As one goes on talking of him and considering his nature there are times when it seems amazing that he did not commit suicide and have done with it. Certainly there were days and seasons when I thought this might be his possible end. But some men break and others bend, and in him there was undoubtedly some curious strength though it were but the Will to Live of Schopenhauer, the one philosopher he sometimes read. I myself used to think that it was perhaps his native sensuousness which kept him alive in spite of all his misery. No man ever lived who enjoyed things that were even remotely enjoyable more acutely than himself, though I think his general attitude towards life was like his attitude towards people and the world. For so many good men Jehovah would have spared the Cities of the Plains. So in a certain sense the few good folk that he perceived in any given class made him endure the others that he hated, while he painted those he loved against their dingy and dreadful background. The motto on the original title-page of "The Under World" was a quotation from a speech by Renan delivered at the Académie Française in 1889: "La peinture d'un fumier peut être justifiée pourvu qu'il y pousse une belle fleur; sans cela, le fumier n'est que repoussant." The few beautiful flowers of the world for Henry Maitland were those who hated their surroundings and desired vainly to grow out of them. Such he pitied, hopeless as he believed their position, and vain as he knew to be their aspirations. In a way all this was nothing but translated self-pity. Had he been more fortunate in his youth I do not believe he would have ever turned his attention in any way towards social affairs, in which he took no native interest. His natural sympathy was only for those whom he could imagine to be his mental fellows. Almost every sympathetic character in all his best books was for him like the starling in the cage of Sterne—the starling that cried, "I can't get out! I can't get out!" Among the subjects that he refused to speak of or to discuss was one which for a long time greatly interested me, and interests me still—I refer to Socialism. But then Socialism, after all, is nothing but a more or less definitive view of a definite organisation with perfectly recognised ends, and he saw no possibility of any organisation doing away with the things he loathed. That is to say, he was truly hopeless, most truly pessimistic. He was a sensuous and not a scientific thinker, and to get on with him for any length of time it was necessary for me to suppress three-quarters of the things I wished to speak about. He was a strange egoist, though truly the hateful world was not his own. It appeared to me that he prayed, or strove, for the power to ignore it. It is for this reason that it seems to me now that all his so-called social work and analysis were in the nature of an alientour de force. He bent his intellect in that direction, and succeeded even against his nature. He who desired to be a Bentley or a Porson wrote bitterly about the slums of Tottenham Court Road. With Porson he damned the nature of things, and wrote beautifully about them. I remember on one occasion telling him of a piece of script in the handwriting of the great surgeon, John Hunter, which ran: "Damn civilisation! It makes cats eat their kittens, sows eat their young, and women send their children out to nurse." I think that gave him more appreciation of science than anything he had ever heard. For it looked back into the past, and for Henry Maitland the past was the age of gold. In life, as he had to live it, it was impossible to ignore the horrors of the present time. He found it easier to ignore the horrors of the past, and out of ancient history he made his great romance, which, truly, he never wrote.
It is a curious thing that a man who was thus so essentially romantic should have been mistaken, not without great reason, for a realist. In one sense he was a realist, but this was the fatal result of his nature and his circumstances. Had he lived in happier surroundings, still writing fiction, I am assured it would have been romance. And yet, curiously enough, I doubt if any of his ideas concerning women were at all romantic. His disaster with his first wife was due to early and unhappily awakened sex feeling, but I think he believed that his marrying her was due to his desire to save somebody whom he considered to be naturally a beautiful character from the dunghill in which he found her. This poor girl was his firstbelle fleur. In all his relations with women it seems as if his own personal loneliness was the dominating factor. So much did he feel these things that it was rarely possible to discuss them with him. Nevertheless it was the one subject, scientifically treated, on which I could get him to listen to me. In the first five years of my literary apprenticeship I began a book, which is still unfinished, and never will be finished, called "Social Pathology." So far as it dealt with sex and sex deprivation, he was much interested in it. In all his books there is to be found the misery of the man who lives alone and yet cannot live alone. I do not think that in any book but "The Unchosen," he ever made a study of that from the woman's side. But it is curiously characteristic of his sex view that the chief feminine character of that book apparently knew not love even when she thought that she knew it, but was only aware of awakened senses.
One might have imagined, considering his early experiences, that he would have led the ordinary life of man, and associated, if only occasionally, with women of the mercenary type. This, I am wholly convinced, was a thing he never did, though I possess one poem which implies the possible occurrence of such a passing liaison. There was, however, another incident in his life which occurred not long before I went to America. He was then living in one room in the house of a journeyman bookbinder. On several occasions when I visited him there I saw his landlady, a young and not unpleasing woman, who seemed to take great interest in him, and did her very best to make him comfortable in narrow, almost impossible, surroundings. Her husband, a man a great deal older than herself, drank, and not infrequently ill-treated her. This was not wholly Maitland's story, for I saw the man myself, as well as his wife. It appears she went for sympathy to her lodger, and he told her something of his own troubles. Their common griefs threw them together. She was obviously of more than the usual intelligence of her class. It appeared that she desired to learn French, or made Maitland believe so; my own view being that she desired his company. The result of this was only natural, and soon afterwards Maitland was obliged to leave the house owing to the jealousy of her husband, who for many years had already been suspicious of her without any cause. But this affair was only passing. He took other rooms, and so far as I know never saw her again.
While I was in America he was living at 7K, and in that gloomy flat there was an affair of another order, an incident not without many parallels in the lives of poor artists and writers. It seems that a certain lady not without importance in society, the wife of a rich husband, wrote to him about one of his books, and having got into correspondence with him allowed her curiosity to overcome her discretion. She visited him very often in his chambers, and though he told me but little I gathered what the result was. Oddly enough, by a curious chain of reasoning and coincidence, I afterwards discovered this woman's name, which I shall, of course, suppress. So far as I am aware these were the only two romantic or quasi-romantic incidents in Maitland's life until towards the end of it. When I came back from America he certainly had no mistress, and beyond an occasional visit from the sons of Harold Edgeworth, he practically received no one but myself. His poverty forbade him entertaining any but one of his fellows who was as poor as he was, and the few acquaintances he had once met in better surroundings than his own gradually drifted away from him, or died as Cotter Morison died. Although he spoke so very little about these matters of personal loneliness and deprivation I was yet conscious from the general tenor of his writing and an occasional dropped word, how bitterly he felt it personally. It had rejoiced my unregenerate heart in America to learn that he was not entirely without feminine companionship at a time when the horror of his life was only partially mitigated by the preference of his mad and wretched wife for the dens and slums of the New Cut. This woman of the upper classes had come to him like a star, and had been a lamp in his darkness. I wonder if she still retains within her heart some memories of those hours.
