It is from this period that we may date the commencement of that folly of which Maturin has been lavishly accused. Whatever might have been the levities of his conduct before, now they certainly became more remarkable. His whole port and bearing was that of a man who had burst from a long sleep into a new state of being; always gay, he now became luxurious in his habits and manners. He was the first in the quadrille—the last to depart. The ball-room was his temple of inspiration and worship. So passionately attached was he to dancing, that he organized morning quadrille parties, which met alternately two or three days in the week at the houses of the favourite members of his coterie. He was proud of the gracefulness and elegance of his dancing; his light figure, and the melancholy and interesting air that, whether natural or fictitious, he threw into his movements, gave a peculiar character to his style. He was a perfect bigot in his attachment to female society; and generally restless and dissatisfied in the exclusive company of men. I remember meeting him at a large assembly where there were several beautiful women, and it was with reluctance he consented to forego the quadrille during the interval of supper: at supper he was uneasy and impatient although he happened to be sitting near some very intellectual persons; at last, after a few songs, which otherwise would have been prolonged, he started up, and with considerable animation and effect, taking a lady by the hand, led the way to the dancing-room.
A very characteristic explanation of this gaiety is given by Mangan,[91] who ascribes it all to misery arising from unappreciated intellectual superiority. Maturin, he says,
—had no friend—companion—brother; he, and the “lonely Man of Shiraz” might have shaken hands, and then—parted. He—is his own dark way—understood many people; but nobody understood him in any way. — — — — “Man, being reasonable, must get drunk,” observes Byron. It is an ugly line; but one that embodies a volume of philosophy—especially if we read it in juxtaposition with that other line, by Boileau “Souvent de tous nos maux la raison est le pire.” The world points the finger of scorn at the intellectual intemperate man—not reflecting—not caring to reflect—that it is his very superiority to the world that drives him to habits of intemperance. His nature is “averse from life” —he has an impatience of existence. Charles Lamb rushed forward, and forced the Gates of Death; and, actuated by a similar feeling, Maturin trod in his footsteps, though only trippingly. Lamb found his Lethe in the quart—Maturin sought his in the quadrille. One drank, the other danced. They were the two kings of Brentford “smelling at one nosegay,” only each experienced the sensation of a different odour from the flowers.
Although the view applied by Mangan is too gloomy a one, it contains, no doubt, a certain amount of truth, and shows a remarkable penetration of Maturin’s character and situation. In his correspondence of that time Maturin repeatedly laments just his want of a literary friend or companion, and the absence of ‘excitement of any description’ that might inspire him to carry on his poetical occupations. As far as these were concerned, his spirit found little nourishment in his environs. Dublin was then rather void of literati, and the people he mixed with were, for the most part, of the usual, every-day character. Feeling thus that even the elite did not attain to the intellectual level he commanded, Maturin turned to the lighter style of social life—with real pleasure, as it corresponded to one side of his temperament, but sometimes, it is not unlikely, with a feverish intensity affording oblivion of the disadvantages under which he laboured, and escape from the melancholy that also was a constituent part of his mind. His nervousness might have been increased by doubts as to the duration of his present mode of existence, and at intervals there naturally came moments of weariness and tedium vitae. In his sermon preached on the first Sunday of the year 1817 Maturin exclaims:
Yes, disappointment has been, must be, the result of our pursuits and passions, because they were “of the earth, earthly;” because of their very nature they were hollow, worthless, and false, and they communicated that nature to their object—they were unworthy of the energies of a thinking spirit, unworthy of the dignity of an immortal soul! — — — What is the result of the chase of these lying vanities? We are disappointed, either in failing to attain them, and thus being rendered wretched by the loss of that whose possession never could have made us happy; or—more mortifying to the illusions of our pride, by attaining them, and finding their possession to be emptiness, yea, “worse than nothing, than vanity.”
