Naturally enough, seeing that we had been friends for so long, and seeing that he had encouraged me so greatly to write my first book, he took a vast interest in all my proceedings, and was very joyous, as he would have said, to observe that I could not afford sheets but slept in the blankets which I had carried all over America. I seek no sympathy on this point, for after all it was not a matter of my being unable to afford linen; it is impossible for the average comfortable citizen to understand how disagreeable sheets become after some thousands of nights spent camping in mere wool, even of the cheapest. It took me years to learn to resign myself to cold linen, or even more sympathetic cotton, when I became a respectable householder.
In the neighbourhood where I lived there was, of course, a great artistic colony, and as I knew one or two artists already, I soon became acquainted with all the others. Many of them were no richer than myself, and as Bohemia and the belief that there was still a Bohemia formed one of Maitland's greatest joys, he was always delighted to hear of any of our remarkable shifts to live. It is an odd thing to reflect that A. D. Mack, Frank Wynne, Albert Croft, and three other artists whose names I now forget, and I once had a glorious supper of fried fish served in a newspaper on the floor of an empty studio. The only thing I missed on that particular occasion was Maitland's presence, but, of course, the trouble was that Maitland would seldom associate with anybody whom he did not know already, and I could rarely get him to make the acquaintance of my own friends. Yet such experiences as we were sometimes reduced to more than proved to him that his dear Bohemia existed, though later in his life, as one sees in "Mark Sumner," he often seemed to doubt whether it was still extant. On this point I used to console him, saying that where any two artists butted their foolish heads against the economic system, there was Bohemia; Bohemia, in fact, was living on a course of high ideals, whatever the world said of them. At this hour there are writers learning their business on a little oatmeal, as George Meredith did, or destroying their digestions, as I did mine and Henry Maitland's, on canned corn beef. Even yet, perhaps, some writers and artists are making their one big meal a day on fried fish.
One Sunday when I missed going to Maitland's, because he was then out of town visiting his family, I had a tale for him on his return. It appeared that I had been writing, and had got so disgusted with the result of it that I found I could not possibly stay in my room, and so determined to go round to my friend Mack. No sooner had I made up my mind on this subject than there was a knock at the door, and presently in came Mack himself. I said promptly, "It is no good your coming here, for I was just going round to you." Whereupon he replied, "It is no good your coming to me because I have no coal, no coke, and nobody will give me any more because I owe for so much already." I replied that I was not going to stay in my room in any case, and affirmed that I would rather be in his studio in the cold than the room where I was. Whereupon he suddenly discovered that my scuttle was actually full of coal, and proposed to take it round to the studio. This seemed a really brilliant idea, and after much discussion of ways and means my inventive faculty produced an old portmanteau and several newspapers, and after wrapping up lumps of coal in separate pieces of paper we packed the portmanteau with the coal and carried it round to the studio in Manresa Road. This seemed to Maitland so characteristic of an artist's life that he was very much delighted when I told him.
It is an odd thing that in one matter Maitland and I were at that time much alike. From most points of view there can hardly have been two more different men, for he was essentially a man of the study and the cloister, while I was far more naturally a man of the open air. Nevertheless, when it came to journalism we were both of the same mind. While I was away from England and he was teaching Harold Edgeworth's sons, Edgeworth introduced him to John Harley, then editing thePiccadilly Gazette, who offered, and would no doubt have kept to it, to use as much matter as possible if Maitland would supply him with something in the journalistic form. Apparently he found it too much against his natural grain to do this work, and I was now in the same predicament. It is true that I had something of a natural journalistic flair which he lacked, but my nose for a likely article was rendered entirely useless to me by the fact that I never could write anything until I had thought about it for several days, by which time it was stale, and much too late from the newspaper point of view. Nevertheless Maitland did occasionally do a little odd journalism, for I remember once, before I went to America, being with him when he received the proofs of an article from theSt. James' Gazette, and picking up "Mark Sumner" one may read: "I thought of this as I sat yesterday watching a noble sunset, which brought back to my memory the sunsets of a London autumn, thirty years ago. It happened that, on one such evening, I was by the river at Chelsea, with nothing to do except to feel that I was hungry, and to reflect that, before morning, I should be hungrier still. I loitered upon Battersea Bridge—the old picturesque wooden bridge, and there the western sky took hold upon me. Half an hour later I was speeding home. I sat down, and wrote a description of what I had seen, and straightway sent it to an evening paper, which, to my astonishment, published the thing next day—'On Battersea Bridge.' I have never seen that article since I saw the proof of it, but there was something so characteristic in it that I think it would be worth some one's while to hunt up the files of theSt. James' Gazettein order to find it. It appears that while he was leaning over the bridge, enjoying the sunset, there was also a workman looking at it. The river was at a low stage, for it was at least three-quarters-ebb, and on each side of the river there were great patches of shining mud, in which the glorious western sky was reflected, turning the ooze into a mass of most wonderful colour. Maitland said to me, "Of course I was pleased to see somebody else, especially a poor fellow like that, enjoying the beauty of the sunset. But presently my companion edged a little closer to me, and seeing my eyes directed towards the mud which showed such heavenly colouring, he remarked to me, with an air of the deepest interest, 'Throws up an 'eap of mud, don't she?'"
Sometimes when Maitland came down to me in Danvers Street he used to go over my accounts and discuss means of making them less. I think his chief joy in them was the feeling that some of his more respectable friends, such as Harold Edgeworth, would have been horrified at my peculiarly squalid existence. In a sense it was, no doubt, squalid, and yet in another it was perhaps the greatest time in my life, and Maitland knew it. In the little book in which I kept my expenses he came across one day on which I had absolutely spent nothing. This was a great joy to him. On another day he found a penny put down as "charity." On looking up the book I find that a note still declares that this penny was given to a little girl to pay her fare in the bus. I remember quite well that this beneficence on my part necessitated my walking all the way to Chelsea from Hyde Park Corner. Yet Maitland assured me that, compared with himself at times, I was practically a millionaire, although he owned that he had very rarely beaten my record for some weeks when all expenditure on food was but three-and-six-pence. One week it actually totalled no more than one-and-elevenpence, but I have no doubt that I went out to eat with somebody else on those days—unless it was at the time my liver protested, and gave me such an attack of gloom that I went to bed and lay there for three days without eating, firmly determined to die and have done with the literary struggle. This fast did me a great deal of good. On the fourth day I got up and rustled vigorously for a meal, and did some financing with the admirable result of producing a whole half-crown.
Whenever Maitland came to me I cooked his food and my own on a little grid, or in a frying-pan, over the fire in my one room. This fire cost me on an average a whole shilling a week, or perhaps a penny or two more if the coals, which I bought in the street, went up in price. This means that I ran a fire on a hundredweight of coal each week, or sixteen pounds of coal a day. Maitland, who was an expert on coal, assured me that I was extremely extravagant, and that a fire could be kept going for much less. On trying, I found out that when I was exceedingly hard up I could keep in a very little fire for several hours a day on only eight pounds of coal, but sometimes I had to let it go out, and run round to a studio to get warm by some artist's stove,—provided always that the merchant in coke who supplied him had not refused my especial friend any further credit.
At this time Maitland and I were both accustomed to work late, although he was just then beginning to labour at more reasonable times, though not to write fewer hours. As for me, I used to find getting up in the morning at a proper hour quite impossible. Probably this was due to some inherited gout, to poisonous indigestion from my own cooking, or to a continued diet of desiccated soups and "Jungle" beef from Chicago. However, it seemed to Maitland that I was quite in the proper tradition of letters while I was working on a long novel, only published years afterwards, which I used to begin at ten or eleven o'clock at night, frequently finishing at six o'clock in the morning when the sparrows began to chirp outside my window.