I have not been able to discover whether it is true, as has been said, that some of Maitland's ancestors were originally German. He himself thought this was so, without having anything definite that I remember to go upon. If it were true I wonder whether it was his Teutonic ancestry which made him turn with a certain joy to the German ideal of woman, that of the haus-frau. If little or nothing were known about him, or only so much as those know who have already written of him, it might, in some ways, be possible to reconstruct him by a process of deductive analysis, by what the school logicians call theregressus a principiatis ad principia. This is always a fascinating mental exercise, and indeed I think, with a very little light on Maitland's life, it should not have been difficult for some to build up a picture not unlike the man. For instance, no one with a gleam of intelligence, whether a critic or not, could read some portions of the chapter in "Victorian Novelists" on "Women and Dickens" without coming to the inevitable conclusion that Maitland's fortune with regard to the women with whom he had been thrown in contact must have been most lamentably unfortunate. Although Dickens drew certain offensive women with almost unequalled power, he treats them so that one becomes oblivious of their very offensiveness, as Maitland points out. Maitland's own commentary on such women is ten thousand times more bitter, and it isfelt, not observed, as in Dickens' books. He calls them "these remarkable creatures," and declares they belong mostly to one rank of life, the lower middle class. "In general their circumstances are comfortable .... nothing is asked of them but a quiet and amiable discharge of their household duties; they are treated by their male kindred with great, often with extraordinary consideration. Yet their characteristic is acidity of temper and boundless licence of querulous or insulting talk. The real business of their lives is to make all about them as uncomfortable as they can. Invariably, they are unintelligent and untaught; very often they are fragrantly imbecile. Their very virtues (if such persons can be said to have any) become a scourge. In the highways and byways of life, by the fireside, and in the bed-chamber, their voices shrill upon the terrified ear." He adds that no historical investigation is needed to ascertain the truthfulness of these presentments. Indeed Maitland required no historical investigation, he had his personal experience to go upon; but this, indeed, is obvious. Nevertheless one cannot help feeling in reading this appalling indictment, that something might be said upon the other side, and that Maitland's attitude was so essentially male as to vitiate many of his conclusions.
A few pages further on in this book he says: "Another man, obtaining his release from these depths, would have turned away in loathing; Dickens found therein matter for his mirth, material for his art." But Maitland knew that Dickens had not suffered in the way he himself had done. Thus it was that he rejoiced in the punishment which Mrs. Joe Gargery received. Maitland writes: "Mrs. Joe Gargery shall be brought to quietness; but how? By a half-murderous blow on the back of her head, from which she will never recover. Dickens understood by this time that there is no other efficacious way with these ornaments of their sex."
Having spoken of Dickens it may be as well to dispose of him, with regard to Maitland, in this particular chapter. It seems to be commonly thought that Maitland wrote his book about the Victorian novelists not only with the sympathy which he expressed, but with considerable joy in the actual work. This is not true, for he regarded it essentially as a pot-boiler, and did it purely for the money. By some strange kink in his mind he chose to do it in Italy, far from any reference library. He wrote: "My little novelist book has to be written before Christmas, and to do this I must get settled at the earliest possible date in a quiet north Italian town. I think I shall choose Siena." On what principle he decided to choose a quiet north Italian town to write a book about Victorian novelists I have never been able to determine. It was certainly a very curious proceeding, especially as he had no overwhelming love of North Italy, which was for him the Italy of the Renaissance. As I have said, he actually disliked the work, and had no desire to do it, well as it was done. It is, however, curious, to me, in considering this book, to find that neither he nor any other critic of Dickens that I have ever read seems to give a satisfactory explanation of the great, and at times overwhelming, attraction that Dickens has for many. And yet on more than one occasion I discussed Dickens with him, and in a great measure he agreed with a theory I put forth with some confidence. I think it still worth considering. For me the great charm of Dickens lies not wholly in his humour or even greatly in his humour. It is not found in his characterisation, nor in his underlying philosophy of revolt, although almost every writer of consequence is a revolutionist. It results purely and simply from what the critics of the allied art of painting describe as "quality." This is a word exceedingly difficult to define. It implies more or less the characteristic way in which paint is put upon the canvas. A picture may be practically worthless from the point of view of subject or composition, it may even be comparatively poor in colouring, and yet it may have an extreme interest of surface. One finds, I think, the same thing in Dickens' writings. His page is full. It is fuller than the page of any other English writer. There are, so to speak, on any given page by any man a certain number of intellectual and emotional stimuli. Dickens' page is full of these stimuli to a most extreme degree. It is like a small mosaic, and yet clear. It has cross meanings, cross lights, reflections, suggestions. Compare a page of Dickens with a page, say, of Thackeray. Take a pencil and write down the number of mental suggestions given by a sentence of Thackeray. Take, again, a sentence of Dickens, and see how many more there are to be found. It is this tremendous and overflowing fulness which really constitutes Dickens' great and peculiar power.
But all this is anticipation. Not yet was he to write of Dickens, Thackeray, and the Brontës, for much was to befall him before he went to Italy again. He was once more alone, and I think I knew that this loneliness would not last for long. I have often regretted that I did not foresee what I might have foreseen if I had considered the man and his circumstances with the same fulness which comes to one in later years after Fate has wrought itself out. Had I known all that I might have known, or done all that I might have done, I could perhaps have saved him from something even worse than his first marriage. Yet, after all, I was a poor and busy man, and while living in Chelsea had many companions, some of them men who have now made a great name in the world of Art. The very nature of Maitland and his work, the dreadful concentration he required to do something which was, as I insist again, alien from his true nature, forbade my seeing him very often, or even often enough to gather from his reticence what was really in his mind. Had I gone to see him without any warning, it would, I knew, have utterly destroyed his whole day's work. But this solitude, this enforced and appalling loneliness, which seemed to him necessary for work if he was to live, ate into him deeply. It destroyed his nerve and what judgment he ever had which, heaven knows, was little enough. What it means to some men to live in such solitude only those who know can tell, and they never tell. To Maitland, with his sensual and sensuous nature, it was most utter damnation.
By now he had come out of the pit of his first marriage, and gradually the horrors he had passed through became dim to his eyes. They were like a badly toned photograph, and faded. I did foresee that something would happen sooner or later to alter the way in which he lived, but I know I did not foresee, and could not have foreseen or imagined what was actually coming, for no one could have prophesied it. It was absurd, impossible, monstrous, and almost bathos. And yet it fits in with the character of the man as it had been distorted by circumstance. One Sunday when I visited him he told me, with a strange mixture of abruptness and hesitation, that he had made the acquaintance of a girl in the Marylebone road. Naturally enough I thought at first that his resolution and his habits had broken down and that he had picked up some prostitute of the neighbourhood. But it turned out that the girl was "respectable." He said to me: "I could stand it no longer, so I rushed out and spoke to the very first woman I came across." It was an unhappy inspiration of the desperate, and was the first act of a prolonged drama of pain and misery. It took me some time and many questions to find out what this meant, and what it was to lead to, but presently he replied sullenly that he proposed to marry the girl if she would marry him. On hearing this, I fell into silence and we sat for a long time without speaking. Knowing him as I did, it was yet a great shock to me. For I would rather have seen him in the physical clutches of the biggest harpy in the Strand—knowing that such now could not long hold him. I had done my best, as a mere boy, to prevent him marrying his first wife, and had failed with the most disastrous results. I now determined to stop this marriage if I could. I ventured to remind him of the past, and the part I had played in it when I implored him to have no more to do with Marian Hilton long before he married her. I told him once more, trying to renew it in him, of the relief it had been when his first wife died, but nothing that I could say seemed to move, or even to offend him. His mind recognised the truth of everything, but his body meant to have its way. He was quiet, sullen, set—even when I told him that he would repent it most bitterly. The only thing I could at last get him to agree to was that he would take no irrevocable step for a week.