Sentiments like these implied a general condemnation of the pursuits Maturin himself was engaged in all his life, and give one more illustration of the tragic contradiction between his profession and his inclinations. That the eccentricities of his conduct incurred a great deal of censure on the part of the more rigorous-minded has already been hinted; but his placidity of temper and easy, gentlemanly manners usually disarmed the displeasure of those coming into contact with him, and he had, upon the whole, no personal enemies. In his own parish he was universally beloved, and where his well-known figure emerged it attracted friendly attention, not unmixed with amazement. His outward appearance used to vary according to his conditions. When he could, he dressed in the highest fashion; his cash being at a low ebb, he would be seen walking about in a costume almost ostentatiously shabby. ‘Mr. Maturin’ says a writer,[92] ‘was tall, slender, but well proportioned, and on the whole, a good figure, which he took care to display in a well made black coat, tight buttoned, and some old light-coloured stocking-web pantaloons, surmounted in winter by a coat of prodigious dimensions, gracefully thrown on, so as not to obscure the symmetry it affected to protect.’ The portrait of Maturin, drawn by Brocas, which appeared in the New Monthly Magazine or Universal Register 1819 and which is reproduced in the 1892 edition of Melmoth the Wanderer, shows a self-portraying and uncommonly handsome face: the finely chiselled mouth indicating a tendency towards the gay and luxurious, while the gaze of the large and melancholy eyes suggests the horrors his imagination was wont to dwell upon. Those who saw him in his home were struck by the former quality greatly prevailing over the latter, as is told by a visitor:[93]
I found him in a large and rather well furnished drawing-room, seated at a writing-desk; while the table on which the desk rested was heaped with books and papers, scattered there in a state of most delectable confusion. He was clad in a sort of loose morning gown, which had evidently been in use for many years. He was cravatless, and looked at the moment rather pale and emaciated. At this period he was at the heyday of his literary popularity, and it struck me that he looked like one who had been enjoying the good things of life (enjoying them too freely) the night before. His eldest boy was seated at his right hand, copying out something from a sadly blotted M. S. Mrs. M. ——, with her daughter, occupied a place near the window, and, when the conversation commenced, joined freely in it. I saw before me for the first time the man of genius, the man whose language and sentiments had operated on me as a species of witchcraft. I felt an indescribable awe—my heart throbbed, and my tongue was for the moment bound up; but the cheerful welcome, the gentle tone, and the brightly animated look of the poet, soon set me quite at ease, and after a few minutes conversation I found myself as it were at home. I was struck most forcibly with the contrast existing in the person and manner of the author and his writings—the one all passion and gloominess and horror, the other ease, grace, and sprightliness, approaching even to levity. He exhibited on this, and on other occasions, when I was with him, a turn for mimicry, and a vein of humour, for which I was entirely unprepared.—
It is mentioned in most notes on Maturin that he was in the habit of placing a wafer on his forehead in his hours of inspiration, to signify to his family that he was not to be intruded upon. This—and many other caprices of a similar kind—might have happened once or twice and then been related at the tea-tables of Dublin as a token of the eccentricity of their literary curate. The story of the wafer seems to be contradicted, or at least greatly qualified, by the statements of some other writers. Carleton[94] says that Maturin had composed the greatest part of his earlier romances at Marsh’s library in St. Patrick’s Close, ‘on a small plain deal desk, which he removed from place to place according as it suited his privacy or convenience;’ and an intimate friend of his has said[95] that he never worked on his two last novels except in the stillness of night, when there was consequently no fear of his being disturbed. As for the inventive part of composition, one writer[96] reports the following utterance of Maturin:
I compose on a long walk; but then the day must neither be too hot, nor cold: it must be reduced to that medium from which you feel no inconvenience one way or the other; and then when I am perfectly free from the city and experience no annoyance from the weather, my mind becomes lighted by sunshine and I arrange my plan perfectly to my own satisfaction.
This confidence was made just on one of those long pedestrian excursions to the county of Wicklow, which Maturin loved to undertake, especially in autumn, his favourite season. During his rambles he sometimes would enter into a literary discussion—which he in general is said to have been rather disinclined to do—and from the occasion now in question his interlocutor has preserved some of his opinions about the poets of England. He appears to have been most attracted by those who presented the least points of contact with his own production. With Byron he shared a boundless admiration for Pope, and of the living poets he liked best Crabbe and next to him Hogg. He was very fond of Moore who had, he said, done what he had wished to do himself, had he been able; but for the poetry of Byron he had a strong distaste, the more remarkable as he had often, as in the case of Bertram, been supposed deliberately to imitate the bard of The Corsair and Lara. What Maturin, however, objected to in Byron’s poems was not the spirit but the style: