I will say it is the black and crying sin of civilized Europe, to compel their children to familiarize their young imaginations with the most brutal crimes, and force their most unripened passions, by placing them in a hot-bed of unutterable impurity. This we do—this we have done for centuries—and this we shall answer for in eternity. Let me propose one plain question to the admirers of the classic writers, as they are called: If a father finds his son reading such passages as occur in their books in his own language, would he not fling the vile pages into the flames, and scarce think those flames too bad for the author?
As Maturin himself had been, for a long time, occupied in giving instruction in this same branch of learning, he knew very well that the copies of the ancients committed into the hands of British school-boys were carefully pruned of the passages he took such offence at; and his eccentric inveighings against the classical writers expressed, after all, his artistic temperament rather than any zeal for morality. His literary tastes were eminently romantic, notwithstanding his admiration for Pope. He had accepted the revival of Mediaevalism in all its phases; his own work began under the auspices of Mrs. Radcliffe and ended with an imitation of Walter Scott; and his works possess every quality generally termed romantic. But Maturin’s Women affords, at the same time, a striking proof of the fact that the romantic writers could occasionally greatly excel in realism, though the spirit of classicism was to them foreign and indeed odious.—
The fancy of Zaira to devote a year before her intended marriage to De Courcy to an ‘intellectual existence’ during which she is to finish his education, is as consistent with her ideal and theoretical cast of mind as it is inconsistent with anything like common prudence. Paris is, moreover, the most unfortunate place she could choose for the commencement of her task; in the most brilliant society of Europe not even Zaira can make so unique a figure as in Dublin, and to the fluctuating mind of De Courcy the gay metropolis has a thousand things to offer, calculated to attract him more than the conversation of Zaira. Among these is a person called Eulalie de Touranges—otherwise unimportant, but just giving him the pleasure of a transitory flirtation, new to his experience, and irresistible at his age. Thus the relation between the lovers very soon becomes constrained in a way appropriately described in a letter of one of Zaira’s friends:
Yesterday I met them at a party at our friend ——’s. The circle was brilliant, and Zaira was unusually eloquent in literature. At the end of a striking sentence which had called forth loud applauses from her auditors, she looked round with a flush of triumph in her lovely countenance for De Courcy. She saw him engaged, not in conversation, but in delighted listening attention to the beautiful Eulalie de Touranges. He was bending over her chair in silence. I marked the change in her countenance, in her voice; the subsiding of her whole figure; the gloomy vacancy of disappointment in her expression. Her hearers did not notice it; they pressed her with some new remarks. She attempted to answer, but evidently did not understand them; struggled to recover her composure, and went on, obviously not knowing of what she was speaking. Music was proposed soon after; and apparently determined to force De Courcy to feel an interest in what she was undertaking, she asked him what she should sing. He appeared not pleased at the publicity which this application gave him, and returned some slight answer, referring her to her own choice. She sat down. I could hear her sigh. She turned languidly over the leaves of her music-book, and sung an air sotto voce with a tone, a look, a manner unlike—oh, how unlike Zaira! At the close of the air, she turned her head almost imperceptibly, and saw De Courcy arranging the men on a chess-board with Mademoiselle de Touranges. The last notes of the air were nearly unintelligible.—
The episode with Eulalie de Touranges is not the only circumstance contributing to the alienation between De Courcy and Zaira. The very basis of their friendship is unnatural. No man, as Maturin simply remarks, is pleased to be the pupil of a woman, and to be continually reminded of the superiority of Zaira cannot fail to become irritating to De Courcy. His liaison to an actress is, moreover, often misconstrued in a way that is very disagreeable to him; but, weak as he is, instead of resolutely defending her honour, he only wishes to get rid of her. Once he is told that Zaira has been married and even had a child, the fate of whom is entirely unknown. His love to her being already on the decline, he feels, and not quite without reason, greatly incensed at her having never mentioned this to him. The innocent figure of Eva begins to reappear to his mind, and when he hears from Montgomery that Eva is lying dangerously ill, his sensitive nature is utterly shocked at the thought of his being the cause of her death. Nothing can now detain him at Paris. The development of these incidents is traced with an inner logic that makes De Courcy’s return to Ireland appear not only natural but inevitable, and forces the reader at once to accept the argumentation. Scott, indeed, says in his critique on Women that De Courcy’s desertion of Zaira is not ‘half so probably motived as his first offence against the code of constancy;’ but his judgment proceeds, no doubt, from an honest indignation at a hero so lamentably deficient in what had always been considered as the principal qualification of one, fidelity in love: summing up the characteristics of De Courcy, the author of Waverley concludes by wishing him to the devil. Yet De Courcy, although the ‘hero’ of an extensive novel, is meant to be neither admired nor hated, only understood, and the characterization is executed with a realism which the time was not quite able to appreciate.