I asked him questions about the girl. He admitted that he did not love her in any sense of the word love. He admitted that she had no great powers of attraction, that she seemed to possess no particularly obvious intellect. She had received his advances in the street in the way that such girls, whose courtship is traditionally carried on in the open thoroughfare, do receive them. But when he asked her to visit him in his chambers she replied to that invitation with all the obvious suspicion of a lower-class girl from whom no sex secrets were hidden. From the very start the whole affair seemed hopeless, preposterous, intolerable, and I went away from him in despair. It was a strange thing that Maitland did not seem to know what love was. If I have not before this said something about his essential lack of real passion in his dealings with women it must be said now. Of course, it is quite obvious that he had a boyish kind of passion for Marian Hilton, but it was certainly not that kind of passion which mostly keeps boys innocent. Indeed those calf loves which afflict youths are at the same time a great help to them, for a boy is really as naturally coy as any maiden. If by any chance Maitland, instead of coming into the hands of a poor girl of the streets of Moorhampton, had fallen in love with some young girl of decent character and upbringing, his passions would not have been so fatally roused. I think it was probably the whole root of his disaster that this should have occurred at all. Possibly it was the horror and rage and anger connected with this first affair, combined with the fact that it became actually sensual, which prevented him having afterwards what one might without priggishness describe as a pure passion. At any rate I never saw any signs of his being capable of the overwhelming passion which might under other circumstances drive a man down to hell, or raise him to heaven. To my mind all his books betray an extreme lack of this. His characters in all their love-affairs are essentially too reasonable. A man wishes to marry a girl, not because he desires her simply and overwhelmingly, but because she is a fitting person, or the kind of woman of whom he has been able to build up certain ideas which suit his mind. In fact the love of George Hardy for Isabel in "The Exile" is somewhat typical of the whole attitude he had towards affairs of passion. Then again in "Paternoster Row" there is the suicide of Gifford which throws a very curious light on Maitland's nature. Apparently Gifford did not commit suicide because of his failure, or because he was half starving, it was because he was weakly desirous of a woman like Anne—not necessarily Anne herself. In Maitland's phrase, he desired her to complete his manhood, to my mind the most ridiculous way of putting the affair. It is in this, I think, that Maitland showed his essential lack of knowledge of the other sex. A man does not captivate women by going to them and explaining, with more or less periphrasis, that they are required to complete his manhood, that he feels a rather frustrate male individual without them. And if he has these ideas at the back of his head and goes courting, the result is hardly likely to be successful. Maitland never understood the passion in the man that sweeps a woman off her feet. One finds this lack in all his men who live celibate lives. They suffer physically, or they suffer to a certain degree from loneliness, but one never feels that only one woman could cure their pain, or alleviate their desolation. At times Maitland seemed, as it were, to be in love with the sex but not with the woman. Of course he had a bitter hatred of the general prejudices of morality, a thing which was only natural to any one who had lived his life and thought what he thought. It is a curious thing to note that his favourite poem in the whole English language was perhaps the least likely one that could be picked out. This was Browning's "Statue and the Bust," which is certainly of a teaching not Puritan in its essence. The Puritan ideal Maitland loathed with a fervour which produced the nearest I have ever seen in him to actual rage and madness. He roared against it if he did not scoff. He sometimes quoted the well-known lines from the unknown Brathwait:
"Where I saw a Puritane oneHanging of his Cat on Monday,For killing of a Mouse on Sonday."
I remember very well his taking down Browning when I was with him one afternoon at 7K. He read a great portion of "The Statue and the Bust" out aloud, and we discussed it afterwards, of course pointing out to each other with emphasis its actual teaching, its loathing of futility. It teaches that the two people who loved each other but never achieved love were two weaklings, who ought to have acted, and should not have allowed themselves to be conquered by the lordly husband. Maitland said: "Those people who buy Browning and think they understand it—oh, if they really knew what he meant they would pick him up with a pair of tongs, and take him out, and burn him in their back yards—in their back yards!" It strikes one that Maitland, in his haste, seemed to imagine that the kind of bourgeois or bourgeoise whom he imagined thus destroying poor Browning with the aid of tongs, possessed such things as back yards, and, perhaps, frequented them on Sunday afternoons. But he had lived for so many years in houses which had not a garden, or anything but a small, damp yard behind, that he began to think, possibly, that all houses were alike. I roared with laughter at his notion of what these prosperous Puritans would do. I had a picture in my mind of some well-dressed woman of the upper middle-class bringing out "The Statue and the Bust" with a pair of tongs, and burning it in some small and horrible back yard belonging to a house in the slums between Tottenham Court Road and Fitzroy Square. And yet, although he understood Browning's sermon against the passive futility of these weak and unfortunate lovers he could not, I think, have understood wholly, or in anything but a literary sense the enormous power of passion which Browning possessed. This lack in him is one of the keys to his character, and it unlocks much. When I left him after he told me about this new affair, I went back to my own rooms and sat thinking it over, wondering if it were possible even now to do anything to save him from his own nature, and the catastrophe his nature was preparing. Without having seen the girl I felt sure that it would be a catastrophe, for I knew him too well. Nevertheless on reflecting over the matter it did seem to me that there was one possible chance of saving him from himself. It was a very unlikely thing that I should succeed, but at any rate I could try.
I have said that we rarely spoke of his early life, and never of what had happened in Moorhampton. Nevertheless I was, of course, aware that it dominated the whole of his outlook and all of his thoughts in any way connected with ordinary social life, especially with regard to intercourse with those who might know something about his early career. At this time I do not think that he actually blamed himself much for what had happened. Men die many times in life and are born again, and by this time he must have looked on the errant youth who had been himself as little more than an ancestor. He himself had died and risen again, and if he was not the man he might have been, he was certainly not the man he had been. Nevertheless he was perpetually alive to what other people might possibly think of him. I believe that the real reason for his almost rigid seclusion from society was that very natural fear that some brute, and he knew only too well that there are such brutes, might suddenly and unexpectedly expose his ancient history. It is true that even in our society in England, which is not famous all the world over for tact, it was not very likely to happen. Nevertheless the bare possibility that it might occur absolutely dominated him. It requires very little sympathy or understanding of his character to see that this must have been so. No doubt it was mainly from this cause that he considered he had no right to approach women of his own class, seeing that he had declassed himself, without telling the whole truth. But this was quite impossible for him to do, and I knew it. In some cases it would have been wise, in some unwise, but Henry Maitland was unable to do such a thing. The result was this sudden revolt, and the madness which led him to speak to this girl of the Marylebone Road, whom I had not yet met but whom I pictured, not inadequately, in my mind. At the first glance it seemed that nothing could possibly be done, that the man must be left to "dree his weird," to work out his fate and accomplish his destiny. And yet I lay awake for a very long time that night thinking of the whole situation, and I at last determined to take a step on his behalf which, at any rate, had the merit of some originality and courage.
Years ago in Moorhampton, when he was a boy, before the great disaster came, Maitland had visited my uncle's house, and had obviously pleased every one he met there. He was bright, not bad looking, very cheerful and enthusiastic, and few that met him did not like him. Among those whose acquaintance he made at that house were two of my own cousins. In later years they often spoke of him to me, even although they had not seen him since he was a boy of seventeen. I now went to both of them and told them the whole affair in confidence, speaking quite openly of his character, and the impossibility he discovered within himself of living in the desolation which fate had brought upon him. They understood his character, and were acquainted with his reputation. He was a man of genius, if not a man of great genius, and occupied a certain position in literature which would one day, we all felt assured, be still a greater position. They were obviously exceedingly sorry for him, and not the less sorry when I told them of the straits in which he sometimes found himself. Nevertheless it seemed to me, as I explained to them, that if he had been lucky enough to marry some one in sympathy with him and his work, some one able to help in a little way to push him forward on the lines on which he might have attained success, there was yet great hope for him even in finance, or so I believed. Then I asked them whether it would not be possible to stop this proposed outrageous marriage, a thing which seemed to me utterly unnatural. They were, however, unable to make any suggestion, and certainly did not follow what was in my mind. Then I opened what I had to say, and asked them abruptly if it were not possible for one of them to consider whether she would marry him if the present affair could be brought decently to an end. They were both educated women, and knew at least two foreign languages. They were accustomed to books, and appreciated his work.