As a result of this night-work I used to get up at four o'clock in the afternoon, sometimes even later, to make my own breakfast. Afterwards I would go out to see some of my friends in their studios, and at the time most people were thinking of going to bed I sat down to the wonderfully morbid piece of work which I believed was to bring me fame. This was a rather odd book, called "The Fate of Hilary Dale." It has no claim whatever to any immortality, and from my point of view its only value lies in the fact that there is a very brief sketch of Maitland in it. He is described in these words: "Will Curgenven, writer, teacher, and general apostle of culture, as it is understood by the elect, had been hard at work for some hours on an essay on Greek metres, and was growing tired of it. His dingy subject and dingy Baker Street flat began to pall on him, and he rose to pace his narrow room." Now Will Curgenven, of course, was Maitland and the dingy Baker Street flat was 7K. "'Damn the nature of things,' as Porson said when he swallowed embrocation instead of whisky!" was what I went on to put into his mouth. This, indeed, was one of Maitland's favourite exclamations. It stood with him for all the strange and blasphemous and eccentric oaths with which I then decorated my language, the result of my experiences in the back blocks of Australia and the Pacific Slope of America. In this book I went on to make a little fun of his great joy in Greek metres. I remember that once he turned to me with an assumed air of strange amazement and exclaimed: "Why, my dear fellow, do you know there are actually miserable men who do not know—who have never even heard of—the minuter differences between Dochmiacs and Antispasts!" That, again, reminds me of a passage in "Paternoster Row," which always gives me acute pleasure because it recalls Maitland so wonderfully. It is where one of the characters came in to the hero and wanted his opinion on the scansion of a particular chorus in the "Œdipus Rex." Maydon laid hold of the book, thought a bit, and began to read the chorus aloud. Whereupon the other one cried: "Choriambics, eh? Possible, of course; but treat them as Ionics a minore with an anacrusis, and see if they don't go better." Now in this passage the speaker is really Maitland, for he involved himself in terms of pedantry with such delight that his eyes gleamed. No doubt it was an absurd thing, but Greek metres afforded so bright a refuge from the world of literary struggle and pressing financial difficulty.
"Damn the nature of things!" was Porson's oath. Now Maitland had a very peculiar admiration for Porson. Porson was a Grecian. He loved Greek. That was sufficient for Maitland. In addition to that claim on his love, it is obvious that Porson was a man of a certain Rabelaisian turn of mind, and that again was a sufficient passport to his favour. No doubt if Porson had invited Maitland to his rooms, and had then got wildly drunk, it would have annoyed Maitland greatly; but the picture of Porson shouting Greek and drinking heavily attracted him immensely. He often quoted all the little stories told of Porson, such as the very well-known one of another scholar calling on him by invitation late one evening, and finding the room in darkness and Porson on the floor. This was when his visitor called out: "Porson, where are the candles, and where's the whiskey?" and Porson answered, still upon the floor, but neither forgetful of Greek nor of his native wit.
When any man of our acquaintance was alluded to with hostility, or if one animadverted on some popular person who was obviously uneducated, Maitland always vowed that he did not know Greek, and probably or certainly had never starved. His not knowing Greek was, of course, a very great offence to Maitland, for he used to quote Porson on Hermann:
"The Germans in GreekAre far to seek.Not one in five score,But ninety-nine more.All save only Hermann,And Hermann's a German."
Of course a man who lacked Greek, and had not starved, was anathema—not to be considered. And whatever Porson may have done he did know Greek, and that saved his soul. Maitland often quoted very joyfully what he declared to be some of the most charming lines in the English language:
"I went to Strasburg, and there got drunkWith the most learned Professor Runck.I went to Wortz, and got more drunkenWith the more learned Professor Runcken."
But if the spirit was willing, the flesh was weak. I never saw Maitland drunk in his life. Indeed he was no real expert in drinking. He had never had any education in the wines he loved. Any amateur of the product of the vine will know how to estimate his actual qualifications as a judge, when I say that Asti, Capri, and especially Chianti seemed to him the greatest wines in the world, since by no means could he obtain the right Falernian of Horace, which, by the way, was probably a most atrocious vintage. As it happened I had been employed for many months on a great vineyard in California, and there had learnt not a little about the making and blending of wine. Added to this I had some natural taste in it, and had read a great deal about wine-making and the great vintages of France and Germany. One could always interest Maitland by telling him something about wine, provided one missed out the scientific side of it. But it was sad that I lacked, from his point of view, the proper enthusiasm for Chianti. Yet, indeed, one knows what was in his classic mind, from the fact that a poor vintage in a real Italian flask, or in something shaped like an amphora, would have made him chuckle with joy far more readily than if a rich man had offered him in a bottle some glorious first growth of the Medoc, Laflitte, Latour, or Haut-Brion. But, indeed, he and I, even when I refused indignantly to touch the Italians, and declared with resolution for a wine of Burgundy or the Médoc, rarely got beyond a Bourgeois vintage.
Nevertheless though I aspired to be his tutor in wines I owed him more than is possible to say in the greater matters of education. My debt to him is really very big. It was, naturally enough, through his influence, that while I was still in my one room in Danvers Street I commenced to read again all the Greek tragedies. By an odd chance I came across a clergyman's son in Chelsea who also had a certain passion for Greek. He used to come to my room and there we re-read the tragedies. Oddly enough I think my new friend never met Maitland, for Maitland rarely came to my room save on Sundays, and those days I reserved specially for him. But whenever we met, either there or at 7K, we always read or recited Greek to each other, and then entered into a discussion of the metrical value of the choruses—in which branch of learning I trust I showed proper humility, for in prosody he was remarkably learned. As for me, I knew nothing of it beyond what he told me, and cared very little, personally, for the technical side of poetry. Nevertheless it was not easy to resist Maitland's enthusiasm, and I succumbed to it so greatly that I at last imagined that I was really interested in what appealed so to him. Heaven knows, in those days I did at least learn something of the matter.
We talked of rhythm, and of Arsis or Ictus. Pyrrhics we spoke of, and trochees and spondees were familiar on our lips. Especially did he declare that he had a passion for anapæsts, and when it came to the actual metres, Choriambics and Galliambics were an infinite joy to him. He explained to me most seriously the differences between trimeter Iambics when they were catalectic, acatalectic, hypercatalectic. What he knew about comic tetrameter was at my service, and in a short time I knew, as I imagined, almost all that he did about Minor Ionic, Sapphic, and Alcaic verse. Once more these things are to me little more than words, and yet I never hear one of them mentioned—as one does occasionally when one comes across a characteristic enthusiast—but I think of Henry Maitland and his gravely joyous lectures to me on that vastly important subject. No doubt many people will think that such little details as these are worth nothing, but I shall have failed greatly in putting Maitland down if they do not seem something in the end. These trifles are, after all, touches in the portrait as I see the man, and that they all meant much to him I know very well. To get through the early days of literary poverty one must have ambition and enthusiasm of many kinds. Enthusiasm alone is nothing, and ambition by itself is too often barren, but the two together are something that the gods may fight against in vain. I know that this association with him, when I was his only friend, and he was my chief friend, was great for both of us, for he had much to endure, and I was not without my troubles. Yet we made fun together of our squalor, and rejoiced in our poverty, so long as it did not mean acute suffering; and when it did mean that, we often-times got something out of literature to help us to forget. On looking back, I know that many things happened which seem to me dreadful, but then they appeared but part of the day's work.
