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]