No doubt my proposal sounded absurd, unconventional, and perhaps not a little horrifying. Nevertheless when I have had anything to do in life I have not been accustomed to let convention stand in my way. Such marriages have been arranged and have not been unsuccessful. There was, I thought, a real possibility of such a marriage as I proposed being anything but a failure. Our conversation ended at last in both of them undertaking to consider the matter if, after meeting Maitland again, they still remained of the same mind, and if he found that such a step was possible. I have often wondered since whether any situation exactly like this ever occurred before. I own that I found it somewhat interesting, and when at last I went back to Maitland I felt entitled to tell him that he could do much better than marrying an unknown girl of the lower classes whom he had accosted in the streets in desperation. But he received what I had to say in a very curious manner. It seemed to depress him profoundly. Naturally enough, I did not tell him the names of those who were prepared to make his acquaintance, but I did tell him that I had been to a lady who had once met him and greatly admired his work, who would be ready to consider the possibility of her becoming his wife if on meeting once again they proved sympathetic. He shook his head grimly, and, after a long silence, he told me that he had not kept his word, and that he had asked Ada Brent to marry him. He had, he said, gone too far to withdraw.
There is such a thing in life as the tyranny of honour, and personally I cared very little for this point of honour when I thought of his future. It was not as if this girl's affections were in any way engaged. If they had been I would have kept silence, bitterly as I regretted the whole affair. She was curious about him, and that was all. It would do her no harm to lose him, and, indeed, as the event proved, it would have been better if she had not married at all. Therefore I begged him to shut up the flat and leave London at once. I even offered to try and find the money for him to do so. But, like all weak people, he was peculiarly obstinate, and nothing that I could urge had the least effect upon him. I have often thought it was his one great failure in rectitude which occurred at Moorhampton that made him infinitely more tenacious of doing nothing which might seem in any way dishonourable, however remotely. I did not succeed in moving him, with whatever arguments I plied him, and the only satisfaction I got out of it was the sense that he knew I was most deeply interested in him, and had done everything, even much more than might have been expected, to save him from what I thought must lead to irreparable misery. Certainly the whole incident was remarkable. There was, perhaps, a little air of curiously polite comedy about it, and yet it was the prelude to a tragedy.
It was soon after this, in fact it was on the following Sunday, that I made the acquaintance of the young woman who was to be his second wife, to bear his children, to torture him for years, to drive him almost mad, and once more make a financial slave of him. We three met in the gloomy sitting-room at 7K. My first impression of this girl was more unfavourable than I had expected. She was the daughter of a small tradesman but little removed from an artisan, and she looked it. In the marriage certificate her father is described as a carver, for what reason I am unable to determine, for I have a very distinct recollection that Maitland told me he was a bootmaker, probably even a cobbler. I disliked the young woman at first sight, and never got over my early impression. From the very beginning it seemed impossible that she could ever become in any remote degree what he might justifiably have asked for in a wife. Yet she was not wholly disagreeable in appearance. She was of medium height and somewhat dark. She had not, however, the least pretence to such beauty as one might hope to find even in a slave of the kitchen. She possessed neither face nor figure, nor a sweet voice, nor any charm—she was just a female. And this was she that the most fastidious man in many ways, that I knew, was about to marry. I went away with a sick heart, for it was nothing less than a frightful catastrophe, and I had to stand by and see it happen. He married her on March 20, 1891, and went to live near Exeter.
For many months after he left London I did not see Maitland, although we continued to correspond, somewhat irregularly. He was exceedingly reticent as to the results of his marriage, and I did not discover definitely for some time to what extent it was likely to prove a failure. Indeed, I had many things to do, and was both financially and in other matters in a parlous condition. In some ways it was a relief to me that he should be living in the country, as I always felt, rightly or wrongly, a certain feeling of responsibility with regard to him when he was close at hand. Marriage always takes one's friends away from one, and for a time he was taken from me. But as I am not anxious to write in great detail about the more sordid facts of his life, especially when they do not throw light on his character, I am not disturbed at knowing little of the earlier days of his second marriage. The results are sufficient, and they will presently appear. For Maitland remained Maitland, and his character did not alter now. So I may return for a little while to matters more connected with his literary life.
I have, I think, before this endeavoured to describe or suggest his personal appearance, but whenever I think of him I regret deeply that no painter ever made an adequate portrait of the man. He was especially interesting-looking, and most obviously lovable and sympathetic when any of his feelings were roused. His grey eyes were very bright and intelligent, his features finely cut, and at times he was almost beautiful; although his skin was not always in such a good condition as it should have been, and he was always very badly freckled. For those who have never seen him a photograph published in a dull literary journal, which is now defunct, is certainly the most adequate and satisfying presentment of him in existence. On a close inspection of this photograph it will be observed that he brushed his hair straight backward from his forehead without any parting. He had a curious way of dressing his hair, about which he was very particular. It was very fine hair of a brown colour, perhaps of a rather mousy tint, and it was never cut except at the ends at the nape of his neck. Whenever he washed his face he used to fasten this hair back with an elastic band which he always carried in his waistcoat pocket. On some occasions, when I have stayed the night at 7K and seen him at his toilette, this elastic band gave him a very odd appearance, almost as if he wore, for the time being, a very odd halo; but as his hair was so long in front it would otherwise have fallen into the basin of water. He told me that once in Germany a waiter entered the room while he was washing his face, and on perceiving this peculiar head-dress betrayed signs of mixed amusement and alarm. As Maitland said, "I believe he thought I was mad."
His forehead was high, his head exceedingly well shaped but not remarkably large. He always wore a moustache. Considering his very sedentary life his natural physique was extremely good, and he was capable of walking great distances if he were put to it and was in condition. Seen nude, he had the figure of a possible athlete. I used to tell him that he might be an exceedingly strong man if he cared to take the trouble to become one, but his belief, which is to be found expressed in one passage of "The Meditations," was that no one in our times could be at once intellectually and physically at his best. Indeed, he had in a way a peculiar contempt for mere strength, and I do not doubt that much of his later bodily weakness and illness might have been avoided if he had thought more of exercise and open air.
In no way was he excessive, in spite of his jocular pretence of a monstrous addiction to "strong waters" as he always called them. He did love wine, as I have written, but he loved it with discretion, although not with real knowledge. It was a case of passion and faith with him. I could imagine that in some previous incarnation—were there such things as reincarnations—he must have been an Italian writer of the South he loved so well. A little while ago I spoke of the strange absence of colour in his rooms. On rereading "The Meditations," I find some kind of an explanation, or what he considered an explanation, of this fact, to which I myself drew his attention. He seemed to imagine that his early acquaintance with his father's engravings inspired him with a peculiar love of black and white. More probably the actual truth is that his father's possible love of colour had never been developed any more than his son's.