It rarely happened that I went to him without some story of the week's happenings, to be told again in return something which had occurred to him. For instance, there was that story of the lady who asked him his experience with regard to the management of butlers. In return I could tell him of going out to dinner at houses where people would have been horrified to learn that I had eaten nothing that day, and possibly nothing the day before. For us to consort with the comfortably situated sometimes seemed to both of us an intolerably fine jest, which was added to by the difference of these comfortable people from the others we knew. Here and there we came across some fatly rich person who, by accident, had once been deprived of his usual dinner. It seemed to give him a sympathetic feeling for the very poor. But, after all, though I did sometimes associate with such people, I was happier in my own room with Maitland, or in his flat, where we discussed our Æschylus, or wrought upon metres or figures of speech—always a great joy to us. Upon these, too, Maitland was really quite learned. He was full of examples of brachyology. Anacoluthon he was well acquainted with. Not even Farrar, in his "Greek Syntax," or some greater man, knew more examples of chiasmus, asyndeton, or hendiadys. In these byways he generally rejoiced, and we were never satisfied unless at each meeting, wherever it might be, we discovered some new phrase, or new word, or new quotation.
Once at 7K I quoted to him from Keats' "Endymion" the lines about those people who "unpen their baaing vanities to browse away the green and comfortable juicy hay of human pastures." All that evening he was denouncing various comfortable people who fed their baaing vanity on everything delightful. He declared they browsed away all that made life worth while, and in return for my gift to him of this noble quotation he produced something rather more astounding, and perhaps not quite so quotable, out of Zola's "Nana." We had been talking of realism, and of speaking the truth, of being direct, of not being mealy-mouthed; in fact, of not letting loose "baaing vanities," and suddenly he took down "Nana" and said, "Here Zola has put a phrase in her mouth which rejoices me exceedingly. It is a plain, straight-forward, absolutely characteristic sentiment, such as we in England are not allowed to represent. Nana, on being remonstrated with by her lover-in-chief for her infidelities, returns him the plain and direct reply, 'Quand je vois un homme qui me plait, je couche avec.' He went on to declare that writing any novels in England was indeed a very sickening business, but he added, "I really think we begin to get somewhat better in this. However, up to the last few years, it has been practically impossible to write anything more abnormal about a man's relations with women than a mere bigamy." Things have certainly altered, but I think he was one of those who helped to break down that undue sense of the value of current morality which has done so much harm to the study of life in general, and indeed to life itself. His general rage and quarrel with that current morality, for which he had not only a contempt, but a loathing which often made him speechless, comes out well in what he thought and expressed about the Harold Frederick affair. There was, of course, as everybody knows, a second illegitimate family. While the good and orthodox made a certain amount of effort to help the wife and the legal children, they did their very best to ignore the second family. However, to Maitland's great joy, there were certain people, notably Mrs. Stephens, who did their very best for the other children and for the poor mother. Maitland himself subscribed, before he knew the actual position, to both families, and betrayed extraordinary rage when he learnt how that second family had been treated, and heard of the endeavours of the "unco' guid" to ignore them wholly. But then such actions and such hypocrisy are characteristic of the middle class in this country and not in this country alone. He loathed their morals which became a system of cruelty; their greed and its concomitant selfishness: their timidity which grows brutal in defence of a position to which only chance and their rapacity have entitled them.
Apropos of his hatred of current morality, it is a curious thing that the only quarrel I ever had with him showed his early point of view rather oddly. Among the few men he knew there was one, with whom I was a little acquainted, who had picked up a young girl in a tavern and taken her to live with him. My own acquaintance with her led to some jealousy between me and the man who was keeping her, and he wrote to Maitland complaining of me, and telling him many things which were certainly untrue. Maitland when he considered the fact of his having ruined his own life for ever and ever by his relations with a woman of this order, had naturally built up a kind of theory of these things as a justification for himself. This may seem a piece of extravagant psychology, but I have not the least doubt that it is true. Without asking my view of the affair he wrote to me very angrily, and declared that I had behaved badly. He added that he wished me to understand that he considered an affair of that description as sacred as any marriage. Though he was young, and in these matters no little of a prig, I was also young, and of a hot temper. That he had not made any inquiries of me, or even asked my version of the circumstances, so angered me that I wrote back to him saying that if he spoke to me in that way I should decline to have anything more to do with him. As he was convinced, most unjustly, that his view was entirely sound, this naturally enough led to an estrangement which lasted for the best part of a year, but I am glad to remember that I myself made it up by writing to him about one of his books. This was before I went to America, and although I was working, it was a great grief to me that we did not meet during this estrangement for any of our great talks, which, both then and afterwards, were part of my life, and no little part of it. Often when I think of him I recollect those lines of Callimachus to Heracleitus in Corey's "Ionica":
"They told me, Heracleitus, they told me you were dead;They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.I wept as I remembered how often you and IHad tired the sun with talking, and sent him down the sky."
In the last chapter I quoted from Boswell, always a favourite of Maitland's, as he is of all true men of letters. But there is yet another quotation from the same work which might stand as a motto for this book, as it might for the final and authoritative biography of Maitland which perhaps will some day be done: "He asked me whether he had mentioned, in any of the papers of the 'Rambler,' the description in Virgil of the entrance into Hell, with an application to the Press; 'for,' said he, 'I do not much remember them.' I told him, 'No.' Upon which he repeated it:
'Vestlbulum ante ipsum primisque in faucibus Orci,Lucius et ultrices posuere cubilia Curæ;Pallentesque habitant Morbi, tristisque Senectus,Et Metus, et malesuada Fames, ac turpis Egestas;Terribiles vis formæ: Letumque, Labosque.'
'Now,' said he, 'almost all these apply exactly to an author; all these are the concomitants of a printing-house.'" Nevertheless, although cares, and sometimes sullen sorrows, want and fear, still dwelt with Maitland, a little time now began for him in which he had some peace of mind, if not happiness. That was a plant he never cultivated. One of his favourite passages from Charlotte Brontë, whose work was in many ways a passion to him, is that in which she exclaims: "Cultivate happiness! Happiness is not a potato," and indeed he never grew it. Still there were two periods in his life in which he had some peace, and the first period now began. I speak of the time after the death of his first wife. The drain of ten shillings a week—which must seem so absurdly little to many—had been far more than he could stand, and many times he had gone without the merest necessities of life so that the poor alien in the New Cut should have money, even though he knew that she spent it at once upon drink and forgetfulness. Ten shillings a week was very much to him. For one thing it might mean a little more food and better food. It meant following up his one great hobby of buying books. Those who know "The Meditations," know what he thought of books, for in that respect this record is a true guide, even if it should be read with caution in most things. Nevertheless although he was happier and easier, it is curious that his most unhappy and despairing books were written during this particular period. "In the Morning," it is true, was done before his wife died, and some people who do not know the inner history of the book may not regard it as a tragedy. In one sense, however, it was one of the greatest literary tragedies of Henry Maitland's life, according to his own statement to me.
At that time he was publishing books with the firm of Miller and Company, and, of course, he knew John Glass, who read for them, very well indeed. It seems that Glass, who had naturally enough, considering his period, certain old-fashioned ideas on the subject of books and their endings, absolutely and flatly declined to recommend his firm to publish "In the Morning," unless Maitland re-wrote the natural tragic end of the book and made it turn out happily. I think nothing on earth, or in some hell for men of letters, could have made Maitland more angry and wretched. If there was one thing that he clung to during the whole of his working time, it was sincerity, and sincerity in literary work implies an absolute freedom from alien and extrinsic influence. I can well remember what he said to me about Glass' suggestion. He abused him and the publishers; the public, England, the world, and the very universe. He almost burst into tears as he explained to me what he had been obliged to do for the sake of the great fifty pounds he was to get for the book. For at this time he only got fifty pounds for a long three-volume novel. He always wrote with the greatest pain and labour, but I do not suppose he ever put anything on paper in his life which cost him such acute mental suffering as the last three chapters of this book which were written to John Glass' barbaric order.
