enjoys the flight of his coursers, whilst their speed terrifies the spectators, filled the Italians with a sensation which applause could neither express nor exhaust.
There is, it will be observed, no stint of powerful attributes, the marvels of Armida leading directly back to Lady Montrevor in The Wild Irish Boy. Yet the descriptions here are somewhat softened, and the style is free from the extravagances of Maturin’s second book; Armida, somehow, seems more fit for a heroine of this extraordinary kind. Her cousin Wandesford, though a cold and selfish character, is so enraptured by her performance that he declares himself on the spot. Armida decidedly rejects his attentions, and on the following morning when he calls on her again, he is informed that Lord Montclare and his daughter have departed from Italy without any intentions of ever returning.
The second prologue represents Armida in London society, of which Maturin draws an amusing and curious picture. Here she is incapable of creating any sensation:
But what was the astonishment, the horror, of the beautiful, intelligent, and ambitious foreigner, on her first introduction to fashionable life in London: lost amid a crowd where beauty could not be distinguished; stunned by a buz of nothings, where mind could not be displayed; elbowed by rouged, naked, dashing dowagers; suffered to stand unnoticed or eyed through a glass by yawning, lounging bucks of ton; sinking amid the crowd, to be permitted to help herself to refreshments, or to want them; to be without conversation, though a mistress of half the dead and living languages, from her ignorance of fashionable jargon; to walk down a set with a partner who appeared to be debating whether it would not be high ton to drop asleep during the exercise—what a reception for a woman who had seen at her feet Italy and France contending to scatter the laurels of fame and the roses of pleasure.
Wandesford reappears, and Armida, in her desolation, receives his attentions with something akin to gratitude. He renews his proposal, which is eagerly embraced by Lord Montclare. Harassed on all sides Armida at last complies and gives Wandesford her word; upon this she is hurried off to Ireland, where Wandesford is shortly to follow them.—
These two chapters are a clever preliminary to the thrilling adventures Armida is going forth to meet, besides giving a good idea of her character and circumstances. In spite of her brilliant position in society she feels lonely and unhappy in her restless life, where in everything she is subjected to the caprices of her father. Her only pleasure is the gratification of her pride through the admiration she excites with her talents; but in England her pride also gets a severe blow. She feels utterly humiliated and is, as it were, prepared to meet what she will be forced to surrender to. In a state of dejection she accepts the proposal of Wandesford, who is less than indifferent to her, nor is her future brightened by her father’s determination to set out for Ireland, which determination she cannot imagine to be anything but a fit of his incurable melancholy. She shudders to think of the country she is taken to, and travels on almost in apathy. Much ‘fury’—of which there is quite enough already—is spared by her not entering the scene of action immediately from the highest pinnacles of glory and triumph; and the deeper and truer side of her character is naturally developed in sorrow and desolation, which her father’s death increases to the uttermost. Her new-found relations cannot compensate for the loss. Lady Montclare, though always wearing a mask of unvarying suavity, inspires not the least confidence in her daughter, and her young son, Endymion, is so closely watched by her and Morosini, that it is impossible for Armida to approach him. Thus she is inevitably drawn to Connal O’Morven, who comes like an incarnation of his wild country, grand and solitary, distinct from anything she has ever seen or dreamt of, while at the same time the boundless devotion he offers her recalls by-gone, brighter days to her mind. Being thus mentally prepared for their fate, they are thrown together by external events with rather unnecessary violence: in the first dawn of their acquaintance Connal finds an opportunity of saving Armida’s life—at the risk of his own—three different times. Upon her first arrival to the castle her horses are terrified and rear staggering backwards on to the rock, and she would be lost did not Connal rush to the scene of imminent danger and snatch her from the carriage. The following day she walks out to the shore and sits down on a rock. Lost in meditations she fails to observe the tide coming on before it has cut off her return; again she would perish but for Connal, who happens to be close at hand. And a few days later, when Wandesford, too, has arrived, he and Armida and Connal visit a small islet to look at some Celtic antiquities. In the meantime a dreadful storm breaks out, and only by exerting his superhuman strength to the utmost Connal succeeds in rowing them back sufficiently near the shore to be rescued when the boat capsizes. In all this, however, there is a kind of inner veracity which saves any of the passages from becoming merely melodramatic. The delineation especially of Armida, who is not (like Connal) raised above human weaknesses, is skilfully represented, and the descriptions of her mental struggles are both psychologically, as well as poetically, true. In Ireland everything is so different from what she is accustomed to, and her relation particularly to Connal is so uncomfortable, that all her experience of the great world is unable to guide her upon her first encounters with him. When Connal rescues her from the waves of the tide, Armida, in her confusion, offers him her purse. The manner in which this ill-chosen retribution is rejected she imagines to imply contempt of her person. This is a possibility that has never before entered her mind; and though it makes her shed tears of resentment, she is unable to answer with the same feeling by dismissing him from her recollection; in order to rid herself from thoughts of Connal, she sits down to—write to Wandesford.
Wandesford himself arrives before he is expected, and is received by Lady Montclare with joyful attention, but with very marked indifference by Armida. She has contracted the habit of frequently strolling on the shore, attended by a newly-acquired friend, Rosine St. Austin. Here she meets Connal, and their acquaintance is quickly developed. He sings Irish songs to her and is, on the whole, quite at his ease, taking no pains to conceal his admiration for her, as he fully comprehends from first that his love is hopeless. But Armida, too, is in love, though her feeling, to begin with, asserts itself as a desire to dazzle him by the display of her accomplishments, for which purpose she invites him to the castle; or as what she imagines to be hatred, when he refuses, being disinclined to enter, as a stranger, the abode of his forefathers. He comes, however, and appears to be the only person capable of understanding Armida and appreciating her talents according to their merits. Their intimacy grows stronger every moment. Then follows the excursion to the islet, to which much piquancy is added by the presence of Wandesford, who is well aware that he has acquired a formidable rival; the storm under which Connal is exerting his strength to save Armida and at the same time his enemy, is very dramatically depicted. Being at last beyond all danger, Connal, wildly happy to have Armida in his arms and pressed to his heart, insists on carrying her so all the way to the castle:
Her wet hair had fallen back from her cheek: he touched it with his lips: she sighed: his hyacinth breath, warm with life and passion, passing over her cheek was balmy to her returning senses: she seemed to see him in a dream. Her arm that hung on his shoulder now half-extended itself, and sunk again; the soft fingers, with a tremulous motion, touched his neck: he felt every nerve in his body shiver: the anguish of passion increased with its hopeless fondness: he held her to his breast in sweet and bitter ecstacy; he felt her too precious to be possessed, or to be resigned; he felt that he could clasp her to his heart with desperate love, and then spring with her from the rock he was climbing.