His fantastic attempts at times to make one believe that he was a great drinker, when a bottle of poor and common wine served him and me for a dinner and made us joyous, were no more true than that he was a great smoker. He had a prodigious big pot of tobacco in his rooms in the early days, a pot containing some form of mild returns which to my barbaric taste suggested nothing so much as hay that had been stored next some mild tobacco. It was one of my grievances against him that when I visited his rooms hard up for tobacco, a thing which frequently occurred in those days, I was almost unable to use his. But it was always a form of joke with him to pretend that his habits were monstrously excessive. As I have said, one of his commonest forms of humour was exaggeration. Many people misunderstood that his very expressions of despair were all touched with a grim humour. Nevertheless he and his rooms were grim enough. On his shelves there was a French book, the title of which I forget, dealing without any reticence with the lives of the band of young French writers under the Second Empire, who perished miserably in the conditions to which they were exposed. This book is a series of short and bitter biographies, ending for the most part with, "mourut à l'hôpital," or "brûlait la cervelle." We were by no means for ever cheerful in these times.
I do not think I have said very much, except by bitter implication, of his financial position, or what he earned. But his finances were a part of his general life's tragedy. There is a passage somewhere at the end of a chapter in "In the Morning" which says: "Put money in thy purse; and again, put money in thy purse; for, as the world is ordered, to lack current coin is to lack the privileges of humanity, and indigence is the death of the soul." I have been speaking wholly in vain if it is not understood that he was a man extremely difficult to influence, even for his own good. This was because he was weak, and his weakness came out with most exceeding force in all his dealings with publishers and editors. For the most part he was atrociously paid, but the fact remains that he was paid, and his perpetual fear was that his books would presently be refused, and that he would get no one to take them if he remonstrated with those who were his taskmasters. In such an event he gloomily anticipated, not so much the workhouse, but once more a cellar off the Tottenham Court Road, or some low, poverty-stricken post as a private tutor or the usher of a poor school. Sometimes when we were together he used to talk with a certain pathetic jocosity, or even jealousy, of Coleridge's luck in having discovered his amiable patron, Gillman. He did not imagine that nowadays any Gillmans were to be found, nor do I think that any Gillman would have found Maitland possible. One night after we had been talking about Coleridge and Gillman he sat down and wrote a set of poor enough verses, which are not without humour, and certainly highly characteristic, that ran as follows:
THE HUMBLE ASPIRATION OF H.M., NOVELIST
"Hoc erat in votis."
Oh could I encounter a Gillman,Who would board me and lodge me for aye,With what intellectual skill, man,My life should be frittered away!
What visions of study methodicMy leisurely hours would beguile!—I would potter with details prosodic,I would ponder perfections of style.
I would joke in a vein pessimisticAt all the disasters of earth;I would trifle with schemes socialistic,And turn over matters for mirth.
From the quiddities quaint of QuintilianI would flit to the latest critiques;—I would visit the London Pavilion,And magnify lion-comiques.
With the grim ghastly gaze of a GorgonI would cut Hendersonian bores—I would follow the ambulant organThat jingles at publicans' doors.
In the odorous alleys of WappingI would saunter on evenings serene;When the dews of the Sabbath were droppingYou would find me on Clerkenwell Green.
At the Hall Scientific of BradlaughI would revel in atheist rant,Or enjoy an attack on some bad lawBy the notable Mrs. Besant.
I would never omit an orationOf Cunninghame Graham or Burns;And the Army miscalled of SalvationShould furnish me frolic by turns.
Perchance I would muse o'er a mystic;Perchance I would booze at a bar;And when in the mind journalisticI would read the "Pall Mall" and the "Star."
Never more would I toil with my quill, man,Or plead for the publishers' pay.—Oh where and O where is the Gillman,Who will lodge me and board me for aye?
Now as to his actual earnings. His first book "Children of the Dawn," was published by Hamerton's. So far as I am aware it brought him in nothing. The book, naturally enough, was a dead failure; nobody perceived its promise, and it never sold. I do not think he received a penny on account for it. He got little more for "Outside the Pale," which was published in 1884, the year I went to America, and was dedicated to me, as the initials J.C.H. on the dedication page of the first edition testify. At that time I still retained in signature my second initial. This book was published by Andrews and Company, and it was through it that he first made acquaintance in a business way with George Meredith, then quite a poor man, and working for the firm as a reader just before he went to Chapman and Hall.
In "Outside the Pale," as a manuscript there was a chapter, or part of a chapter, of a curiously romantic kind. It was some such theme as that which I myself treated in a romantic story called "The Purification." Hilda Moon, the idealised heroine of the streets, washed herself pure of her sins in the sea at midnight, if I remember the incident rightly, for I never actually read it. It appears that George Meredith was much taken with the book, but found his sense of fitness outraged by the introduction of this highly romantic incident. It seemed out of tone with the remainder of the book and the way in which it was written. He begged Maitland to eliminate it. Now as a rule Maitland, being a young writer, naturally objected to altering anything, but he knew that Meredith was right. At any rate, even at that period, the older man had had such an enormous experience that Maitland accepted his opinion and acted upon it. He told me that George Meredith came downstairs with him into the street, and standing on the doorstep once more reiterated his advice as to this particular passage. He said in the peculiar way so characteristic of him, "My dear sir, I beg you to believe, it made meshiver!" That passage is missing in the published book.
"Outside the Pale" had a kind ofsuccès d'estime. Certain people read it, and certain people liked it. It was something almost fresh in English. Nevertheless he made little or nothing out of it. Few, indeed, were those who made money out of Andrews and Company at that time. The business was run by Harry Andrews, known in the trade as "the liar," a man who notoriously never spoke the truth if a lie would bring him in a penny. I afterwards published a book with the same firm, and had to deal with the same man. After "Outside the Pale" came "Isabel," which, as I have said, was obviously written under the influence of Tourgeniev. So far as I am aware this influence has not been noted, even by so acute a critic as Thomas Sackville, but I myself was at that time a great reader of Tourgeniev, partly owing to Maitland's recommendation and insistence upon the man, and I recognised his influence at once. Maitland openly acknowledged it, a thing no writer does without very strong reason. This book, of course, was not a success. That, I believe, was the last work he published with Andrews and Company. So far as he was concerned the firm had not been a success. He was still compelled to earn his bread and cheese and rent by teaching.
Although Tourgeniev was the earliest great influence upon Maitland, his influence was very largely that of form. So far as feeling was concerned his god for many years was undoubtedly Dostoievsky. That Russian writer himself suffered and had been down into the depths like the modern writer Gorki, which was what appealed to Maitland. Indeed he says somewhere: "Dostoievsky, a poor and suffering man, gives us with immense power his own view of penury and wretchedness." It was Maitland who first introduced "Crime and Punishment," to me. There is no doubt, when one comes to think of it seriously, a certain likeness between the modern Russian school and Maitland's work, and that likeness is perhaps founded on something deeper than mere community of subject which shows itself here and there. Perhaps there is something essentially Slav-like in Maitland's attitude to life. He was a dreamer, rebellious and unable. If, indeed, his ancestry was partly Teutonic, he might have been originally as much Slav as German.
In 1886, while I was still in America, he began "The Mob." At that time, just when he had almost done the first two volumes, there occurred the Trafalgar Square Riots, in which John Burns, Hyndman, and Henry Hyde Champion, were concerned. Fool as Maitland was about his own affairs, he yet saw that it was a wonderful coincidence from his point of view that he should have been dealing with labour matters and the nature of the mob at this juncture. Some rare inspiration or suggestion led him to rush down with the first two volumes to Messrs. Miller and Company, where they were seen by John Glass, who said to him, "Give us the rest at once and we will begin printing it now." He went home and wrote the third volume in a fortnight while the other two volumes were in the press. This book was published anonymously, as it was thought, naturally enough, that this would give it a greater chance of success. It might reasonably be attributed to any one, and Maitland's name at that time, or indeed at any time afterwards, was very little help towards financial success. Now I am of opinion, speaking from memory, that this book was bought out and out by the publishing firm for fifty pounds. To a young writer who had never made so much fifty pounds was a large sum. In Maitland's exaggerated parlance it was "gross and riotous wealth."