After his wife's death he wrote "The Under-World," "Bond and Free," "Paternoster Row," and "The Exile." It is a curious fact, although it was not always obvious even to himself, and is not now obvious to anybody but me, that I stood as a model to him in many of these books, especially, if I remember rightly, for one particular character in "Bond and Free." Some of these sketches are fairly complimentary, and many are much the reverse. The reason of this use of me was that till much later he knew very few men intimately but myself; and when he wanted anybody in his books of a more or less robust character, and sometimes more or less of a kind that he did not like, I, perforce, had to stand for him. On one occasion he acknowledged this to me, and once he was not at all sure how I should take it. As a matter of fact the most life-like portrait of me ends as a villain, and, as he had touched me off to the very life in the first volume, it did make me a little sorer than I acknowledged. I leave the curious to discover this particular scoundrel. Of course it was only natural that my wild habits and customs, the relics of Australia and America, afforded him a great deal of amusement and study. On one occasion they cost him, temporarily, the very large sum of three pounds. As he said, he used to look upon me as a kind of hybrid, a very ridiculous wild man with strong literary leanings, with an enormous amount of general and unrelated knowledge; and at the same time as a totally unregulated or ill-regulated ruffian. This was a favourite epithet of his, for which I daresay there was something to be said. Now one Sunday it happened that I was going up to see him at 7K, and came from Chelsea with two or three books in my hand, and, as it happened, a pair of spectacles on my nose. At that time I sometimes carried an umbrella, and no doubt looked exceedingly peaceful. As a result of this a young man, who turned out afterwards to be a professional cricketer, thought I was a very easy person to deal with, and to insult. As I came to York Place, which was then almost empty of passers by, I was walking close to the railings and this individual came up and pushing rudely past me, stepped right in front of me. Now this was a most outrageous proceeding, because he had fifteen free feet of pavement, and I naturally resented it. I made a little longer step than I should otherwise have done and "galled his kibe." He turned round upon me and, using very bad language, asked me where I was going to, who I thought I was, and what I proposed to do about it. I did not propose to do anything, but did it. I smote him very hard with the umbrella, knocking him down. He remained on the pavement for a considerable time, and then only got up at the third endeavour, and promptly gave me into custody. The policeman, who had happened to see the whole affair, explained to me, with that civility common among the custodians of order to those classes whose dress suggests they are their masters, that he was compelled to take the charge. I was removed to Lower Seymour Street and put in a cell for male prisoners only, where I remained fully half an hour.
While I was in this cell a small boy of about nine was introduced and left there. I went over to him and said, "Hullo, my son, what's brought you here?" Naturally enough he imagined that I was not a prisoner but a powerful official, and bursting into tears he said, "Oh, please, sir, it warn't me as nicked the steak!" I consoled him to the best of my ability until I was shortly afterwards invited down to Marlborough Street Police Court, where Mr. De Rutzen, now Sir Albert De Rutzen, was sitting. As I had anticipated the likelihood of my being fined, and as I had no more than a few shillings with me, I had written a letter to Maitland, and procuring a messenger through the police, had sent it up to him. He came down promptly and sat in the court while I was being tried for this assault. After hearing the case Mr. De Rutzen decided to fine me three pounds, which Maitland paid, with great chuckles at the incident, even though he considered his prospect of getting the money back for some months was exceedingly vague. It was by no means the first time that he had gone to the police court for copy which "is very pretty to observe," as Pepys said, when after the Fire of London it was discovered that as many churches as public houses were left standing in the city. That such a man should have had to pursue his studies of actual life in the police courts and the slums was really an outrage, another example of the native malignity of matter. For, as I have insisted, and must insist again, he was a scholar and a dreamer. But his pressing anxieties for ever forbade him to dream, or to pursue scholarship without interruption. He desired time to perfect his control of the English tongue, and he wanted much that no man can ever get. It is my firm conviction that if he had possessed the smallest means he would never have thought himself completely master of the medium in which he worked. He often spoke of poor Flaubert saying: "What an accursed language is French!" He was for ever dissatisfied with his work, as an artist should be, and I think he attained seldom, if ever, the rare and infrequent joy that an artist has in accomplishment. It was not only his desire of infinite perfection as a writer pure and simple, which affected and afflicted him. It was the fact that he should never have written fiction at all. He often destroyed the first third of a book. I knew him to do so with one three times over. This, of course, was not always out of the cool persuasion that what he had done was not good, for it often was good in its way, but frequently he began, in a hurry, in despair, and with the prospects of starvation, something that he knew not to be his own true work, or something which he forced without adequate preparation. Then I used to get a dark note saying, "I have destroyed the whole of the first volume and am, I hope, beginning to see my way." It was no pleasant thing to be a helpless spectator of these struggles, in which he found no rest, when I knew his destiny was to have been a scholar at a great university.
When one understands his character, or even begins to understand it, it is easy enough to comprehend that the temporary ease with regard to money which came after his wife's death did not last so very long. The pressure of her immediate needs and incessant demands being at last relaxed he himself relaxed his efforts in certain directions and presently was again in difficulties. I know that it will sound very extraordinary to all but those who know the inside of literary life that this should have been so. A certain amount of publicity is almost always associated in the minds of the public with monetary success of a kind. Yet one very well-known acquaintance of mine, an eminent if erratic journalist, one day had a column of favourable criticism in a big daily, and after reading it went out and bought a red herring with his last penny and cooked it over the fire in his solitary room. It was the same with myself. It was almost the same with Maitland even at this time. No doubt the worst of his financial difficulties were before I returned from America, and even before his wife died, but never, till the end of his life, was he at ease with regard to money. He never attained the art of the pot-boiler by which most of us survive, even when he tried short stories, which he did finally after I had pressed him to attempt them for some years.
In many ways writing to him was a kind of sacred mission. It was not that he had any faith in great results to come from it, but the profession of a writer was itself sacred, and even the poorest sincere writer was asacer vates. He once absolutely came down all the way to me in Chelsea to show me a well-known article in which Robert Louis Stevenson denied, to my mind not so unjustly, that a writer could claim payment at all, seeing that he left the world's work to do what he chose to do for his own pleasure. Stevenson went on to compare such a writer to afille de joie. This enraged Maitland furiously. I should have been grieved if he and Stevenson had met upon that occasion. I really think something desperate might have happened, little as one might expect violence from such a curious apostle of personal peace as Maitland. Many years afterwards I related this little incident to Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa, but I think by that time Maitland himself was half inclined to agree with his eminent brother author. And yet, as I say, writing was a mission, even if it was with him an acquired passion; but his critical faculties, which were so keenly developed, almost destroyed him. There can be no stronger proof that he was not one of those happy beings who take to the telling of stories because they must, and because it is in them. There was no time that he was not obliged to do his best, though every writer knows to his grief that there are times when the second best must do. And thus it was that John Glass so enraged him. All those things which are the care of the true writer were of most infinite importance to him. A misprint, a mere "literal," gave him lasting pain. He desired classic perfection, both of work and the mere methods of production. He would have taken years over a book if fear and hunger and poverty had permitted him to do so. And yet he wrote "Isabel," "The Mob," and "In the Morning," all in seven months, even while he read through the whole of Dante's "Divina Commedia," for recreation, and while he toiled at the alien labour of teaching. Yet this was he who wrote to one friend: "Would it not be delightful to give up a year or so to the study of some old period of English history?" When he was thirty-six he said: "The four years from now to forty I should like to devote to a vigorous apprenticeship in English." But this was the man who year after year was compelled to write books which the very essence of his being told him would work no good. Sometimes I am tempted to think that the only relief he got for many, many years came out of the hours we spent in company, either in his room or mine. We read very much together, and it was our delight, as I have said, to exchange quotations, or read each other passages which we had discovered during the week. He recited poetry with very great feeling and skill, and was especially fond of much of Coleridge. I can hear him now reading those lines of Coleridge to his son which end:
"Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to theeWhether the summer clothe the general earthWith greenness, or the redbreast sit and singBetwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branchOf mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatchSmokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fallHeard only in the trances of the blast,Or if the secret ministry of frostShall hang them up in silent icicles,Quietly shining to the quiet Moon."