Half-conscious as she is, the attitude touches a latent chord in Armida’s bosom, which makes her understand her own feelings; that same night her passion becomes clear to her. Yet there is still another experience in store for her, as novel as it is startling: the suspicion of a rival. The next time she goes to the shore, Connal appears in the door of a solitary hut which he, with some embarrassment, confesses that he often visits. Approaching it, Armida sees through the open door a beautiful woman with an infant in her lap. After this episode all the pangs of jealousy are roused to life, and sometimes take a very frenetic mode of expression. An explanation, however, is soon given by the woman herself, who accosts Armida and Rosine on one of their walks and tells them the story of her life. The father of her child is Wandesford, by whom she has been seduced during one of his former stays in Ireland, whereupon he has taken her with him to England and there abandoned her; under much suffering she has returned to Ireland, and would have perished but for the assistance of Connal, who is the only one that has taken pity on her fate. She is, and has always been, desperately in love with Connal, but as she understands that he adores Armida, she wishes to clear his character before her. Armida is calmed, and when she next meets Connal she is triumphant and impossible to resist. He is forced to throw himself at her feet, but remembers the conspiracy he is engaged in, and darkly hints that they must part for ever.—
The progress of Armida’s mind to the point of an all-absorbing passion is described with a consistency and a flexibility that gives the first remarkable proof of Maturin’s deep insight into feminine psychology. The characterization of Connal is much more schablonenmässig: he simply possesses every mental and bodily perfection. Nevertheless there are some good observations upon his character, which tend to naturalness rather than to eulogy. His inexperience of life and society, an effect of his solitary existence in which he has thought more than he has seen, is distinctly presented. Thus his high-sounding theories are sometimes dispersed by Armida’s charms and his own feelings. Once she asks him to come to a fête given by a lady in the neighbourhood. He first refuses to visit a house where, he says, his grandfather has been insulted; and when Armida resents his disobedience he assures her that ‘to a Milesian the sacrifice of his life is trivial to the sacrifice of his pride.’ All the same he makes his appearance at the feast, the description of which is one of the finest things in the book. Armida has been, all the evening, in a state of weariness and absent-mindedness that greatly enrages Wandesford. Through his carelessness a part of her drapery is torn in a dance, and she retires to repair it in the room of Lady Gabriella, the granddaughter of their hostess. Here she is joined by Connal, who has been wandering round the gardens in hope of catching a glimpse of her. Hitherto they have met mostly under circumstances endangering their lives, or else amid wildness and desolation; but now they are brought together in surroundings inviting them to happiness and joy. Armida confesses to Connal that his feelings are reciprocated, and they succeed in becoming oblivious to all but the present moment. Their interview being interrupted she asks him to accompany her, and he instantly obeys:
But what a different figure entered the ball-room from that which had quitted it—glowing, brilliant, her features sparkling with the tremulous, with the gem-like lustre of hope and passion; her form almost too bright and light for any element but air to support or to convey; her very vestments seemed to undergo a change like the Cameleon from the air she respired; and her whole figure realized the fable of the statue converted into woman by the charm of love. No longer shrinking into obscurity, she accepted the trembling hand that Connal offered, and when they joined the set, they scarce seemed beings of the same species with those who surrounded them.
When the dance began, all the other performers paused almost involuntarily. Envy was stifled by resistless admiration, and even applause by wonder. The perfection of their figures, the ease, lightness, and enjouement of their movements, the exquisite modulation of their attitudes, that seemed to form a kind of visible music, gave to the spectators the idea of two descended genii mixing in the festivity. The light movements of Connal scarce disturbed a ringlet of the glossy hair that fell on his white neck: and as Armida’s nymph-like form glided among the dancers, it appeared like a star sometimes passing through the clouds, sometimes sparkling as it emerged from them: all gazed with delight, but the anxious Rosine (who could as little account for Connal’s appearance as for Armida’s sudden re-animation) and the disappointed Gabriella.
The pressure of company towards the door announced the approach of supper, and Connal, ignorant of the modern custom of the young, hurrying down to secure the best accommodations, waited with the reverence of other days, till every female had quitted the apartment. The supper-room was completely filled when he entered, but Lady Gabriella eagerly displacing those near her, offered him a seat next herself, but Connal slightly bowing, placed himself at the back of Armida’s chair, and intoxicated with his situation, forgot alike the luxuries of the feast and the gaze of strangers.
Never had they appeared to each other so resistless: that rose-coloured light which a brilliant entertainment diffuses on every object was more congenial to the voluptuous splendour of Armida’s beauty than the gloom of rocks, or the paleness of moonlight: and Armida, who amidst all her passion revolted from the chill and stern character of Connal, his apathy of life, and his contempt of luxury, now amid scenes that renewed her former existence saw him all she wished, and like the sun-flower expanded in his unclouded rays.
This, indeed, is the only time the sun shines upon them. The fête does not pass off without ominous collisions between Connal and Wandesford, and Lady Montclare, anxious for many reasons, hastens to take leave of the party. Having arrived home Armida again goes to meet Connal on the rocks. He dare not speak of the conspiration, but gives her to understand that he is compelled to leave Ireland to seek his sustenance. Armida, with tears, implores him to take her with him. All her pride is vanished; henceforth she is only a woman who loves. A hope springs to life in Connal, but this night the fatal event takes place which frustrates all his chances—it is told by Connal to Armida long afterwards, but may, for the sake of elucidation, be mentioned now. Inspired by Armida’s love Connal determines to dissolve the conspiracy. He seeks out his men, who are assembled in a cave, adjures them to surrender themselves to the mercy of the government and make him their hostage, if need be. They listen with conviction, when Wandesford, who has traced Connal’s footsteps from the castle, suddenly appears in their midst. The men are on the point of killing him, but Connal saves his life and appeals to him to intercede for them with the government, which Wandesford promises on his word of honour to do.—When Armida, however, on the following morning solemnly rejects him—on account of the story of the woman in the hut—Wandesford breaks his word without a scruple. He disappears for some days to prepare for his plan. This interval is filled by a very romantic description of an old Irish harper, who has remained faithful to the house of O’Morven. Connal takes Armida to see him, but he terrifies them both with prophecies of death and woe. And the following night, when they are together on the heath, the tower where Connal lives with his grandfather, is suddenly seen bursting into flames and besieged by soldiers, who are sent to suppress the intended rebellion. From this moment Connal is forced to appear in the character of a leader of rebels. He succeeds in retiring with his band into an inaccessible place in the mountains, whence reports of his miraculous valour soon reach Castle Montclare. Armida, having never taken any interest in Irish politics, has great difficulty in grasping what has happened. All the same she would be ready to follow Connal under any circumstances, but one day the news is spread that he has enticed Lady Gabriella to accompany him into his retreat. In reality this warm-blooded young lady, who has taken a fancy to the interesting Milesian, has followed him of her own accord, and Connal immediately restores her to her grandmother. Armida, however, finds no reason to doubt the news, and thus once more becomes a prey to unfounded suspicions. Besides being repetition, this means of bringing the plot forward is not very brilliant; but the emotions of Armida are again admirably analyzed. This time there is no outburst of pride or indignation, only silent despair. She walks out on the darkening heath, followed by Rosine, and hurries onward without aim or purpose, until they sink down exhausted and presently recognize, without being seen, two figures passing by them: Connal, conducting Gabriella back to her home. Having now lost all interest in life, Armida re-engages herself to Wandesford. His treatment of her continues to be very unchivalrous, as she does not conceal that her heart cannot be his; it is, however, determined that they are to proceed to England directly and get married there, Armida still being attended by Rosine. Their journey is soon impeded by a snowstorm, and they fall into the hands of the rebels. Wandesford is dragged away, but Connal, who is under the impression that Armida is already married to him, once more saves his life, enabling him to proceed alone to the nearest town. Connal then undertakes to conduct Armida back to Castle Montclare; before long he understands that she is not the wife of Wandesford, and she, on her part, learns the truth about Gabriella. After scenes of great passion their final resolution is impressively told in a few words, sounding, as it were, like the bang of a heavy gate:
The distracted Connal, kneeling before her, implored for a word, a look of life. “I can no longer see you,” said Armida, sinking from his arms to the ground; “and though I stretch out my hands, they wander about, without being able to reach you.”
