Born, in Dublin, 1782. To Trin. Coll., Dublin, as scholar, 1798; B.A., 1800. Married Henrietta Kingsbury, 1802. Ordained Curate of Loughrea; afterwards of St. Peter’s, Dublin. Kept a school, and also engaged in literature. Tragedy “Bertram” produced at Drury Lane, 9 May 1816; “Manuel,” Drury Lane, 8 March 1817; “Fredolfo,” Covent Garden, 12 May 1817. Lived for some time in London. Died, in Dublin, 30 Oct. 1824; buried in St. Peter’s, Dublin. Works: “The Fatal Revenge” (under pseudonym: “Dennis Jasper Murphy”), 1807; “The Wild Irish Boy” (anon.), 1808; “The Milesian Chief” (anon.), 1812; “Bertram,” 1816 (7th edn. same year); “Manuel” (anon.), 1817; “Women” (anon.), 1818; “Sermons,” 1819; “Fredolfo,” 1819; “Melmoth the Wanderer” (anon.), 1820; “The Universe” (probably written by J. Wills), 1821; “Six Sermons on the Errors of the Roman Catholic Church,” 1824; “The Albigenses” (anon.), 1824. Life: in 1892 edn. of “Melmoth.”
Personal
Walter Scott, however, was the first who mentioned him, which he did to me, with great commendation, in 1815; and it is to this casualty, and two or three other accidents, that this very clever fellow owed his first and well-merited public success.
Unhappy Maturin,—what a life was his! Of his death I fear to ask. What makes me more particularly think of him just now is a drawing in chalk that I saw of him immediately before Mary’s illness. A young man of the name of Bewick, who is, I think, from Ireland, came to town, wishing to take portraits of people here who were known to the public. The great Wellknown, the Arch-Critic, and many others sat to him; and when all more worthy subjects were exhausted, he wrote to ask permission to take a likeness of me, and brought all the portraits he had to show me. Those of Maturin and Lady Morgan astonished me,—they were so very like the pictures that existed in my imagination of those worthies. The earnest melancholy look of Maturin, while strongly marked by genius, is like that of one who had not only supped full of horrors, but dined and breakfasted on them: I never saw character more strongly portrayed in a countenance.
The curate of St. Peter’s was exceedingly vain both of his person and accomplishments; and as his income would not allow him to attract attention by the splendour of his dress and manners, he seldom failed to do so by their singularity. Mr. Maturin was tall, slender, but well-proportioned, and, on the whole, a good figure, which he took care to display in a well-made black coat, tightly buttoned, and some odd light-coloured stocking-web pantaloons, surmounted, in winter, by a coat of prodigious dimensions, gracefully thrown on, so as not to obscure the symmetry it affected to protect. The Rev. Gentleman sang and danced, and prided himself on performing the movements and evolutions of the quadrille, certainly equal to any other divine of the Established Church, if not to any private lay gentleman of the three kingdoms. It often happened, too, that Mr. Maturin either laboured under an attack of gout, or met with some accident, which compelled the use of a slipper or a bandage, on one foot or one leg, and, by an unaccountable congruity of mischances, he was uniformly compelled on these occasions to appear in the public thoroughfares of Dublin, where the melancholy spectacle of a beautiful limb in pain never failed to excite the sighs and sympathies of all the interesting persons who passed as well as to prompt their curiosity to make audible remarks or inquiries respecting the possessor.
Could not endure to have children near him during his hours of literary composition. At such times he was particularly sensitive, and pasted a wafer on his forehead as a token to the members of his family that he was not to be interrupted. He said if he lost the thread of his ideas even for a moment, they were gone from him altogether.
Bertram, 1816
It is grand and powerful; the language most animated and poetical; and the characters sketched with a masterly enthusiasm.
I want words to describe the mingled horror and disgust with which I witnessed the opening of the fourth act, considering it as a melancholy proof of the depravation of the public mind. The shocking spirit of jacobinism seemed no longer confined to politics. The familiarity with atrocious events and characters appeared to have poisoned the taste, even where it had not directly disorganized the moral principles, and left the feelings callous to all the mild appeals, and craving alone for the grossest and most outrageous stimulants.