And to hear him chant the mighty verse of the great Greeks who were dead, and yet were most alive to him, was always inspiring. The time was to come, though not yet, when he was to see Greece, and when he had entered Piræus and seen the peopled mountains of that country Homer became something more to him than he had been, and the language of Æschylus and Sophocles took on new glories and clothed itself in still more wondrous emotions. He knew a hundred choruses of the Greek tragedies by heart, and declaimed them with his wild hair flung back and his eyes gleaming as if the old tragedians, standing in the glowing sun of the Grecian summer, were there to hear him, an alien yet not an alien, using the tongue that gave its chiefest glories to them for ever. But he had been born in exile, and had made himself an outcast.
Those who have read so far, and are interested in him, will see that I am much more concerned to say what I felt about him than to relate mere facts and dates. I care little or nothing that in some ways others know more or less of him, or know it differently. I try to build up my little model of him, try to paint my picture touch by touch; often, it may be, by repetition, for so a man builds himself for his friends in his life. I must paint him as a whole, and put him down, here and there perhaps with the grain of the canvas showing through the paint, or perhaps with what the worthy critics call a rich impasto, which may be compiled of words. Others may criticise, and will criticise, what I write. No doubt they will find much of it wrong, or wrong-headed, and will attribute to me other motives than those which move me, but if it leads them to bring out more of his character than I know or remember, I shall be content. For the more that is known of him, the more he will be loved.
It was somewhere about this time that I undertook to write one of two or three articles which I have done about him for periodicals, and the remembrance of that particular piece of work reminds me very strongly of his own ideas of his own humour in writing. There have been many discussions, wise and otherwise, as to whether he possessed any at all, and I think the general feeling that he was very greatly lacking in this essential part of the equipment of a writer, to be on the whole true. Among my lost letters there was one which I most especially regret not to be able to quote, for it was very long, perhaps containing two thousand words, which he sent to me when he knew I had been asked to do this article. Now the purport of Maitland's letter was to prove to me that every one was wrong who said he had no humour. In one sense there can be no greater proof that anybody who said so was right. He enumerated carefully all the characters in all the books he had hitherto written in whom he thought there was real humour. He gave me a preposterous list of these individuals, with his comments, and appealed to me in all deadly seriousness to know whether I did not agree with him that they were humorous. But the truth is that, save as a talker, he had very little humour, and even then it was frequently verbal. It was, however, occasionally very grim, and its strength, oddly enough, was of the American kind, since it consisted of managed exaggeration. He had a certain joy in constructing more or less humorous nicknames for people. Sometimes these were good, and sometimes bad, but when he christened them once he kept to it always. I believe the only man of his acquaintance who had no nickname at all was George Meredith, but then he loved and admired Meredith in no common fashion.
In some of his books he speaks, apparently not without some learning, of music, but there are, I fancy, signs that his knowledge of it was more careful construction than actual knowledge or deep feeling. Nevertheless he did at times discover a real comprehension of the greater musicians, especially of Chopin. Seeing that this was so, it is very curious, and more than curious in a writer, that he had a measureless adoration of barrel organs. He delighted in them strangely, and when any Italian musician came into his dingy street or neighbourhood, he would set the window open and listen with ardour. Being so poor, he could rarely afford to give away money even in the smallest sum. Pennies were indeed pennies to him. But he did sometimes bestow pence on wandering Italians who ground out Verdi in the crowded streets. Among the many languages which he knew was, of course, Italian; for, as I have said, he read the "Divina Commedia" easily, reading it for relaxation as he did Aristophanes. It was a great pleasure to him, even before he went to Italy, to speak a few words in their own tongue to these Italians of the English streets. He remembered that this music came from the south, the south that was always his Mecca, the Kibleh of the universe. Years afterwards, when he had been in the south, and knew Naples and the joyous crowds of the Chaiaja—long before I had been there and had listened to its uproar from the Belvidere of San Martino—he found Naples chiefly a city of this joyous popular music. Naples, he said, was the most interesting modern city in Europe; and yet I believe the chief joy he had there was hearing its music, and the singing of the lazzaroni down by Santa Lucia. "Funiculi, Funicula," he loved as much as if it were the work of a classic, and "Santa Lucia" appealed to him like a Greek chorus. I remember that, years later, he wrote to me a letter of absurd and exaggerated anger, which was yet perfectly serious, about the action of the Neapolitan municipality in forbidding street organs to play in the city. Sometimes, though rarely, seeing that he could not often afford a shilling, he went to great concerts in London. Certainly he spoke as one not without instruction in musical subjects in "The Vortex," but I fancy that musical experts might find flaws in his nomenclature. Nevertheless he did love music with a certain ardent passion.
He was a man not without a certain sensuality, but it was his sensuousness which was in many ways the most salient point in his character. As I often told him, he was a kind of incomplete Rabelaisian. That was suggested to me by his delighted use of Gargantuan epithets with regard to the great recurrent subject of food. He loved all things which were redolent of oil and grease and fatness. The joy of great abundance appealed to him, and I verily believe that to him the great outstanding characteristic of the past in England was its abundant table. Indeed, in all things but rowdy indecency, he was a Rabelaisian, and being such, he yet had to put up with poor and simple food. However, provided it was at hand in large quantities, he was ready to feed joyously. He would exclaim: "Now for our squalid meal! I wonder what Harold Edgeworth, or good old Edmund Roden would say to this?" When I think of the meagre preface that Harold Edgeworth wrote in later years for "Basil," when that done by G.H. Rivers—afterwards published separately—did not meet with the approval of Maitland's relatives and executors, I feel that Edgeworth somewhat deserved the implied scorn of Maitland's words. As for Edmund Roden, he often spoke of him affectionately. In later years he sometimes went down to Felixstowe to visit him. He liked his house amazingly, and was very much at home in it. It was there that he met Grant Allen, and Sir Luke Redburn, whom he declared to be the most interesting people that he saw in Felixstowe at that time.
I am not sure whether it was on this particular occasion, perhaps in 1895, that he went down to Essex with a great prejudice against Grant Allen. The reason of this was curious. He was always most vicious when any writer who obviously lived in comfort, complained loudly and bitterly of the pittance of support given him by the public, and the public's faithful servants, the publishers. When Allen growled furiously on this subject in a newspaper interview Maitland recalled to me with angry amusement a certain previous article in which, if I remember rightly, Grant Allen proclaimed his absolute inability to write if he were not in a comfortable room with rose-coloured curtains. "Rose-coloured curtains!" said Maitland contemptuously, and looking round his own room one certainly found nothing of that kind. It was perhaps an extraordinary thing, one of the many odd things in his character, that the man who loved the south so, who always dreamed of it, seemed to see everything at that period of his life in the merest black and white. There was not a spark or speck of colour in his rooms. Now in my one poor room in Chelsea I had hung up all sorts of water-colours acquired by various means from artists who were friends of mine. By hook or by crook I got hold of curtains with colour in them, and carpets, too, and Japanese fans. My room was red and yellow and scarlet, while his were a dingy monochrome, as if they sympathised with the outlook at the back of his flat, which stared down upon the inferno of the Metropolitan Railway. But to return to Grant Allen. Maitland now wrote: "However, I like him very much. He is quite a simple, and very gentle fellow, crammed with multifarious knowledge, enthusiastic in scientific pursuits. With fiction and that kind of thing he ought never to have meddled; it is the merest pot-boiling. He reads nothing whatever but books of scientific interest."