“God! this is too much for man. Armida! answer!—Will you be mine? I speak in despair; I have nothing to offer or to promise: will you be the companion of a rebel, in a desert, amid war, and want, and danger?”
Armida, with an impulse like fate, threw herself into his arms. He clasped her to his heart. — —
There follows now a pause in the narrative, as Connal tells Armida the story of his life, his engagement in the rebellion, and the treachery of Wandesford. Upon this they are obliged to set out for the coast of the Atlantic, and at this period even Rosine is compelled to leave them. After a march through a country devastated by the ravages of famine and rape, enduring intolerable hardships and continual attacks from the troops of the government, they finally reach the isles, where a solitary hut with a bed of rushes becomes the dwelling of Armida for a long time to come. Ireland has taken her revenge; the proud and brilliant being at whose feet Europe has lain prostrate, is changed into a silent and self-sacrificing woman, deprived of all qualifications ever to re-assume her place in society. This trait is a remarkable one in the romantic fiction of the time, where the freshness and buoyancy of a heroine are usually not in the least affected by perilous adventures and privations ever so hard.
The story of Desmond and Endymion is more eccentric and presents a curious mixture of passion and fantastic gracefulness. It has already been said that Endymion, in reality, is a girl, though her mother, who covets the estates of Montclare, endeavours to conceal her sex. From the moment Desmond has clasped her to his heart, in saving her life, Endymion is absorbed by a feeling for him, the nature of which she does not comprehend. She plainly avows her love to Desmond, whom she imagines herself to regard in the light of an elder brother; he fully shares her sentiments, but, dreading their apparently unnatural tendency, tries, though without success, to avoid her presence:
— — — — — “Oh that sensation,” cried Endymion, “how often I feel it in your presence: at some moments, at the present, it almost deprives me of breath, of sense: it is a delight that makes me sick and giddy: the Italians before an earthquake, have a sensation for which there is no name; such is the sensation I feel in your presence, that I could throw myself into your arms and weep, if you would let me.”
“Stop, stop,” said Desmond, “talk this language no more: if the sight of each other be thus intoxicating, thus ruinous, let us part, and see each other no more.”
Endymion wept.
“Oh torture me no more with this fantastic fondness,” said Desmond, “so unlike what we ought to feel for each other: this female fastidiousness I cannot bear. I wish to love you like a younger brother; you treat me with the caprice of a mistress. Endymion, I cannot endure this. Never did I feel before these wild, these maddening sensations. I know not what you have done with me; what strange influence you have obtained over me, but it is an influence that I must fly from to preserve my reason, my life.”
“Oh! do not, do not talk of going,” said Endymion, ringing his hands in agony. “Am I so lost that I cannot love or be loved without being guilty: is my affection a crime, or a curse—why must I not love you? It is so sad, none can envy me; none shall ever see me.” She whispered, “If you will sometimes let me twine those bright ringlets on my fingers, or gaze on you, when your eye is averted from me, or touch your hand when it is unconsciously suspended near me—and is that too much; can you refuse me that?”
“I can refuse you nothing, and therefore I must fly from you. I tried, but I cannot love you as a man: I know what it is to love a brother well; for Connal I would die, but for you, Endymion, I would live: live, in you, for you, in your sight: dream life away in voluptuous and frantic melancholy: the feelings that oppress, that soften, that sicken me, even now while I speak to you I cannot describe them; I must not feel them; no, not another moment. Oh! untwine those arms from me; you are making me wild; my blood burns like fire in my veins: do not believe these hot tears that drop on your hands: they are tears of hatred,—hatred of myself and you” — — —
The appearance, in the literature of all times, of a young female in male attire is, as a rule, connected with the gay and humorous—it is enough to call to mind Shakespeare’s comedies—or else it is used as a pretty and sentimental expedient finally leading to a happy result, as in Cymbeline, in certain episodes in Don Quixote, in the Monastery of Scott and the Albigenses of Maturin. The figure is not often taken very seriously, and the disguise still more seldom leads to conflicts of a tragical import. Of famous literary characters of the last-mentioned description, Goethe’s Mignon is slightly recalled by Endymion,[54] while the peculiar circumstances appertaining to the concealment of Endymion’s sex render her case well-nigh exceptional in fiction. The topic is delicate enough and its treatment difficult to the extreme. The tone might easily get a tinge of the ridiculous, or even of the coarse, yet here it does neither; Maturin’s singular skill and delicacy in depicting those young, pale and ethereal beings that unite precocity and purity, timidity and passion, by no means denies itself in the creation of Endymion.—Desmond, as a character, is more successful than Connal, if only as being less faultless. He is brave and high-minded like his brother, but at the same time light-headed and choleric; he is said to have been ‘famous for rural gallantry,’ and is not insensible to refined gallantry either. Shortly before the disastrous events narrated above take place, he learns the fact of Endymion’s being a woman from the old harper, who has overheard a conversation between Lady Montclare and the monk Morosini. About the same time he receives a note inviting him to a nightly rendez-vous. He takes it to come from Endymion, and, in spite of the serious admonitions of Connal, whom he makes his confidant, he goes to the meeting-place; but to his astonishment he finds that the writer of the billet is not Endymion, but her mother. Shocked and disgusted he leaves the castle, being thus absent when the rebellion breaks out. In the meantime he is thrown into the arms of Lady Gabriella. Having been rejected by Connal, she seeks consolation with the younger brother; Desmond, passionate and disappointed as he is, surrenders himself to her charms, and they disappear together for a long time.—In the meanwhile Connal leaves his island and undertakes an adventurous journey to Dublin, having heard that an eminent person there would be willing to intercede for him with the government. By accident he enters a theatre, where he sees his brother with Gabriella, and from a conversation near him he gathers that their life is considered to be a perfect scandal. He seeks out Desmond and persuades him to re-join his regiment, which is in the vicinity of Castle Montclare. The brothers part, Desmond being still entirely ignorant of Connal’s participation in the rebellion. Desmond travels back to the castle, where his position becomes very painful. Lady Montclare is about to contract a marriage with his father the agent, who is wholly unlike his sons. As for Endymion, she continues to be a victim of the shameful imposture and is, moreover, surrounded by dangers threatening both her life and her reason. Her love for Desmond is more conspicuous than ever; one night he finds her in the chapel where she is doing penance which Morosini has imposed on her for permitting her thoughts to dwell too much on Desmond. As the monk is often present during these penances, and she confesses that he talks to her in a way she does not understand, Desmond concludes that his motives for staying alone with the slightly-clad girl are not purely ecclesiastic. Indignant and despairing, but at a loss how to treat her, Desmond withdraws from the scene. The decisive moment, however, comes that very night; as in the case of Armida and Connal, it is told in a few simple sentences. Desmond is roused from his slumbers by hearing Endymion sobbing at his door and imploring him to open it. At last he yields to the entreaties:
“Desmond!” she cried, starting at his altered looks, though she could not understand their expression, “Desmond! the wildness of your eyes terrifies me: I feel there is danger, though I cannot comprehend it. How your hand burns! how you tremble! Are you afraid?”
