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.