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,