“I am, I am,” said the panting Desmond.
“And what is it we fear? I have seen you sit beside your brother; I have seen you lean on his arm; I have seen your hand locked in his.”
“Yes, yes, you have, and would it were locked in his now, instead of yours.”
“And why can you not caress me like a brother?”
“Because a woman cannot be my brother,” said Desmond, distractedly.
At these words Endymion started from his arms, and with a scream of horror flew towards her own apartment; and Desmond, terrified at the consequences of his own imprudence, pursuing her, kneeled at her door, and supplicated in his turn for admission in vain.
Endymion’s horror does not arise from any immediate realization of what she has heard; though she has attained a standpoint at which a continuation of the imposture would destroy her reason, the vital truth regarding herself becomes clear to her but by degrees. But she recollects having heard her mother say to Morosini: ‘should she ever learn she is a woman, she must live no longer,’ and this she at once applies to herself. The next day she rushes to Desmond and wildly implores him to save her, as she is to be sent away under the protection of the monk. Desmond fortunately remembers a clergyman called St. Austin, uncle to Armida’s friend Rosine, to whom they succeed in flying. He unites them and procures for them a solitary retreat, where they spend some idyllic months in perfect felicity.
On arriving at Dublin Connal learns that the eminent person in whom he has placed his hope is in Ireland no more. The only thing for him to do, under the circumstances, is to return to the island, where his presence indeed would be urgently necessary. He has confided Armida to the protection of a young man of the name of Brennan, who secretly hates him and, what is worse, cherishes a violent passion for Armida. He begins to harass her with his attentions, and they being met in a way that may be surmised, extends his hatred towards her as well, devising an exquisite mode of vengeance. He comes one night to the hut where Armida lives attended by a peasant woman, and requires her to accompany him, on the pretext that O’Morven has returned and wishes to see her. He then conducts her into a cavern where there really is an O’Morven: the old grandfather of Connal, who is now totally insane and appears to bear a particular malevolence against Armida. It is Brennan’s intention to have her murdered by the maniac, which undoubtedly would happen, did not Connal arrive at the very last moment. His journey thither has been much retarded by his being wounded by three men whom Brennan has sent out to waylay and assault him. Now, after a hideous fight, Brennan’s own life is ended. Yet Connal is wanted for more than one reason. The state of his band has, in his absence, grown utterly desperate; it is again seen how soberly and realistically Maturin conceived the business of the rebellion:
The discipline that Connal had established was destroyed: instead of confining themselves to the islands, they had spread themselves along the shore, exercising every outrage and aggression on the inhabitants; and, from the indiscriminate admission of every vagabond and profligate into the ranks, their numbers had increased beyond all power of control, and the spirit of humanity and honour, that Connal had tried to inspire them with, was utterly extinguished.
In proportion as this barbarization increases, the chances of any reconciliation with the government naturally diminish, and the final traces of Connal’s own enthusiasm for the cause disappear as well. Troops are now everywhere collected to march against him, and besides being daily beset by enemies, Connal is besieged by a terrible anxiety for the fate of Armida. One day a detachment of soldiers come over to the island. The officer at their head is wounded, and it is only with difficulty that Connal saves him from being killed by the rebels. He is taken care of, and to his horror Connal recognizes Desmond, who, to this moment, has been ignorant of the story of Armida and Connal. His own paradisiacal existence with Endymion—or Ines, as she is now called—has come to a sorrowful end. They have been traced to their retreat, and one night the door is burst open whereupon Morosini rushes in with two attendants. The monk pursues Ines as she flees out of the hut, while the attendants attempt to detain Desmond. He overpowers them, however, and follows in pursuit of his wife, whom he sees plunge herself into the river with the monk in hot haste after her. Some days later the body of Morosini is found, but no traces of Ines. Desmond, being now possessed of the sole desire to court death, joins his regiment, and Wandesford immediately takes care to command him to march against Connal.
Though disapproving of the rebellion, Desmond resolves to fight and perish with Connal. Before the decisive battle he conducts Armida away and places her at the house of St. Austin, where Rosine still resides, and then returns to the island. The battle is fought, and, contrary to all expectation, both Connal and Desmond survive it. The former finds his way to a remote and solitary cave, where he hides himself with his dying grandfather. Desmond, weak and wounded, goes back to the castle. He is carefully nursed by Lady Montclare, whose husband has recently died and who now conceives a plan concerning Desmond. Her whole life has been a struggle to keep in her family the estates of Montclare, and her last resort turns out to be a marriage between Armida and Desmond. To that end she has her daughter brought to the castle and imposes on her the fraudulent statement that Connal is in the hands of Wandesford, and is to suffer death unless she consents to marry Desmond. Of Armida there is, by this time, left but a faded beauty and a ruined mind; but seeing that she is only required to persevere in her self-sacrifice for Connal, she easily consents. Nor does Desmond oppose himself; both are too weary and apathetic even to enquire for the reasons of Wandesford’s singular resolution. The report of their intended marriage reaches Connal. He meets Lady Montclare who, in fear of her life, solemnly declares that it is Armida’s will and that he is to hear it from her own lips. She arranges an interview between them, and Armida has strength enough to stand to her resolution, the reasons for which she promises to disclose to Connal immediately after her wedding. The night of this very interview, however, Connal is plunged into despair at seeing how innocent people are punished for having given him shelter, and thus he straightway betakes himself to Wandesford to deliver himself up. Still he is not to die yet; Wandesford, to whom the whole affair is one of personal hatred and vengeance, orders five hundred lashes to be administered to him, whereupon he is to be set free, in case he survives the scourging. He does survive it, and is able to keep his last appointment with Armida. The night of Armida’s wedding Connal is wandering near the castle, when Wandesford rides past him. Connal challenges him and shoots him through the heart, and he expires repenting his crimes.—In the meantime Armida, having fulfilled what she imagines her last duty towards Connal, takes her fate in her own hands. Her late father has been an expert in, and also initiated his daughter into, the interesting science of preparing poisons. Immediately before the ceremony is to commence she swallows a dose of poison that has the power of dismissing life, without pain, in eight and forty hours. The marriage, however, is destined never to be contracted; just as the priest is opening his book, a piercing shriek rings through the chapel, and Ines appears in their midst. She has been saved from the river by the agents of Lady Montclare, and, since then, been secretly imprisoned in the castle. Her reason is irrevocably lost: she does not even recognize Desmond. Sick of horrors Armida retires to her apartment, whither Rosine brings Connal at the appointed hour. Everything is now explained; the conversation is interrupted only by a party of soldiers breaking into the castle, in quest of Connal. He is conducted to take his trial for rebellion, by martial law, and the sentence is death. At the moment the soldiers fire, Desmond rushes to Connal and falls with him. Armida and Ines likewise find their death beside the corpses of their respective lovers. Rosine and her uncle are left to inter the dead; Lady Montclare, it is stated, buries her crimes and her remorse in a convent.