It was at Felixstowe, too, that he met Carew Latter who induced him to write twenty papers in one of the journals Latter conducted. They were to be of more or less disreputable London life. Some of them at least have been reprinted in his volumes of short stories. There is certainly no colour in them; in some ways they resemble sketches with the dry-point. Of course after he had once been on the continent, and had got south to Marseilles and the Cannebiere, he learnt to know what colour was, and wrote of it in a way he had never done before, as I noticed particularly in one paragraph about Capri seen at sunset from Naples. In this sudden discovery of colour he reminded me, oddly enough, of my old acquaintance Wynne, the now justly celebrated painter, who, up to a certain time in his life, had painted almost in monochrome, and certainly in a perpetual grey chord. Then he met Marvell, the painter, who was, if anything, a colourist. I do not think Marvell influenced Wynne in anything but colour, but from that day Wynne was a colourist, and so remains, although to it he has added a great and real power of design and decoration. It is true that Maitland never became a colourist in writing, but those who have read his work with attention will observe that after a certain date he was much more conscious of the world's colour.
In those days our poverty and our ambition made great subjects for our talks. I myself had been writing for some years with no more than asuccès d'estime, and I sometimes thought that I would throw up the profession and go back to Australia or America, or to the sea, or would try Africa at last. But Maitland had no such possibilities within him. He maintained grimly, though not without humour, that his only possible refuge when war, or some other final disaster made it impossible for writers to earn their difficult living, was a certain block of buildings opposite 7K. This, however, was not Madame Tussaud's as the careless might imagine, it was the Marylebone workhouse, which he said he regarded with a proprietary eye. It always afforded him a subject for conversation when his prospects seemed rather poorer than usual. It was, at any rate, he declared, very handy for him when he became unable to do more work. No doubt this was his humour, but there was something in this talk which was more than half serious. He always liked to speak of the gloomy side of things, and I possess many letters of his which end with references to the workhouse, or to some impending, black disaster. In one he said: "I wish I could come up, but am too low in health and spirits to move at present. A cold clings about me, and the future looks dark." Again he said: "No, I shall never speak of my work. It has become a weariness and toil—nothing more." And again: "It is a bad, bad business, that of life at present." And yet once more: "It is idle to talk about occupation—by now I have entered on the last stage of life's journey." This was by no means when he had come towards the end of his life. However, the workhouse does come up, even at the end, in a letter written about two months before his death. He wrote to me: "I have been turning the pages with great pleasure, to keep my thoughts from the workhouse." Those who did not know him would not credit him with the courage of desperation which he really possessed, if they saw his letters and knew nothing more of the man.
The art of portraiture, whether in words or paint, is very difficult, and appears less easy as I attempt to draw Maitland. Nevertheless the time comes when the artist seems to see his man standing on his feet before him, put down in his main planes, though not yet, perhaps, with any subtlety. The anatomy is suggested at any rate, if there are bones in the subject or in the painter. As it seems to me, Maitland should now stand before those who have read so far with sympathy and understanding. I have not finished my drawing, but it might even now suffice as a sketch, and seem from some points of view to be not wholly inadequate. It is by no means easy to put him down in a few words, but patience and the addition of detail reach their end, it may be not without satisfaction—for "with bread and steel one gets to China." It is not possible to etch Maitland in a few lines, for as it seems to me it is the little details of his character with which I am most concerned that give him his greatest value. It is not so much the detail of his actual life, but the little things that he said, and the way he seemed to think, or even the way that he avoided thinking, which I desire to put down. And when I say those things he wished not to think of, I am referring more especially to his views of the universe, and of the world itself, those views which are a man's philosophy, and not less his philosophy when of set purpose he declines to think of them at all, for this Maitland did without any doubt. Goethe said, when he spoke, if I remember rightly, about all forms of religious and metaphysical speculation, "Much contemplation, or brooding over these things is disturbing to the spirit." Unfortunately I do not know German so I cannot find the reference to this, but Maitland, who knew the language very thoroughly and had read nearly everything of great importance in it, often quoted this passage, having naturally a great admiration for Goethe. I do not mean that he admired him merely for his position in the world of letters. What he did admire in Goethe was what he himself liked and desired so greatly. He wished for peace, for calmness of spirit. He did not like to be disturbed in any way whatsoever. He would not disturb himself. He wished people to be reasonable, and thought this was a reasonable request to make of them. I remember on one occasion when I had been listening to him declaiming about some one's peculiar lack of reasonableness, which seemed to him the one great human quality, that I said: "Maitland, what would you do if you were having trouble with a woman who was in a very great rage with you?" He replied, with an air of surprise, "Why, of course, I should reason with her." I said shortly, "Don't ever get married again! " Nevertheless he was a wonderfully patient and reasonable man himself, and truly lacked everything characteristic of the combatant. He would discuss, he would never really argue. I do not suppose that he was physically a coward, but his dread of scenes and physical violence lay very deep in his organisation. Although he used me as a model I never really drew him at length in any of my own books, but naturally he was a subject of great psychological interest to me. Pursuing my studies in him I said, one day, "Maitland, what would you do if a man disagreed with you, got outrageously and unreasonably angry, and slapped you in the face?" He replied, in his characteristically low and concentrated voice, "Do? I should look at him with the most infinite disgust, and turn away."
His horror of militarism was something almost comic, for it showed his entire incapacity for grasping the world's situation as it shows itself to any real and ruthless student of political sociology who is not bogged in the mud flats of some Utopian island. Once we were together on the Horse Guards' Parade and a company of the Guards came marching up. We stood to watch them pass, and when they had gone by he turned to me and said, "Mark you, my dear man, this,thisis the nineteenth century!" In one of his letters written to me after his second marriage he said of his eldest son: "I hope to send him abroad, to some country where there is no possibility of his having to butcher or be butchered." This, of course, was his pure reason pushed to the point where reason becomes mere folly, for such is the practical antinomy of pure reason in life. It was in this that he showed his futile idealism, which was in conflict with what may be called truly his real pessimism. That he did good work in many of his books dealing with the lower classes is quite obvious, and cannot be denied. He showed us the things that exist. It is perfectly possible, and even certainly true, that many of the most pessimistic writers are in reality optimists. They show us the grey in order that we may presently make it rose. But Maitland wrote absolutely without hope. He took his subjects as mere subjects, and putting them on the table, lectured in pathology. He made books of his dead-house experiences, and sold them, but never believed that he, or any other man, could really do good by speaking of what he had seen and dilated upon. The people as a body were vile and hopeless. He did not even inquire how they became so. He thought nothing could be done, and did not desire to do it. His future was in the past. The world's great age would never renew itself, and only he and a few others really understood the desperate state into which things had drifted. Since his death there has been some talk about his religion. I shall speak of this later, on a more fitting occasion; but, truly speaking, he had no religion. When he gave up his temporary Positivist pose, which was entirely due to his gratitude to Harold Edgeworth for helping him, he refused to think of these things again. They disturbed the spirit. If I ever endeavoured to inveigle him into a discussion or an argument upon any metaphysical subject he grew visibly uneasy. He declined to argue, or even to discuss, and though I know that in later life he admitted that even immortality was possible I defy any one to bring a tittle of evidence to show that he ever went further. This attitude to all forms of religious and metaphysical thought was very curious to me. It was, indeed, almost inexplicable, as I have an extreme pleasure in speculative inquiry of all kinds. The truth is that on this side of his nature he was absolutely wanting. Such things interested him no more than music interests a tone-deaf man who cannot distinguish the shriek of a tom-cat from the sound of a violin. If I did try to speak of such things he listened with an air of outraged and sublime patience which must have been obvious to any one but a bore. Whether his philosophy was sad or not, he would not have it disturbed.