—As for Zaira, she knows nothing of the art of keeping the interest of a lover alive by occasionally exercising some reserve towards him; it is impossible for her not to show clearly that he is all she lives for, and this deep and serious view of their relation would, even in itself, inspire a kind of awe in the fickle-minded De Courcy. Now the passion of Zaira is heightened according as that of De Courcy cools down; she is seized with that eccentric, all-absorbing infatuation which persons of genius sometimes conceive for objects wholly unworthy of it. Having been kept, for a time, painfully hovering between hope and despair, she is at last relieved from all doubts. It happens in rather a hackneyed way: she gets hold of a bit of paper on which De Courcy has begun to compose an answer to his guardian who has written to him and implored him to come back, and Zaira makes out the words: ‘I am weary, sick to the soul of my present situation; I shall fly from it as soon as possible.’ The lack of originality, however, is easily forgotten in the almost appalling power with which the sufferings of Zaira are described, sufferings that gradually deprive her of her talents and her health, of everything but life. Of pride she has never had much; now she loses every trace of it. Although aware that she is wearying him, she is still anxious to appear in his company, and when he actually begins to shun her, she even follows him in the street, and stealing to his hotel, at last sees him depart. But for the tender care which some of her French friends take of her, Zaira would perish; to restore her to her former vigour, however, is not in human power. She cannot find peace in any of her old pursuits, nothing can divert her mind from the calamity that has befallen her. At this time she is thrown into the society of an atheistic philosopher who, in support of his theories, endeavours to prove to her that misery is, and must be, the lot of all intellectual beings. Their conversations on this subject unquestionably belong to the longueurs of the book; as the adoption of his sceptical views would not, in her present state of mind, be of any solace to Zaira, the discourses are unnecessarily protracted, and her escape from the ‘snares’ of the philosopher does not appear so meritorious as is probably intended. But all the more impressively are described Zaira’s attempts at turning to religion, seeking consolation in a living faith. Her friends have taken her to a beautiful villa in the country, where she has a singular experience while roaming about in a summer night:
— — — The garden, with its placid regular beauty, tortured her by its contrast to the agitation of her soul. A gate, at the extremity of it, opened into a wood; she hurried into the wood, its darkness was as light unto her, it seemed as a shelter from her own thoughts, and she fled to it with avidity. Nature, in all its rich and exhaustless luxuriance, has nothing to the eye or to the soul so delicious as the mild splendour of moonlight, shed over the darkness of a forest. There is darkness beneath for the unhappy to muse—there is light above for the happy to gaze on—and the trembling gleams between the branches give a strong image of life, chequered indeed with fitful and precarious lustre, but of which the predominant image is gloom—diversified, but essential.
Zaira wandered on; the beauty of the night, the mildness of the climate, precluded all apprehension from her wandering at this late hour. She found herself in a part of the wood where the thick-mingling branches excluded all light, but a tremulous and chequered gleam, that appeared and disappeared among the foliage above, as it was agitated slightly by the breeze. Suddenly a figure appeared to her in the darkness; a white figure, as large as life. She started at first, but a moment after approached it; just where it seemed to stand, the trees opened a little, and the moonlight fell strongly on it, producing a remarkable and solemn effect. It was a figure of Christ on the cross, which had been taken from a ruined church in the neighbourhood, and placed there by the peasantry. It was of wood, but it was well executed, and the light that fell on it at once concealed its defects, and magnified its expression. What an object for a mind in the state of Zaira’s!—Accident, that had so often presented her with the most terrible omens, seemed in this to seek to make atonement. The image of the Saviour of the world hanging on the cross a sacrifice for mankind, surrounded by darkness, and concentrating and reflecting the light solely from his own figure, was an intuitive symbol of relief. She approached it, as she would the presence of a friend. The pale and dying countenance, the woe-bent head, the outspread arms, seemed to unite the expression of suffering and protection—singular but intelligible combination. None can pity but those who have suffered. “He that suffered, being tempted, is able to succour those that are tempted.”
