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.’