His real interest in religion seemed to lie in his notion that it was a curious form of delusion almost ineradicable from the human mind. There is a theory, very popular among votaries of the creeds, which takes the form of denying that any one can really be an atheist. This is certainly not true, but it helps one to understand the theologic mind, which has an imperative desire to lay hold of something like an inclusive hypothesis to rest on. So far as Maitland was concerned there was no more necessity to have an hypothesis about God than there was to have one about quaternions, and quaternions certainly did not interest him. He shrugged his shoulders and put these matters aside, for in many things he had none of the weaknesses of humanity, though in others he had more than his share. In his letters to G.H. Rivers, which I have had the privilege of reading, there are a few references to Rivers' habits and powers of speculation. I think it was somewhere in 1900 or 1901 that he read "Forecasts." By this time he had a strong feeling of affection for Rivers, and a very great admiration for him. His references to him in the "Meditations" are sufficiently near the truth to corroborate this. Nevertheless his chief feeling towards Rivers and his work, beyond the mere fact that it was a joy to him that a man could make money by doing good stuff, was one of amazement and surprise that any one could be deeply interested in the future, and could give himself almost wholly or even with partial energy, to civic purposes. And so he wrote to Rivers: "I must not pretend to care very much about the future of the human race. Come what may, folly and misery are sure to be the prevalent features of life, but your ingenuity in speculation, the breadth of your views, and the vigour of your writing, make this book vastly enjoyable. The critical part of it satisfies, and often delights me. Stupidity should have a sore back for some time to come, and many a wind-bag will be uneasily aware of collapse."
It is interesting to note, now that I am speaking of his friendship for Rivers, and apropos of what I shall have to say later about his religious views, that he wrote to Rivers: "By the bye, you speak of God. Well, I understand what you mean, but the word makes me stumble rather. I have grown to shrink utterly from the use of such terms, and though I admit, perforce, a universal law, I am so estranged by its unintelligibility that not even a desire to be reverent can make those old names in any way real to me." So later he said that he was at a loss to grasp what Rivers meant when he wrote: "There stirs something within us now that can never die again." I think Maitland totally misinterpreted the passage, which was rather apropos of the awakening of the civic spirit in mankind than of anything else, but he went on to say that he put aside the vulgar interpretation of such words. However, was it Rivers' opinion that the material doom of the earth did not involve the doom of earthly life? He added that Rivers' declared belief in the coherency and purpose of things was pleasant to him, for he himself could not doubt for a moment that therewassome purpose. This is as far as he ever went. On the other hand, he did doubt whether we, in any sense of the pronoun, should ever be granted understanding of that purpose. Of course all this shows that he possessed no metaphysical endowments or apparatus. He loved knowledge pure and simple, but when it came to the exercises of the metaphysical mind he was pained and puzzled. He lacked any real education in philosophy, and did not even understand its peculiar vocabulary. However vain those of us who have gone through the metaphysical mill may think it in actual products, we are all yet aware that it helps greatly to formulate our own philosophy, or even our own want of it. For it clears the air. It cuts away all kinds of undergrowth. It at any rate shows us that there is no metaphysical way out, for the simple reason that there has never existed one metaphysician who did not destroy another. They are all mutually destructive. But Maitland had no joy in construction or destruction; and, as I have said, he barely understood the technical terms of metaphysics. There was a great difference with regard to these inquiries between him and Rivers. The difference was that Rivers enjoyed metaphysical thinking and speculation where Maitland hated it. But all the same Rivers took it up much too late in life, and about the year 1900 made wonderful discoveries which had been commonplaces to Aristotle. A thing like this would not have mattered much if he had regarded it as education. However, he regarded it as discovery, and wrote books about it which inspired debates, and apparently filled the metaphysicians with great joy. It is always a pleasure to the evil spirit that for ever lives in man to see the ablest people of the time showing that they are not equally able in some other direction than that in which they have gained distinction.
It is curious how this native dislike of Maitland to being disturbed by speculative thought comes out in a criticism he made of Thomas Hardy. He had always been one of this writer's greatest admirers, and I know he especially loved "The Woodlanders," but he wrote in a letter to Dr. Lake something very odd about "Jude the Obscure." He calls it: "a sad book! Poor Thomas is utterly on the wrong tack, and I fear he will never get back into the right one. At his age, a habit of railing at the universe is not overcome." Of course this criticism is wholly without any value as regards Hardy's work, but it is no little side light on Maitland's own peculiar habits of thought, or of persistent want of thought, on the great matters of speculation. His objection was not to anything that Hardy said, but to the fact that the latter's work, filled with what Maitland calls "railing at the universe," personally disturbed him. Anything which broke up his little semi-classic universe, the literary hut which he had built for himself as a shelter from the pitiless storm of cosmic influences, made him angry and uneasy for days and weeks. He never lived to read Hardy's "Dynasts," a book which stands almost alone in literature, and is to my mind a greater book than Goethe's "Faust," but if he had read it I doubt if he would have forgiven Thomas Hardy for disturbing him. He always wanted to be left alone. He had constructed his pattern of the universe, and any one who shook it he denounced with, "Confound the fellow! He makes me unhappy." The one book that he did read, which is in itself essentially a disturbing book to many people, and apparently read with some pleasure, was the earliest volume of Dr. Frazer's "Golden Bough"; but it is a curious thing that what interested him, and indeed actually pleased him, was Frazer's side attacks upon the dogmas of Christianity. He said: "The curious thing about Frazer's book is, that in illustrating the old religious usages connected with tree-worship and so on, he throws light upon every dogma of Christianity. This by implication; he never does it expressly. Edmund Roden has just pointed this out to the Folk-lore Society, with the odd result that Gladstone wrote at once resigning membership." This was written after Gladstone died, but it reads as if Maitland was not aware that he was dead. Odd as it may seem, it is perfectly possible that he did not know it. He cared very little for the newspapers, and sometimes did not read any for long periods. It is rather curious that when I proved to him in later years that he had once dated his letters according to the Positivist Calendar, he seemed a little disturbed and shocked. Still, it was very natural that when exposed to Positivist influences he should have become a Positivist, for among the people of that odd faith, if faith it can be called, he found both kindness and intellectual recognition. But when his mind became clearer and calmer, and something of the storm and stress had passed by, he was aware that his attitude had been somewhat pathologic, and did not like to recall it. This became very much clearer to him, and indeed to me, when another friend of ours, a learned and very odd German who lived and starved in London, went completely under in the same curious religious way. His name was Schmidt. He remained to the day of Maitland's death a very great friend of his, and I believe he possesses more letters from Henry Maitland than any man living—greatly owing to his own vast Teutonic energy and industry in writing to his friends.