Having succeeded in getting hold of a good firm of notable and well-known publishers, he dreaded leaving them, even though he very soon discovered that fifty pounds for a long three-volume novel was most miserable pay. That he wrote books rapidly at times was no guarantee that he would always write them as rapidly. For once in his life he had written a whole volume in a fortnight, but it might just as well take him many months. There are, indeed, very few of his books of which most of the first volume was not destroyed, rewritten, and sometimes destroyed and again rewritten. Nevertheless he discovered a tremendous reluctance to ask for better terms. It was not only his fear of returning to the old irremediable poverty which made him dread leaving a firm who were not all they might have been, but he was cursed with a most unnecessary tenderness for them. He actually dreaded hurting the feelings of a publishing firm which had naturally all the qualities and defects of a corporation. The reason that he did at last leave this particular firm was rather curious. It shows that what many might think a mere coincidence may prejudice a fair man's mind.
As I have said, he had been in the habit of selling his books outright for fifty pounds. After this had gone on for many books I suggested to him, as everything he wrote went into several editions under the skilful management of the firm, that it might be as well to sell them the first edition only and ask for a royalty on the succeeding ones. Now this would never have occurred to him, and he owned that it was a good idea. So when "The Flower," was finished he sold the first edition for forty pounds, and arranged for a percentage on succeeding editions. He went on with the next book at once. Now as it happened, curiously enough, there was no second edition of "The Flower" called for, and this so disheartened poor Maitland that he sold his two next novels outright for the usual sum.
One day when I was with him he spoke of the bad luck of "The Flower," which seemed to him almost inexplicable. It was so very unlucky that it had not done well, for the loss of the extra ten pounds was not easy for him to get over in his perpetual and grinding poverty. When we had discussed the matter he determined to ask the firm what they would give him for all further rights in the book. He did this, and they were kind enough to pay the sum of ten pounds for them, making up the old price of fifty pounds for the whole book. Then, by one of those chances which only business men are capable of thoroughly appreciating, a demand suddenly sprang up for the story and the publishers were enabled to bring out a new edition at once. Some time later it went into a third edition, and, I believe, even into a fourth. Now it will hardly be credited that Maitland was very sore about this, for he was usually a very just man; and when I suggested, for the hundredth time but now at the psychological moment, that the firm of Bent and Butler who were then publishing for me, might give him very good terms, he actually had the courage to leave his own publishers, and never went back to them.
I have insisted time and again upon Maitland's weakness and his inability to move. Nothing, I believe, but a sense of rankling injustice would have made him move. I had been trying for three years to get him to go to my publishing friends, and I have heard his conduct in the matter described as obstinacy. But to speak truly it was sheer weakness and nervousness. The older firm at any rate gave him fifty pounds for a book, and they were wealthy people, likely to last. My own friends were new men, and although they gave him a hundred pounds on account of increasing royalties, it was conceivably possible that they might be a failure and presently go out of business. His notion was that the firm he had left would then refuse to have anything more to do with him, that he would get no other firm to publish his work, and that he would be thrown back into the ditch from which he had crawled with so much difficulty. It is an odd comment on himself where he makes one man say to another in "Paternoster Row": "You are the kind of man who is roused by necessity. I am overcome by it. My nature is feeble and luxurious. I never in my life encountered and overcame a practical difficulty." He spoke afterwards somewhat too bitterly of his earlier publishing experiences, and was never tired of quoting Mrs. Gaskell to show how Charlotte Brontë had fared.
In "The Meditations" he says: "Think of that grey, pinched life, the latter years of which would have been so brightened had Charlotte Brontë received but, let us say, one-third of what, in the same space of time, the publisher gained by her books. I know all about this; alas! no man better." There was no subject on which he was more bitterly vocal. Mr. Jones-Brown, the senior partner of Messrs. Miller and Company, I knew myself, for after I wrote "The Wake of the Sun," it was read by Glass and sold to them for fifty pounds. When this bargain was finally struck Mr. Jones-Brown said to me: "Now, Mr. H., as the business is all done, would you mind telling me quite frankly to what extent this book of yours is true?" I replied: "It is as true in every detail as it can possibly be." "Then you mean to say," he asked, "that you actually did starve as you relate?" I said: "Certainly I did, and I might have made it a deal blacker if I had chosen." He fell into a momentary silent reverie and shaking his head, murmured: "Ah, hunger is a dreadful thing;—I once went without dinner myself!" This was a favourite story of Henry Maitland's. It was so characteristic of the class he chiefly loathed. Those who have gathered by now what his satiric and ironic tendencies were, can imagine his bitter, and at the same time uproariously jocular comments on such a statement. For he was the man who had stood cursing outside a cookshop without even a penny to satisfy his raging hunger, as he truly relates under cover of "The Meditations."
It is an odd, and perhaps even remarkable fact, that the man who had suffered in this way, and was so wonderfully conscious of the absurdities and monstrosities of our present social system, working by the pressure of mere economics, should have regarded all kinds of reform not merely without hope, but with an actual terror. He had once, as he owned, been touched by Socialism, probably of a purely academic kind; and yet, when he was afterwards withdrawn from such stimuli as had influenced him to think for once in terms of sociology, he went back to his more natural depairing conservative frame of mind. He lived in the past, and was conscious every day that something in the past that he loved was dying and must vanish. No form of future civilisation, whatever it might be, which was gained by means implying the destruction of what he chiefly loved, could ever appeal to him. He was not even able to believe that the gross and partial education of the populace was better than no education at all, in that it must some day inevitably lead to better education and a finer type of society. It was for that reason that he was a Conservative. But he was the kind of Conservative who would now be repudiated by those who call themselves such, except perhaps in some belated and befogged country house.
A non-combative Tory seems a contradiction in words, but Maitland's loathing of disturbance in any form, or of any solution of any question by means other than the criticism of the Pure Reason, was most extreme. As for his feelings towards the Empire and all that it implied, that is best put in a few words he wrote to me about my novel "In the Sun": "Yes, this is good, but you know that I loathe the Empire, and that India and Africa are abomination to me." To anticipate as I tell his story I may quote again on the same point from a letter written to me in later years when he was in Paris: "I am very seriously thinking of trying to send my boy to some part of the world where there is at least a chance of his growing up an honest farmer without obvious risk of his having to face the slavery of military service. I would greatly rather never see him again than foresee his marching in ranks; butchering, or to be butchered."
This implies, of course, as I have said before, that he failed for ever to grasp the world as it was. He clung passionately and with revolt to his own ideas of what it ought to be, and protested with a curious feeble violence against the actual world as he would not see it. It is a wonder that he did any work at all. If he had had fifty pounds a year of his own he would have retreated into a cottage and asphyxiated himself with books.
I have often thought that the most painful thing in all his work was what he insisted on so often in "Paternoster Row" with regard to the poor novelist there depicted. The man was always destroying commenced work. Once he speaks about "writing a page or two of manuscript daily, with several holocausts to retard him." Within my certain knowledge this happened scores of times to Maitland. He destroyed a quarter of a volume, half a volume, three quarters of a volume, a whole volume, and even more, time and time again. He did this, to my mind, because he fancied nervously that he must write, that he had to write, and began without adequate preparation. It became absolutely tragic, for he commenced work knowing that he would destroy it, and knowing the pain such destruction would cost him, when a little rest might have enabled him to begin cheerfully with a fresh mind. I used to suggest this to him, but it was entirely useless. He would begin, and destroy, and begin again, and then only partially satisfy himself at last when he was in a state of financial desperation, with the ditch or the workhouse in front of him.