Crudities and absurdities abound, but there are outbursts of wild poetry amidst the rant. Coleridge’s critique brings into a piquant juxtaposition the subtle Romanticism of the poets, and the crude Radcliffian premonitions which here still lingered.
Melmoth the Wanderer, 1820
[“Melmoth”] is not altogether so mad as some reviewers pronounced it; yet sufficiently so to excuse thousands for closing their eyes against the poetic invention and buoyancy of fancy everywhere visible.
Although far too long, marvellously involved with tales within tales, and disfigured in parts by the rant and the gush of its class, “Melmoth” is really a powerful book, which gave something more than a passing shudder to its own generation (it specially influenced Balzac), and which has not lost its force even now. But the usual novel of this kind, which was written in vast numbers, was simply beneath contempt.
The work of renovation began with Charles Robert Maturin, in his time a well-known Irish clergyman and littérateur. The tale in which he displayed his finer imaginative power is “Melmoth the Wanderer” (1820). He eliminated from the Radcliffe romance the “sentimental Miss who luxuriates in the rich and weeping softness of a watery landscape,” and depended on fear as his sole motive. In many scenes, resembling the punishments in the lower circles of Dante’s “Inferno,” he reached, if not terror, the borderland where horror becomes terror. Such is the incarceration of a young monk among serpents, whose “cold and bloating” forms crawl over him, and the starvation and madness of lovers in a subterranean prison. But the incoherency and extreme length of the romance have long since overwhelmed it; one of the last references to it being Thackeray’s, who compared Goethe’s eye to Melmoth’s.
General
It [“Manuel”] is the absurd work of a clever man.
We observe, with pleasure, that Mr. Maturin has put his genius under better regulation [in “Women”] than in his former publications, and retrenched that luxuriance of language, and too copious use of ornament, which distinguishes the authors and orators of Ireland, whose exuberance of imagination sometimes places them in the predicament of their honest countrymen who complained of being run away with by his legs.
The author of “Montorio” and of “Bertram” is unquestionably a person gifted with no ordinary powers. He has a quick sensibility—a penetrating and intuitive acuteness—and an unrivalled vigour and felicity of language, which enable him at one time to attain the happiest condensation of thought, and at others to pour forth a stream of eloquence rich, flowing, and deep, chequered with images of delicate loveliness, or darkened by broad shadows cast from objects of stern and adamantine majesty. Yet, in common with many other potent spirits of the present time, he fails to excite within us any pure and lasting sympathy. We do not, on reading his works, feel that we have entered on a precious and imperishable treasure. They dazzle, they delight, they surprise, and they weary us—we lay them down with a vague admiration for the author, and try to shake off their influence as we do the impressions of a feverish dream.
Was verily and indeed a man of genius.
Above all, however, there were the works of Maturin,—those startling and enthralling, however sombre and repellent fictions, which, with all their defects of art, and taste, and insufficiency of purpose, lift the mystery and terror and physical agencies of Mrs. Radcliffe into an imaginative grandeur worthy of Shelley or Novalis. There were “The Albigenses,” with its masterly contrasts of the hunted people and their hunters; “The Fatal Revenge,” with its terrible capacities and convulsions of the human soul; and “Melmoth,” with its amazing pictures of guilt, malignity, and suffering, and its girl of the Indian seas—its Immalee, loveliest conception of youth, purity, and ardour.
The name of Maturin has almost died altogether from the recollection of the reader, and it is with difficulty that the student can find any of the many works which he poured forth, and which, indeed, are little worth the trouble of looking for. His high-flown productions and romantic theatrical figure might, however, have thrown at least an amusing tragi-comic light upon his surroundings had any record of them been attainable.
He never overcame his tendency to absurd extravagance of expression and wild improbability, though we can understand why it was that the great critics of the time continued to hope that he would tone down.