But in London Schmidt came to absolute destitution. I myself got to know him through Maitland. It appeared that he owned a collie dog, which he found at last impossible to feed, even though he starved himself to do so. Maitland told me of this, and introduced me to Schmidt. On hearing his story, and seeing the dog, I went to my own people, who were then living in Clapham, and asked them if they would take the animal from Schmidt and keep it. When I saw the German again I was given the dog, together with a paper on which were written all Don's peculiar tricks, most of which had been taught to him by his master and needed the German language for their words of command. Soon after this Schmidt fell into even grimmer poverty, and was rescued from the deepest gulf by some religious body analogous in those days to the Salvation Army of the present time. Of this Maitland knew nothing, until one day going down the Strand he found his friend giving away religious pamphlets at the door of Exeter Hall. When he told me this he said he went next day to see the man in his single room lodging and found him sitting at the table with several open Bibles spread out before him. He explained that he was making a commentary on the Bible at the instigation of one of his new friends, and he added: "Here,hereis henceforth my life's work." Shortly after this, I believe through Harold Edgeworth or some one else to whom Maitland appealed, the poor German was given work in some quasi-public institution, and with better fare and more ease his brain recovered. He never mentioned religion again. It was thus that Maitland himself recovered from similar but less serious influences in somewhat similar conditions. For some weeks in 1885 I was myself exposed to such influences in Chicago, in even bitterer conditions than those from which Schmidt and Maitland had suffered, but not for one moment did I alter my opinions. As a kind of final commentary on this chapter and this side of Maitland's mind, one might quote from a letter to Rivers: "Seeing that mankind cannot have done altogether with the miserable mystery of life, undoubtedly it behoves us before all else to enlighten as we best can the lot of those for whose being we are responsible. This for the vast majority of men—a few there are, I think, who are justified in quite neglecting that view of life, and, by the bye, Marcus Aurelius was one of them. Nothing he could have done would have made Commodus other than he was—I use, of course, the everyday phrases, regardless of determinism—and then one feels pretty sure that Commodus was not his son at all. For him, life was the individual, and whether he has had any true influence or not, I hold him absolutely justified in thinking as he did." There again comes out Maitland's view, his anti-social view, the native egoism of the man, his peculiar solitude of thought.
To have seen "Shelley plain" once only is to put down a single point on clear paper. To have seen him twice gives his biographer the right to draw a line. Out of three points may come a triangle. Out of the many times in many years that I saw Maitland comes the intricate pattern of him. I would rather do a little book like "Manon Lescaut" than many biographical quartos lying as heavy on the dead as Vanbrugh's mansions. If there are warts on Maitland so there were on Cromwell. I do not invent like the old cartographers, who adorned their maps with legends saying, "Here is much gold," or "Here are found diamonds." Nor have I put any imaginary "Mountains of the Moon" into his map, or adorned vacant parts of ocean with whales or wonderful monsters. I put down nothing unseen, or most reasonably inferred. In spite of my desire, which is sincere, to say as little as possible about myself, I find I have to speak sometimes of things primarily my own. There is no doubt it did Maitland a great deal of good to have somebody to interest himself in, even if it were no one of more importance than myself. Although he was so singularly a lonely man, he could not always bury himself in the classics, or even in his work, done laboriously in eight prodigious hours. We for ever talked about what we were going to do, and there was very little that I wrote, up to the time of his leaving London permanently, which I did not discuss with him. Yet I was aware that with much I wrote he was wholly dissatisfied. I remember when I was still living in Chelsea, not in Danvers Street but in Redburn Street, where I at last attained the glory of two rooms, he came to me one Sunday in a very uneasy state of mind. He looked obviously worried and troubled, and was for a long time silent as he sat over the fire. I asked him again and again what was the matter, because, as can be easily imagined, I always had the notion that something must be the matter with him, or soon would be. In answer to my repeated importunities he said, at last: "Well, the fact of the matter is, I want to speak to you about your work." It appeared that I and my affairs were at the bottom of his discomfort. He told me that he had been thinking of my want of success, and that he had made up his mind to tell me the cause of it. He was nervous and miserable, though I begged him to speak freely, but at last got out the truth. He told me that he did not think I possessed the qualities to succeed at the business I had so rashly commenced. He declared that it was not that he had not the very highest opinion of such a book as "The Western Trail," but as regards fiction he felt I was bound to be a failure. Those who knew him can imagine what it cost him to say as much as this. I believe he would have preferred to destroy half a book and begin it again. Naturally enough what he said I found very disturbing, but I am pleased to say that I took it in very good part, and told him that I would think it over seriously. As may be imagined, I did a great deal of thinking on the subject, but the result of my cogitations amounted to this: I had started a thing and meant to go through with it at all costs. I wrote this to him later, and the little incident never made any difference whatever to our affectionate friendship. I reminded him many years after of what he had said, and he owned then that I had done something to make him revise his former opinion. When I come to speak of some of his letters to me about my later books it will be seen how generous he could be to a friend who, for some time then, had not been very enthusiastic about his own work. I have said before, and I always believed, that it was he and not myself who was at the wrong kind of task. Fiction, even as he understood it, was not for a man of his nature and faculties. He would have been in his true element as a don of a college, and much of his love of the classics was a mystery to me, as it would have been to most active men of the world, however well educated. I did understand his passion for the Greek tragedies, but he had almost more delight in the Romans; and, with the exception of Catullus and Lucretius, the Latin classics are to me without any savour. There is no doubt that in many ways I was but a barbarian to him. For one thing, at that time I was something of a fanatical imperialist. He took no more interest in the Empire, except as literary material, than he did in Nonconformist theology. Then I was certainly highly patriotic as regards England, but he was very cosmopolitan. It was no doubt a very strange thing that he should have spoken to me about my having little faculty for writing fiction when I had so often come to the same silent conclusion about himself. Naturally enough I did not dare to tell him so, for if such a pronouncement had distressed me a little it would distress him very much more. Yet I think he did sometimes understand his real limitations, especially in later years, when he wrote more criticism. The man who could say that he was prepared to spend the years from thirty-six to forty in a vigorous apprenticeship to English, was perfectly capable of continuing that apprenticeship until he died.
He took a critical and wonderful interest in the methods of all men of letters, and that particular interest with regard to Balzac, which was known to many, has sometimes been mistaken. Folks have said, and even written, that he meant to write an English "Comedie Humaine." There is, no doubt, a touch of truth in this notion, but no more than a touch. He would have liked to follow in Balzac's mighty footsteps, and do something for England which would possibly be inclusive of all social grades. At any rate he began at the bottom and worked upwards. It is quite obvious to me that what prevented him from going further in any such scheme was not actually a want of power or any failure of industry, it was a real failure of knowledge and of close contact with the classes composing the whole nation. Beyond the lower middle class his knowledge was not very deep. He was mentally an alien, and a satiric if interested intruder. He had been exiled for the unpardonable sins of his youth. It is impossible for any man of intellect not to suspect his own limitations, and I am sure he knew that he should have been a pure child of books, for as soon as he got beyond the pale of his own grim surroundings, those surroundings which had been burnt, and were still being burnt into his soul, he apparently lost interest. Though two or three of these later books have indeed much merit, such novels as "The Vortex" and "The Best of All Things" are really failures. I believe he felt it. Anthony Hope Hawkins once wrote to me apropos of something, that there were very few men writing who really knew that all real knowledge had to be "bought." Maitland had bought his knowledge of sorrow and suffering and certain surroundings at a personal price that few can pay and not be bankrupt. But while I was associating with almost every class in the world he lived truly alone. There were, indeed, long months when he actually saw no one, and there were other periods when his only friend besides myself was that philosophic German whose philosophy put its lofty tail between its legs on a prolonged starvation diet.