In this he never seemed to learn by experience. It was a curious futility, which was all the odder because he was so peculiarly conscious of a certain kind of futility exhibited by our friend Schmidt. He used to write to Maitland at least a dozen times a year from Potsdam. These letters were all almost invariably read to me. They afforded Maitland extraordinary amusement and real pleasure, and yet great pain. Schmidt used to begin the letter with something like this: "I have been spending the last month or two in deep meditation on the work which it lies in my power to do. I have now discovered that I was not meant to write fiction. I am therefore putting it resolutely aside, and am turning to history, to which I shall henceforward devote my life." About two months later Maitland would read me a portion of a letter which began: "I have been much troubled these last two months, and have been considering my own position and my own endowments with the greatest interest. I find that I have been mistaken in thinking that I had any powers which would enable me to write history in a satisfactory manner. I see that I am essentially a philosopher. Henceforth I shall devote myself to philosophy." Again, a month or two after, there would come a letter from him, making another statement as if he had never made one before: "I am glad to say that I have at last discovered my own line. After much thought I am putting aside philosophy. Henceforward I devote myself to fiction." This kind of thing occurred not once but twenty or thirty times, and the German for ever wrote as if he had never written anything before with regard to his own powers and capabilities. One is reminded forcibly of a similar case in England, that of J.K. Stephen.
As I have been speaking of "Paternoster Row," it is very interesting to observe that Maitland was frequently writing most directly of himself in that book. It is curious that in this, one of his most successful novels, he should have recognised his own real limitations. He says that "no native impulse had directed him to novel-writing. His intellectual temper was that of the student, the scholar, but strongly blended with a love of independence which had always made him think with detestation of a teacher's life." He goes on to speak of the stories which his hero wrote, "scraps of immature psychology, the last thing a magazine would accept from an unknown man." It may be that he was thinking here of some of his own short stories, for which I was truly responsible. Year after year I suggested that he should do some, as they were, on the whole, the easiest way of making a little money. Naturally I had amazing trouble with him because it was a new line, but I returned to the charge in season and out of season, every Sunday and every week-day that I saw him, and every time I wrote. We were both perfectly conscious that he had not the art of writing dramatic short stories which were essentially popular. There is no doubt that he did not possess this faculty. When one goes through his shorter work one discovers few indeed which are stories or properly related to theconte. They are, indeed, often scraps of psychology, sometimes perhaps a little crude, but the crudeness is mostly in the construction. They are in fact rather possible passages from a book than short stories. Nevertheless he did fairly well with these when he worked with an agent, which he did finally and at last on continued pressure from me. I notice, however, that in his published volumes of short stories there are several missing which I should like to see again. I do not know whether they are good, but two or three that I remember vaguely were published, I believe, in the old "Temple Bar." One was a story about a donkey, which I entirely forget, and another was called "Mr. Why." It was about a poor man, not wholly sane, who lived in one room and left all that that room contained to some one else upon his death. On casual search it seemed that the room contained nothing, but the heir or heiress discovered at last on the top of an old cupboard Why's name written large in piled half-crowns.
It may have been noticed by some that he spoke in the little "Gillman" set of verses which I have quoted, of "Hendersonian bores." This perhaps requires comment. For one who loved his Rabelais and the free-spoken classics of our own tongue, Maitland had an extreme purity of thought and speech, a thing which one might not, in some ways, have looked for. No one, I think, would have dared to tell him a gross story, which did not possess remarkable wit or literary merit, more than once. His reception of such tales was never cordial, and I remember his peculiar and astounding indignation at one incident. Somehow or another he had become acquainted with an East End clergyman named Henderson. This Henderson had, I believe, read "The Under World," or one of the books dealing with the kind of parishioner that he was acquainted with, and had written to Maitland. In a way they became friends, or at any rate acquaintances, for the clergyman too was a peculiarly lonely man. He occasionally came to 7K, and I myself met him there. He was a man wholly misplaced, in fact he was an absolute atheist. Still, he had a cure of souls somewhere the other side of the Tower, and laboured, as I understood, not unfaithfully. He frequently discussed his mental point of view with Maitland and often used to write to him. By some native kink in his mind he used to put into these letters indecent words. I suppose he thought it was a mere outspoken literary habit. As a matter of fact this enraged Maitland so furiously that he brought the letters to me, and showing them demanded my opinion as to what he should do. He said: "This kind of conduct is outrageous! What am I to do about it?" Now, it never occurred to Maitland in a matter like this, or indeed in any matter, to be absolutely outspoken and straightforward. He was always so afraid of hurting people's feelings. I said: "It is perfectly obvious what to do. My good man, if you don't like it, write and tell him that you don't." This was to him a perfectly impossible solution of a very great difficulty. How it was solved I do not exactly remember, but I do know that we afterwards saw very little of Mr. Henderson, who is embalmed, like a poor fly, in the "Gillman" poem.
It was characteristic, and one of the causes of his continued disastrous troubles, that Maitland was incapable of being abruptly or strenuously straightforward. A direct "No," or "This shall not be done," seemed to him, no doubt, to invite argument and struggle, the one thing he invariably procured for himself by invariably avoiding it.
"Paternoster Row," was written, if I remember rightly, partly in 1890, and finished in 1891, in which year it was published. It is an odd thing to think of that he was married to his second wife in March 1891, shortly before this book came out. In the third volume there is practically a strange and bitter, and very remarkable, forecast of the result of that marriage, showing that whilst Maitland's instincts and impulses ran away with him, his intellect was yet clear and cold. It is the passage where the hero suggests that he should have married some simple, kind-hearted work-girl. He says, "We should have lived in a couple of poor rooms somewhere, and—we should have loved each other." Whereupon Gifford—here Maitland's intellect—exclaims upon him for a shameless idealist, and sketches, most truly the likely issue of such a marriage, given Maitland or Reardon. He says: "To begin with, the girl would have married you in firm persuasion that you were a 'gentleman' in temporary difficulties, and that before long you would have plenty of money to dispose of. Disappointed in this hope, she would have grown sharp-tempered, querulous, selfish. All your endeavours to make her understand you would only have resulted in widening the impassable gulf. She would have misconstrued your every sentence, found food for suspicion in every harmless joke, tormented you with the vulgarest forms of jealousy. The effect upon your nature would have been degrading." Never was anything more true.