The end, it is clear, somewhat lowers the level of the book and disturbs the final effect. From the rather unnatural idea of marriage between Armida and Desmond and onwards in the ensuing events there is much that is strained and stilted in the story; the circumstance of Armida’s extraordinary poison is too trivial and absurd to make any serious impression. The closing scene is entirely melodramatic: the eight and forty hours come to an end exactly at the time of Connal’s execution, and Ines expires at the same moment for the simple reason that everybody else does. But, strange to say, the chief incident itself, causing this conventional winding up of a highly romantic story, strikes one with its painful realism. One of the most remarkable features in The Milesian Chief is the mode of Connal’s death. In romances with tragical issue, of the time, the hero may die in a battle, he may die by accident, he may commit suicide or even be assassinated; but to let him first be flogged and then executed in consequence of the sentence of a court martial, is to excite terror and pity at the expence of the atmosphere of greatness and invincible superiority with which he is surrounded in the beginning of the tale. To reject everything conciliatory in the tragic, to bereave the death of a hero of every trait of sublimity and poetical splendour, to let his own person, as it were, be degraded by the ignominy he is exposed to, is certainly alien to the spirit and methods of the early 19:th century romanticism. The manner in which Scott allows the Master of Ravenswood to end his days is perfectly characteristic of the period, while the death of Connal O’Morven anticipates ideas much more modern. There is, in the end of Connal, something that brings to mind a very impressive Irish story of later date, the Maelcho (1894) of Emily Lawless, treating of the Desmond wars (1579-81), where the romantic halo in which the hero is enveloped is torn into shreds by degrees, until he is, both mentally and physically broken, hanged obscurely, en passant, like any of the countless victims of those troubled times.—
Of the principal personages in The Milesian Chief Armida and Ines are the most remarkable as types of some novelty in the fiction of the time. The latter is not without parallels in Maturin’s own work, but her originality lies in the absence of all reflection or principle: she acts solely by instinct, never expending a thought upon the moral standard of her feelings, and guided only by the nature contrary to whose intentions she has been reared up. A young lady answering to the description of Armida is uncommon in all romantic literature. The Radcliffe heroine, as has been pointed out by a critic,[55] is but a slight variation of the one favoured by Richardson: weak and sentimental, only calculated to move pity, never doing anything for her lover, who gladly sacrifices his life for her. As for the heroines of Scott, many of them, no doubt, display activity and courage and accomplish wonders for others, yet none would, in all likelihood, take the step Armida does, were they in her position; none have the independence of mind and superiority of intellect which render her perfectly regardless of the opinion of the world. The pride and the accomplishments, the grandezza and the accustomedness to obedience and admiration with which she is invested, usually distinguish females of a maturer age, like Lady Ashton in The Bride of Lammermoor and Lady Montrevor in The Wild Irish Boy. But though Armida entirely lacks that girlish docility and inexperience which seems to require manly protection, Maturin has succeeded in making her young and natural, and it is described with great beauty and power how her stateliness melts away before an overwhelming passion, and how the burning heart of youth demands its due when opportunity arises.
The characterization of Connal and Desmond, as has already been pointed out, is not equal to that of Armida and Ines. The best-drawn male character in the book is Wandesford, who is surprisingly real. He is a man of the world of the selfish and unfeeling kind, retaining some outward dignity by displaying a sort of conventional courage, that, ‘stimulated by witnesses, or by military tumult, could rush on death: the courage of the senses rather than the mind.’ When the latter is required, as on the occasion of his being well-nigh drowned with Armida and Connal, he proves to be a coward at heart. He is incapable of generosity towards his enemy, and his bad qualities always grow worse when met by adversities; thus in his strife with Connal, whom he hates as a rival and dislikes as an Irishman, he continually sinks deeper into the quagmire of crime and dishonour, which process is quite plausible and recounted without exaggeration. The narrow, unimaginative side of his character is well illustrated by his discussion, especially with Armida, whose superiority he cannot avoid instinctively to feel:
“The hearts of your whole sex,” said Wandesford, furiously, “are not worth the earth I tread: you have no heart: you have nothing but pride, caprice, and desire. While the first men in Europe were at your feet, you spurned them. My honourable addresses, the addresses of a man of the first family, fortune, and character were despised; but the moment you saw this Irishman, this heir of the poverty, and pride, and infamy of his country, you rushed into his arms, though he dashed you from them. Perhaps his figure awoke your classical taste, and you wished to transfer your study, like the statuary of old, from marble to flesh.”—
In the case of certain other personages Maturin’s sovereign contempt for a secondary character comes to light. This is, indeed, one of the most conspicuous flaws of the book. All delineation, for instance, of the wonderful mind of Lady Montclare is omitted. She is perfectly stereotyped; it is only evident that her every thought runs upon keeping the estates of her husband, and that she is, to this end, ready to commit the most atrocious crimes with an ever-smiling countenance—but in the reality of her being it is impossible to believe. Another character of whom much might have been made is the elder O’Morven, Connal’s father, who has gratefully accepted the situation of land-steward to Lord Montclare. He might be all the more interesting as he is expressly said to represent the worst kind of Irish character, being intent upon ‘unfeeling, unworthy self-enjoyment, not destitute of affection, but wholly without dignity.’ He receives Armida and her father on their arrival at the castle, and his conversation is expressive enough:
There he (Connal) has shut himself up in a hovel with that old fool my father, and all my hopes of him are destroyed; and it was not from my want of speaking to him either, for says I to him, as I said, ‘Why, Connal, where’s the use of your refusing his lordship’s kindness? Where did I get this good coat on my back, and a seat at his table (for your lordship promised I should not dine with the servants)? and where did your brother get his commission? Was it not from his lordship condescending to take us up, and forgetting our offence in being his relations?’ And says I, Do you think that poring over an old Irish manuscript, or wandering over these wild shores, listening to an old harp with hardly a string to it will put a potatoe in your mouth, or give a stone to repair those ruins you live in, or bring you back your land to you again?
Upon this, however, he is all but dropped out of the plot; he is very seldom brought into contact with his sons, and, upon the whole, plays no part in the story. Towards the end it is told that he is married by Lady Montclare, and shortly afterwards dies, wearied by her ‘violence’—of which the reader is not favoured with one single instance.