As Zaira gazed on this figure, it seemed to live, to speak to her. Texts of scripture rushed on her heart, as if whispered to it by the Deity. She appeared to hear these sounds issuing audibly from the lifeless lips of the figure—“Come unto me, all ye that are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.” She obeyed the call thus echoed from the bottom of her heart; she prostrated herself before the cross. Her spirit was bowed down along with her body, as she exclaimed, “Oh, my God! accept a heart that has wandered, but longs to return to its Saviour. Purify it, regenerate it, fill it with the love of you alone. Had it known no other but yours, it had never been almost broken. Let your Spirit descend on it, and aid me to struggle with that image, for which all its pulses have beat, which has been wrapt in its very core. You alone are worthy of that place, which a mortal has too long usurped. Vindicate it for yourself, and set me free. Deliver me into the glorious liberty of the children of God, unconscious of any presence, incapable of admitting any image, but yours; dead to the world, and absorbed in God alone.”
But though she uttered these words, it seemed as if some inner winding of her treacherous heart was disclosed to her, where the image of Charles rested, and defied the power even of heaven to displace him. It seemed to her as if she dreaded lest her own prayers should be heard; and that if the Deity had that moment offered to efface that image for ever from her soul, to make it as the image of one she had never seen or seen always with indifference, she would have shrunk from the offer, and implored any other infliction at his hands.—
The religious inspiration Zaira has thus felt for a moment does not return, although she passes the greater part of the night before the Crucifix, where she is, in the morning, found insensible. All her devotional exercises are in vain; for as she cannot find peace in the spirit of religion, her efforts to embrace its empty forms are also doomed to fail. She makes some arrangements to enter a convent, but is deterred from it after a conversation she holds with an old nun, a resident of the place. The results of an existence that leads to apathy and stupefaction, that deadens every feeling and makes living automata of human beings, are displayed in the person of the nun with all the force expressing Maturin’s innate horror at a life in monotony—and Zaira abandons her intention with a strong conviction that she could not buy the salvation of her soul at the price of killing it first. The convent was, indeed, the usual refuge of fictitious characters in great distress; in The Heart of Midlothian which appeared in the same year as Women, Lady Staunton—the ‘Zaira’ of that great novel—ends in a continental convent practising all the vigils and austerities of the religion, and is then heard of no more. Yet it would have been a too convenient way of quenching the fire by which Zaira is consumed, and breaking off the psychological process she is undergoing, to shut her within the walls of a convent. The author pursues with unfaltering consistency the restless strivings of her powerful mind after forgetfulness which she both wishes and dreads. Perceiving that her aim cannot be reached in solitude, she engages in acts of private charity, visiting the poor and sick until she is tired out. Satisfaction, however, is denied her; it is boldly shown that a person, however good and noble, cannot perforce make herself religious, and that there are circumstances under which that remedy fails, without any fault of the patient’s. Weary to the soul, she at last decides to put an end to her life. In all her vicissitudes, it must be observed, her nature has remained unchanged, and with the most terrible reality before her eyes she still lives half in a world of theories. She discusses the subject of suicide with her friends, and passes some painful nights in reading accounts of the deaths of Brutus and Cato.[106] Yet at the decisive moment her reason wanders; dream and reality are blended; magnificent visions chase each other through her delirious brain, and on recovering she clearly remembers having seen a white figure whom she imagines to be the Irish girl, once forsaken for her. This figure continues to haunt her mind, and as it is something she can concentrate her thoughts upon, it soon becomes an idée fixe with her. Weak and exhausted as she is, she travels to Dublin. From a morbid inclination as much as for philanthropical reasons she keeps on visiting the filthiest streets and most miserable hovels, in one of which, as has been related, she finds her wretched mother.—