Whatever kind of disaster his marriage was to be for Maitland, there is no doubt that it was for me also something in the nature of a catastrophe. There are marriages and marriages. By some of them a man's friend gains, and by others he loses, and they are the more frequent, for it is one of the curiosities of human life that a man rarely finds his friend's wife sympathetic. As it was, I knew that in a sense I had now lost Henry Maitland, or had partially lost him, to say the least of it. Unfair as it was to the woman, I felt very bitter against her, and he knew well what I felt. Thinking of her as I did, anything like free human intercourse with his new household would be impossible, unless, indeed, the affair turned out other than I expected. And then he had left London and gone to his beloved Devonshire. How much he loved it those who have read "The Meditations" can tell, for all that is said there about that county was very sincere, as I can vouch for. Born himself in a grim part of Yorkshire, and brought up in Mirefields and Moorhampton, that rainy and gloomy city of the north, he loved the sweet southern county. And yet it is curious to recognise what a strange passion was his for London. He had something of the same passion for it as Johnson had, although the centre of London for him was not Fleet Street but the British Museum and its great library. He wrote once to his doctor friend: "I dare not settle far from London, as it means ill-health to me to be out of reach of the literary 'world'—a small world enough, truly." But, of course, it was most extraordinarily his world. He was a natural bookworm compelled to spin fiction. And yet he did love the country, though he now found no peace there. With his wife peace was impossible, and this I soon learnt from little things that he wrote to me, though he was for the first few months of his marriage exceedingly delicate on this subject, as if he were willing to give her every possible chance. I was only down in Devonshire once while he was there with his wife. I went a little trip in a steamship to Dartmouth, entering its narrow and somewhat hazardous harbour in the middle of the great blizzard which that year overwhelmed the south of England, and especially the south of Devon, in the heaviest snow drifts. When I did at last get away from Dartmouth, I found things obviously not all they should be, though very little was said about it between us. I remember we went out for a walk together, going through paths cut in snow drifts twelve or even fifteen feet in depth. Though such things had been a common part of some of my own experiences they were wonderfully new to Maitland, and made him for a time curiously exhilarated. I did not stay long in Devon, nor, as a matter of fact, did he. For though he had gone there meaning to settle, he found the lack of the British Museum and his literary world too much for him, and besides that his wife, a girl of the London streets and squares, loathed the country, and whined in her characteristic manner about its infinite dulness. Thus it was that he soon left the west and took a small house in Ewell, about which he wrote me constant jeremiads.
He believed, with no rare ignorance, as those who are acquainted with the methods of the old cathedral builders will know, that all honest work had been done of old, that all old builders were honourable men, and that modern work was essentially unsound. He had never learned that the first question the instructed ask the attendant verger on entering a cathedral is: "When did the tower fall down?" It rarely happens that one is not instantly given a date, not always very long after that particular tower was completed. I remember that it annoyed him very much when I proved to him by documentary evidence that a great portion of the work in Peterborough Cathedral was of the most shocking and scandalous description. Nevertheless these facts do not excuse the modern jerry-builder, and the condition of his house was one, though only one, of the perpetual annoyances he had to encounter.
But, after all, though pipes break and the roof leaks, that is nothing if peace dwells in a house. There could be no peace in Maitland's house, for his wife had neither peace nor any understanding. Naturally enough she was an uneducated woman. She had read nothing but what such people read. It is true she did not speak badly. For some reason which I cannot understand she was not wholly without aspirates. Nevertheless many of her locutions were vulgar, and she had no natural refinement. This, I am sure, would have mattered little, and perhaps nothing, if she had been a simple housewife, some actual creature of the kitchen like Rousseau's Thérèse. As I have said, I think that Maitland was really incapable of a great passion, and I am sure that he would have put up with the merest haus-frau, if she had known her work and possessed her patient soul in quiet without any lamentations. If there was any lamenting to be done Maitland himself might have done it in choice terms not without humour. And indeed he did lament, and not without cause. On my first visit to Ewell after his return from Devon I again met Mrs. Maitland. She made me exceedingly uneasy, both personally, as I had no sympathy for her, and also out of fear for his future. It did not take me long to discover that they were then living on the verge of a daily quarrel, that a dispute was for ever imminent, and that she frequently broke out into actual violence and the smashing of crockery. While I was with them she perpetually made whining and complaining remarks to me about him in his very presence. She said: "Henry does not like the way I do this, or the way I say that." She asked thus for my sympathy, casting bitter looks at her husband. On one occasion she even abused him to my face, and afterwards I heard her anger in the passage outside, so that I actually hated her and found it very hard to be civil.
By this time I had established a habit of never spending any time in the company of folks who neither pleased nor interested me. I commend this custom to any one who has any work to do in the world. Thus my forthcoming refusal to see any more of her was anticipated by Maitland, who had a powerful intuition of the feelings I entertained for his wife. In fact, things soon became so bad that he found it necessary to speak to me on the subject, as it was soon nearly impossible for any one to enter his house for fear of an exhibition of rage, or even of possible incivility to the guest himself. As he said, she developed the temper of a devil, and began to make his life not less wretched, though it was in another way, than the poor creature had done who was now in her grave. Naturally, however, as we had been together so much, I could not and would not give up seeing him. But we had to meet at the station, and going to the hotel would sit in the smoking-room to have our talk. These talks were now not wholly of books or of our work, but often of his miseries. One day when I found him especially depressed he complained that it was almost impossible for him to get sufficient peace to do any of his work. On hearing this the notion came to me that, though I had been unable to prevent him marrying this woman, I might at any rate make the suggestion that he should take his courage in both his hands and leave her. But I was in no hurry to put this into his head so long as there seemed any possibility of some kind of peace being established. However, she grew worse daily, or so I heard, and at last I spoke.
He answered my proposal in accents of despair, and I found that he was now expecting within a few months his first child's birth. Under many conditions this might have been a joy to him, but now it was no joy. And yet there was, he said, some possibility that after this event things might improve. I recognised such a possibility without much hope of its ever becoming a reality. Indeed it was a vain hope. It is true enough that for a time, the month or so while she was still weak after childbirth, she was unable to be actively offensive; but, honestly, I think the only time he had any peace was before she was able to get up and move about the house. During the last weeks of her convalescence she vented her temper and exercised her uncivil tongue upon the nurses, more than one of whom left the house, finding it impossible to stay with her. However he was at any rate more or less at peace in his own writing room during this period. When she again became well I gathered the real state of the case from him both from letters and conversations, and I saw that eventually he would and must leave her. Knowing him as I did, I was aware that there would be infinite trouble, pain, and worry before this was accomplished, and yet the symptoms of the whole situation pointed out the inevitable end. I had not the slightest remorse in doing my best to bring this about, but in those days I had trouble enough of my own upon my shoulders, and found it impossible to see him so often as I wished; especially as a visit from me, or from anybody else, always meant the loss of a day's work to him. Yet I know that he bore ten thousand times more than I myself would have borne in similar circumstances, and I shall give a wrong impression of him if any one thinks that most of his complaints and confessions were not dragged out of him by me. He did not always complain readily, but one saw the trouble in his eyes. Yet now it became evident that he would and must revolt at last. It grew so clear at last, that I wanted him to do it at once and save himself years of misery, but to act like that, not wholly out of pressing and urgent necessity but out of wisdom and foresight, was wholly beyond Henry Maitland.
It was in such conditions that the child was born and spent the first months of its life. Those who have read his books, and have seen the painful paternal interest he has more than once depicted, will understand how bitterly he felt that his child, the human being for whose existence he was responsible, should be brought up in such conditions by a mother whose temper and conduct suggested almost actual madness. He wrote to me: "My dire need at present is for a holiday. It is five years since I had a real rest from writing, and I begin to feel worn out. It is not only the fatigue of inventing and writing; at the same time I keep house and bring up the boy, and the strain, I can assure you, is rather severe. What I am now trying to do is to accumulate money enough to allow of my resting, at all events from this ceaseless production, for half a year or so. It profits me nothing to feel that there is a market for my work, if the work itself tells so severely upon me. Before long I shall really be unable to write at all. I am trying to get a few short stories done, but the effort is fearful. The worst of it is, I cannot get away by myself. It makes me very uncomfortable to leave the house, even for a day. I foresee that until the boy is several years older there will be no possibility of freedom for me. Of one thing I have very seriously thought, and that is whether it would be possible to give up housekeeping altogether, and settle as boarders in some family on the Continent. The servant question is awful, and this might be an escape from it, but of course there are objections. I might find all my difficulties doubled."