The Milesian Chief could not be better characterized than Talfourd[56] does in his much-quoted phrase: ‘There is a bleak and misty grandeur about it which, in spite of its glaring defects, sustains for it an abiding place in the soul.’ The defects are glaring indeed. The composition, here as always the blind side of Maturin, is anything but flawless. The development of the intrigue is sometimes primitive, sometimes rough and rhapsodical. Repetition occurs frequently in the adventures—the saving of lives especially is an actual habit with the brothers O’Morven; Connal’s journey to Dublin is so long as to be a digression, and not particularly interesting; the end is forced and theatrical, and some of the characters are made nothing of. These faults were, at all times, counterpoised by plenty of good characterization and impressive narrative; but now, at a distance of a hundred years, they appear so unimportant just because the whole is wrapped up in that ‘bleak and misty grandeur.’ The absence of technical defects is, after all, but a negative merit which swiftly loses its charm, while the creations of a truly poetical imagination are never entirely defaced by the wear and tear of time. The romantic atmosphere about the best scenes in The Milesian Chief, in so far as such a thing can be defined, arises from a close affinity between the human emotions and the sombre scenery around, effected by the instrumentality of a suggestive, passionate, and musical style. In point of description The Milesian Chief shows a great advance from Maturin’s earlier works; the nature of Western Ireland had, perhaps, never yet been depicted with a power and accuracy like this. Hence it is difficult to embrace the opinion of a critic[57] that in the description of scenery the influence of Mrs. Radcliffe is discernible. In Montorio it was, and it is easy to perceive that neither was acquainted with the Mediterranean nature which they painted in such glowing colours. But here there is quite a different strain, Northern and familiar; or what is to be said, for instance, of this sonorous passage:
The character of the scene was grandeur—dark, desolate, and stormy grandeur. The sea, troubled with rains and winds, dashed its grey waves along a line of rocky coast with a violence that seemed even in the absence of a storm to announce perpetual war and unexhausted winter. The dark clouds, though they moved rapidly along, never left the horizon clear, and seemed too thick for rains to melt or storms to disperse. The country near the shore, brown, stony and mountainous, looked as if the sun never shone on it, as if it lay for ever under the grey and watery sky: the shore itself, bold, high, and sweeping, had all the savage precipitateness, the naked solitude, the embattled rockiness, which nature seems to throw round her as a fortress, where she retires from the assaults of the elements, and the approach of man.
It has been hinted before that The Milesian Chief seems indebted to Miss Owenson’s Wild Irish Girl. The germ of the plot may have been taken from the latter: an Irish family of princely descent have sunk into poverty and lost their lands to an Englishman whom they regard as an usurper—the complications this circumstance leads to form the incidents in both tales. These, however, are quite differently developed. Miss Owenson’s story has the character of an idyll rather than a tragedy, being brought to a happy and harmonious end. Nor is there any communion between the principal personages. The venerable figure of the prince of Inismore Maturin had already borrowed in The Wild Irish Boy; here, presumably to avoid repetition, the burden of chieftaincy is placed upon younger shoulders, and the old Milesian, who is but once brought upon the scene of action, is represented as a complete ruin. Connal, then, as an Irishman, is a new type in the fiction of his country. Reminiscences of the antiquarian enthusiasm of Miss Owenson crop up in some of the conversations between Armida and Connal, where particularly the poetry and music of the ancient Irish is extensively discussed and warmly striven for.—The Radcliffe school—through the medium of Montorio—is slightly recalled only by the trio of Lord and Lady Montclare and Morosini. From Maturin’s first romance proceed the figures of the dark, melancholy-looking nobleman whose conscience is weighed down by an evil deed, and of the diabolical monk who is his confidant and tormentor at the same time. Yet Lord Montclare shows a development from the genuine Gothic Romance, represented by count Montorio. The latter has committed a bloody and terrible crime, the remembrance of which confines him within the walls of a gloomy castle, where he sits brooding over his deeds and starting at the slightest sound. The offence which Lord Montclare is guilty of is of a less violent kind and has the opposite effect of driving him restlessly from land to land. With him a step is taken towards the type of the Wanderer.
A great many passages in The Milesian Chief anticipate the manner of Scott rather than recall Mrs Radcliffe and Lewis. Very characteristic is the well-written episode where Brennan conducts Armida to the old O’Morven. The silent desolation of the night; Brennan’s sudden appearance in the hut and the alarm of the peasant woman, who in vain dissuades Armida from following him; his conversation on the way; the impotent rage of the maniac, and lastly the furious fight between Connal and Brennan: all this is horrifying, certainly, but in the same way horrible as are innumerable scenes in Scott. The difference, in this respect—apart from the question of the supernatural—between the school of Scott and the school of Radcliffe, is, that the thrilling, the exciting, is removed from the vaults of a castle and the dungeons of the Inquisition out into the open air under a Northern sky. But there is even a more obvious reason to mention Scott in connection with The Milesian Chief. Talfourd adds to his phrase quoted above: ‘Yet never perhaps was there a more unequal production—alternately exhibiting the grossest plagiarism and the wildest originality.’ From where the plagiarism is suggested, unless from The Wild Irish Girl, the present writer is unable to say; Maturin’s novel is, on the contrary, alleged to have been a subject for imitation for no less a man than Walter Scott himself. The resemblance of The Bride of Lammermoor (1819) to The Milesian Chief is, in fact, far more detailed than that of the latter to the story of Miss Owenson. Edgar Ravenswood, like Connal O’Morven, is the heir of a once powerful family whose dominions have passed into the possession of an Englishman. Like his Milesian counterpart he lives in an old tower in great poverty, profoundly discontented with the supposed oppressor. The new owners, in both cases, have a daughter, and the two heroes of the respective tales have occasion to begin their acquaintance with the fair ones by saving their lives. Both fall in love, and the love of both is reciprocated. Connal becomes the leader of a rebellion which his love to Armida would induce him to suppress; Ravenswood, too, is involved in a conspiracy against the government, from which his attachment to Lucy Ashton urges him to withdraw. Both love-stories finally end in a tragic way, the heroines being first, by fraud, brought to the point of union with another.—With all these likenesses, it is of interest to note how differently the two novelists work up the subject-matter they have in common. Maturin, as usual, is for the extreme, making the conditions of his hero desperate from the first, and the contrast between the two families as striking as possible. Connal lives in the remote and unknown West of Ireland, hated and despised by the new lord—relatives as they are—and supported only by a handful of peasants. All paths are practically closed to him; he is, as it were, predestined to his fate. In The Bride of Lammermoor, constructed with the temperate and easy skill of Scott, no such contrarieties are felt. Edgar Ravenswood is acknowledged and entertained by Sir William Ashton, he possesses powerful friends, and would, no doubt, advance far in the world but for his fatal love for Lucy. The course of events, here, runs smoother but is, at the same time, more varied and less easy to guess beforehand; compared with The Milesian Chief, the book seems to contain almost an infinite variety of characters and episodes. Ravenswood himself is rather a solitary figure in Scott, being destitute of the light-heartedness and sunny good-humour of his youthful heroes in general. Yet he has his faults, and in comparison with Connal, seems almost real. But if Scott was more successful with the male characters, Maturin was more so with the feminine. There is no denying that Armida is far more interesting than Lucy. The latter is, in fact, nothing but the weak and passive type from the preceding century, merely ennobled by the hand of Scott, and would never be able, like Armida, to support the central part of a story. That the emotional element in The Milesian Chief outweighs the ruggedness of the construction and the poverty of the action may be ascribed to the skilful characterization of Armida; and a chapter like the twentieth in The Bride of Lammermoor seems quite tame and colourless after the fiery love-scenes described by Maturin.
To how high a degree the resemblance of the one romance to the other is a result of direct influence and intentional imitation, it would be purposeless to discuss. It may even be quite accidental, for in a country with the history of Scotland and Ireland, a theme like this must have been both natural and lent itself profitably to the novelist. That the outlines were furnished by actual life is made more than probable by their continued appearance in Irish literature. They are made use of, as late as 1845, in Charles Lever’s story of The O’Donoghue. During nine hundred years, the heads of this family have been kings of that part of Ireland where their castle stands. Towards the end of the 18:th century they fall into a state of decay and are compelled to part with their castle and their estates, which are sold to a wealthy English baronet who has a beautiful daughter. The old O’Donoghue, with his two sons, is reduced to the state almost of peasants. The elder of these sons is, like Connal O’Morven, a proud and impetuous character, whom a deep sense of his own and his country’s wrongs prompts to embrace the insurrection of ’98; the younger, a counterpart of Desmond, turns Protestant and enters Trinity College. Otherwise the tales of Maturin and Lever contain no elements in common—the elder O’Donoghue succeeds in escaping to France, the younger finally marries the baronet’s daughter—and thus imitation is entirely out of the question. But from an intended preface to The O’Donoghue, where Lever tells[58] how the story occurred to him while on a tour in the South of Ireland, it appears how conspicuous these impoverished descendants of noble families were in Irish society:
Between the great families—the old houses of the land and the present race of proprietors—there lay a couple of generations of men who, with all the traditions and many of the pretensions of birth and fortune, had really become in ideas, modes of life, and habits, very little above the peasantry about them. They inhabited, it is true, the “great house,” and they were in name the owners of the soil, but, crippled by debt and overborne by mortgages, they subsisted in a shifty conflict with their creditors, rack-renting their miserable tenants to maintain it. Survivors of everything but pride of family, they stood there like stumps, blackened and charred, the last remnants of a burnt forest, their proportions attesting the noble growth that preceded them.
What would the descendants of these men prove when, destitute of fortune and helpless, they were thrown upon a world that actually regarded them as blamable for the unhappy condition of Ireland? Would they stand by “their order” in so far as to adhere to the cause of the gentry? Or would they share the feelings of the peasant to whose lot they had been reduced, and charging on the Saxons the reverses of their fortune, stand forth as rebels to England?
Now in the preface to The Milesian Chief Maturin had promised to apply his powers to scenes of actual life. The actual life of the class of society he was choosing for his subject had, according to the sentence of Lever, also a sordid and prosaic side, nor could they all be regarded as martyrs for their country without any fault of their own. As Maturin’s peculiar powers were, above all, in ‘painting life in extremes,’ he described not so much what is, as what would be, under given circumstances, exceptional indeed, but not impossible; and even in so doing he was, as has been pointed out, most attracted by the phenomena in the ‘recesses of the human heart.’ Thus the promise of actual life, in the usual sense of the word, is but imperfectly fulfilled. Yet beneath the delineations of human passions of general applicability, there is, however, a perceptible glimpse of a certain aspect of unmistakable Irish life—in the absence of which Mangan[59] would hardly have called The Milesian Chief the most intensely Irish story he knew of.
Of Maturin’s third book, any more than of his second, no contemporary reviews are extant, but its immediate success—at least where the author was known—seems to have been considerable. The writer in the New Monthly Magazine 1827 tells us that the book ‘received encomiums from many of the leading critics,’ and that ‘several individuals, inspired perhaps by the highly-wrought and poetical feeling of “The Milesian,” composed sundry “complimentary verses” upon it.’ Yet a second edition never appeared, and that Maturin’s circumstances continued to be distressing, all biographers agree.[60] His delicacy in concealing himself behind a pseudonym was of no avail to him regarding his chances of religious preferment; according to the aforesaid writer these were completely destroyed by the publication of his novels. So far, however, from abandoning the Muses, Maturin turned his poetical inspiration in another direction, still more contradictory to his profession. He became a dramatist, probably encouraged by the success bestowed upon a new play of no very remarkable merit. In 1813 Richard Lalor Sheil, the celebrated Irish barrister, produced a tragedy called Adelaide, or the Emigrants, written for the highly talented Miss O’Neill, who, after many hardships in obscure provincial theatres, had been engaged at the Old Crow-Street Street Theatre in Dublin. The decided success of Sheil—who also had composed his play in order to defray some necessary expenses—incited Maturin to follow his example. He sat down to write a drama in good earnest, as in his juvenile years he had often done for amusement. Already in the latter part of the year he was able to send in his Bertram, but the management of the theatre, for some reason or other, thought it advisable to reject it. Nearly a year afterwards Maturin hit upon it among his manuscripts, and, on the advice of a friend, sent it over for the perusal of his literary correspondent Walter Scott. The kindness of Scott was never appealed to in vain; he read the play and warmly recommended it to John Kemble, as he relates[61] in a letter to Daniel Terry, dated Nov. 10:th 1814, observing that Bertram is ‘one of those things which will either succeed greatly, or be damned gloriously, for its merits are marked, deep, and striking, and its faults of a nature obnoxious to ridicule.’ With every allowance for Scott’s desire to help Maturin, it seems unquestionable that he was really impressed by the play. After a few critical remarks upon the last act, he concludes his letter to Terry: ‘With all this, which I should say had I written the thing myself, it is grand and powerful: the language most animated and poetical; and the characters sketched with a masterly enthusiasm.’
Notwithstanding these eulogies Kemble refused the play, and its fate seemed as doubtful as ever. Fortunately for Maturin, however, the committee of management of the Drury Lane Theatre were, in the following year, wanting something new for their repertory. The members of that body were, in 1815, men of high literary aspirations; the procurement of plays devolved on Lord Byron, who states[62] that the number he was supplied with amounted to five hundred, not one of which he could think of accepting. His attempts to exact a new play from some of the foremost writers of the day remained without effect, but Scott, to whom he also addressed himself, faithfully referred him to Maturin. A correspondence ensued, in consequence of which, Byron says,[63] ‘Maturin sent his Bertram and a letter without his address, so that at first I could give him no answer. When I at last hit upon his residence, I sent him a favourable answer and something more substantial. His play succeeded; but I was at that time absent from England.’
The answer must indeed have been a favourable one, for, to judge from a letter from John Murray[64] to Scott, dated Dec. 25:th 1815, Bertram created quite a sensation in the committee:
I was with Lord Byron yesterday. He enquired after you, and bid me say how much he was indebted to your introduction of your poor Irish friend Maturin, who had sent him a tragedy, which Lord Byron received late in the evening, and read through without being able to stop. He was so delighted with it that he sent it immediately to his fellow-manager, the Hon. George Lamb, who, late as it came to him, could not go to bed without finishing it. The result is that they have laid it before the rest of the Committee; they, or rather Lord Byron, feels it his duty to the author to offer it himself to the managers of the Covent Garden. The poor fellow says in his letter that his hope of subsistence for his family for the next year rests upon what he can get for this play. I expressed a desire of doing something, and Lord Byron then confessed that he had sent him fifty guineas.
