Poe.
In the history of literature change means liberation. The intellectual aspect of a period having worn itself out, the forms which have supported it are felt to be a clog and a burden; and when these forms are dissolved, the channel of thought, from a natural sense of freedom, takes a course diametrically opposite. The transformation seldom takes place abruptly; it may even have been long prepared by pioneers more or less conscious of the advance of a new time with new ideals; but the greatest as well as the most characteristic productions of the victorious movement are not brought forth until the previous order of things has been completely overthrown, and sometimes there is but a short step from the zenith of a literary current to its decadence.
Romanticism in England represented a reaction against that traditional 18:th century, into which Cowper, and Bums, and Ossian had already brought elements new and resuscitating, and whose foundations had at a still earlier date been gently stirred by Thomson, Collins, and Gray. It was a reaction against a time when poetry, although of a polish unequalled afterwards, was confined to subjects upon which the expending of exalted emotions was impossible; when fiction chiefly comprised moralizing descriptions pertaining to everyday life; and when all sense of outward nature was excluded from both. In the English literature of the beginning of the 19:th century the terms romanticism and naturalism—in curious opposition to the subsequent use of the words—represented collateral currents, springing from the same source, and sometimes the terms were nearly synonymous. In their very essence both of these terms implied a greater amount of freedom. Return to nature was one of the leading catchwords of the time; and the intention of seeing nature not only visually, but also in its most intimate connections with human life, and as intervening in the destinies of man, was to contribute a new depth to thought and feeling, as well as to render the emotions more varied and more intense. The lays of by-gone ages and primitive peoples were studied with admiration and received as wisdom. This interest in nature, independent as it was of any limits of time and space, was followed by the revival of imagination, upon which faculty the romantic movement was largely based. In order to gain a freer scope for imagination romanticism took its literary models and ideas from the dim and mysterious middle ages rather than from the clear and well-regulated classical; in the contrast between the Gothic and the Antique the ‘barbarities’ of the former receded to the background, according as its greater suitability to ‘the views of a genius and to the ends of poetry’[1] became apparent. But in this approach of the mind to nature there was an underlying sense of the incapacity of human conditions to impart happiness, and the flight of imagination to vague and unknown regions was prompted by the feeling that in reality there was no consolation. It was, consequently, not with unalloyed delight that the romantic mind turned to new and untilled fields. It is a characteristic of the movement that it begot a melancholy of its own, a nervous, restless kind of melancholy, connected with temporal rather than eternal matters, and foreign to its predecessors in the previous century; the difference from these is made apparent upon comparing the melancholy of Childe Harold to that of the Night Thoughts. If it were possible to imagine the Renaissance with its gaiety turned into Weltschmerz, the result would be something like the romanticism of the early 19:th century.
However, freedom held sway, if not in life, still in literature, and the English romanticism owed its masterpieces to originality, as the English classicism did to imitation. Another consequence of this freedom was a greater variety in the romantic literature. Tintern Abbey and The Ancient Mariner were both written about the same time; both are original and entirely different, and both would have been inconceivable in 1750.
The liberation of the imaginative mind evidently had its perils. Among the romantic writers—even among those of rank—were men to whom freedom implied excess and whose originality was not always strong enough to supply the breakdown of rules and restrictions, and who, accordingly, have not escaped oblivion. One of these is Charles Robert Maturin, the subject of the following pages: a man of unmistakable genius, who was not without influence on some of his happier contemporaries; in whose works the main currents of the time are faithfully and variously reflected, and who occasionally gives forcible proofs of his creativeness in passages that point to the standards of much later periods.
The family of Maturin come from France. The ancestor, Gabriel Maturin, was a Huguenot priest to whom life in that country was made impossible and who, after various adventures, settled in Ireland towards the close of the 17:th century. Concerning this ancestor there was a family tradition, duly recorded in all the biographies of Charles Robert Maturin, with the statement that it had, from his childhood, made an indelible impression upon him and that he firmly believed it to be true; or with the suggestion that he had invented it himself in some romantic fit or other. The mystery connected with the birth of his ancestor is usually represented as the principal charm Maturin found in the story, yet if related in his own words[2] it is patent to all which point of the narrative is most strongly emphasized. Many of the most characteristic passages in Maturin’s writings can be explained by the fact that he was fond of imagining his own family to have been a victim of religious persecution. This is how he used to tell the legend:
In the reign of Louis XIV the carriage of a catholic lady of rank was stopped by the driver discovering that a child was lying in the street. The lady brought him home, and, as he was never claimed, considered and treated him as her child: he was richly drest, but no trace was furnished, by himself or otherwise, that could lead to the discovery of his parents or connexions.
As the lady was a devotee, she brought him up a strict catholic, and being puzzled for a name for him, she borrowed one from a religious community, les Maturins, of whom there is mention in the Jewish Spy, and who were then of sufficient importance to give their name to a street in Paris, la Rue des Mathurins.
In spite of all the good lady’s pains, and maugre his nom de caresse, my ancestor was perverse enough to turn protestant, and became pastor to a hugonot congregation in Paris, where he sojourned, and begat two sons.