In a letter to Moore, written from Venice in 1817, Byron again expresses[65] his satisfaction at having been able to promote the ‘first and well-merited success’ of this ‘very clever fellow.’ There is no reason to doubt that Byron’s admiration was genuine. The high opinion he entertained of Bertram may, of course, have been biassed by his regard for Scott, like that of Scott by motives of friendship; but there is that in Maturin’s tragedy which reflects the spirit of the time with peculiar distinctness; from many of its wild effusions speaks the very Zeitgeist of romanticism, which was sure to find response with the best of the age as well as with the general public.
Before the play could be finally accepted, the approval of Kean had to be obtained. Kean had spent the greater part of 1815 on a tour extended to Dublin, where he appeared at the Crow-Street Theatre as Richard II, Othello, and Hamlet. In the beginning of 1816 the great man returned to London, and Bertram was submitted to his judgment. Kean did not share the enthusiasm of the committee; according to his biographer[66] he pronounced the play to be ‘all sound and fury signifying nothing,’ yet offering a welcome relief after the characters of Shakespeare. His principal reason, however, for undertaking to perform the part of the hero was the conviction that it would ‘serve to increase his reputation.’ After a few rehearsals he came to realize that the part of Bertram was but a secondary one; but there being, as he said, no Mrs. Siddons to eclipse him in the part of the heroine, he resolved to do his best to eclipse Miss Somerville. In this he succeeded so well that Bertram, by all accounts, really did much to increase his reputation as the leading tragedian of the time.—
Between the production and first performance of Bertram there was a lapse of more than two years, during which the monotony of Maturin’s existence was but seldom broken by occurrences worthy of notice. An instance of his poetical carelessness in practical matters is thus related in the Irish Quarterly Review 1852:
Whilst he was composing Bertram, and living amidst a confused sea of difficulties, a clergyman, high in the church, had called upon him in York-street for the purpose of making him an offer of preferment; he was requested to wait for a few minutes, and after the lapse of half an hour, Maturin entered, his hair in dishevelled masses, wrapped in a flowing morning gown, and bearing in one hand a pen, in the other a portion of the manuscript of Bertram, from which he was repeating some highly wrought sentence just completed; he threw himself on the sofa beside his starched visitor, who very soon retreated, leaving the poet to cultivate the muse, in poverty and at leisure.
An anecdote like this, whether true or invented, affords, no doubt, a glimpse of Maturin as he really was, and has a deeply tragical as well as a comical side. It marks the perpetual conflict between what he was inclined to do and what he, in the opinion of the world, ought to have been doing; and when the fit of inspiration had subsided, the bitterness of seeing his family imperfectly provided for was always there. That Maturin repeatedly received assistance from liberal friends is seen from the correspondence of Byron, yet at the same time there are recorded certain actions of Maturin himself, which display uncommon generosity towards others, at least in one in his position. He was prevailed upon to become security for a relation, who subsequently had recourse to the act of insolvency, leaving Maturin burthened with a heavy debt for many years to come. This new disaster possibly caused him again to take up his rejected drama. The fact of Maturin’s being acceptable as security for a considerable sum, however, would go to show that his circumstances were not all times absolutely desperate—which also might be inferred from the story of an alleged literary production of his, connected with the latter part of 1815. A poetical competition had been announced by Trinity College in order to celebrate the Battle of Waterloo. Here, according to the New Monthly Magazine 1827, Maturin easily carried off the prize with a poem which he, ‘in a most handsome manner,’ presented to a pupil of his called Shea[67] and declined all profit from the publication of it. The poem was printed in January 1816, when Bertram already had been accepted to Drury Lane and Maturin, no doubt, was full of sanguine expectations. This Mr. Shea was a pupil of Maturin’s to whom he appears to have been greatly attached; one of his letters to Murray, dated July 6:th 1816, ends with the following plea for him:
Like all Irishmen, I reserve the most important part of my letter for the last. Mr. Shea, my pupil, of whom you have heard me talk so highly and justly while in London, has produced a poem on the marriage of the princess, I want you to publish it—I am satisfied of its merits and the certainty of its success.—
His friends are numerous and wealthy, and the work would have a most rapid sale. I am sure you will not decline encouraging this young Muse, when I make her introduction through you a matter of personal and particular obligation to—Yours most truly C. Rob. Maturin.
There is, indeed, no positive proof of Maturin’s being the author of Lines on the Battle of Waterloo, except the categorical statement in the New Monthly Magazine, besides the circumstance that the name of Shea, despite the wealthy and numerous friends, was destined never to adorn the history of English poetry. The poem is, however, furnished with a few notes written in a half-playful tone, where the author makes a reservation to eventual accusations of plagiarism, which notes, on account of the style alone, must be concluded to flow from the pen of Maturin. Of a passage like this, a student of Maturin can hardly doubt the authorship:
A Poem written by one who owed nothing to communication with other minds, would be original in every sense of the word—but the paucity of its materials would probably ill atone for the novelty of the structure; it would be perhaps like the Indian love-song mentioned I think in Ashe’s travels, where all the varieties of sentiment, and modulations of language, that the passion might be supposed capable of inspiring, are compressed into three short sentences, strongly resembling the monotonous chirp of their native birds—I love you—I love you dearly—I love you all day long.
The value of the poem itself is very moderate. Though endowed with a highly poetical temperament, Maturin was not a poet in the strictest sense of the word. Rhyme was an instrument of which he never became a master; the writer in the New Monthly Magazine says that he had ‘a natural distaste to the constant return of sound arising from the restraints it threw upon his luxuriant fancy.’ He mentions the Waterloo as a singular example of Maturin’s being able to overcome his rooted aversion to the labours of versification, and cites two or three instances where he strove in vain to conquer the insurmountable difficulties it used to cause him. In 1821, when Ireland had the doubtful honour to receive a visit from George IV, Maturin, among many others, thought the occasion to demand a versified homage to the monarch. After the laborious production of three lines, however, he destroyed the paper ‘in a transport of rage.’ From Montorio, which abounds with indifferent poetry, it was already seen which way Maturin’s powers lay. His poetical prose is always fine and rhythmical in form, and very often original in ideas, whereas his rhymes are trivial, and usually make the thoughts so. The poem on Waterloo treats, in an obscure and bombastical style, less of the battle itself than of the glory of those who won it; the opening lines are, perhaps, the most worthy of quotation:
’Tis night, her dim and dusky veil
Falls o’er creation’s aspect pale,
In deep repose lie town and tower,
Embattled steep, and foliaged bower—
The stilly forms of things unseen
Waver in twilight’s dubious screen,—
And mount, and vale, and earth, and sky
In grey confusion mock the eye,
Like features of some absent face,
That anguished Memory pains in vain to trace.
What Maturin was capable of achieving in blank verse, remains next to be seen.