Now he and Thérèse lived together with Madame Espinel. The old lady, a very admirable and delicate creature of an aristocratic type, was no longer young, and was typically French. She was in a poor state of health, and lived, like Cornaro, on next to nothing. Her views on food were what Maitland would have described as highly exiguous. She stood bravely by the French breakfast, a thing Maitland could endure with comfort for no more than a week or two at a time. Her notions as to the midday meal and dinner were not characterised by that early English abundance which he so ardently desired. After a long period of subdued friction on the subject it appears that his endurance of what he called prolonged starvation actually broke down. He demanded something for breakfast, something fat, something in the nature of bacon. How this was procured I do not know; I presume that bacon can be bought in Paris, though I do not remember having ever seen it there; perhaps it was imported from England for his especial benefit. However pleasing for the moment the result may have been to him from the gastronomic point of view, it led Madame Espinel to make as he alleged, uncalled-for and bitter remarks upon the English grossness of his tastes. As he was certainly run down and much underfed, his nerves were starved too, and he got into one of his sudden rages and practically ran away from France. I hinted, or said, not long ago that he was in a way an intellectual coward because he would never entertain any question as to the nature of the universe, or of our human existence in it. Things were to be taken as they stood, and not examined, for fear of pain or mental disturbance. It was a little later than this that Rivers said acutely to Lake: "Why, the man is a moral coward. He stands things up to a certain point and then runs away." So now he ran away from French feeding to Lake's doorstep, and Lake, as I have said, sent him to Rivers with the very best results, for Mrs. Rivers took a great interest in him, looking on him no doubt as a kind of foolish child of genius, and fed him, by Lake's direction, for all that she was worth. As soon as he was in anything like condition, or getting on towards it, he was unable to remain any longer at Folkestone and proposed to return once more to France. This, however, the doctor forbade, and thinking that a prolonged course of feeding and rest was the one thing he required, induced him to go to a sanatorium in the east of England. At this time Lake had practically no belief whatever in the man being tuberculous, but he used Maitland's firm conviction that he was in that condition to induce him to enter this establishment. It was perhaps the best thing which could be done for him. He was looked after very well, and the doctor at the sanatorium agreed with Lake in finding no evidence of active pulmonary trouble.
As I have said, Maitland kept much, or most, of this from me—it was very natural. He wrote to me from the sanatorium very many letters, from which I shall not quote, as they were after all only the natural moans of a solitary invalid. But he forbade me to come to him, and I did not insist on making the visit which I proposed. I was quite aware, if it were only by instinct and intuition, that he had no desire for me to discover exactly how things had been going with him in France. Nevertheless I did understand vaguely, though it was not till afterwards that I discovered there had been a suggestion made that he should not return there, or, indeed, go back to the circumstances which had proved so nearly disastrous. I do not think that this suggestion was ever made personally to him, although I understand it was discussed by some of his friends. It appears that a year or so afterwards when he was talking to Miss Kingdon, she told him that it had been thought possible that he might not return to France. This he received with much amazement and indignation, for certainly he did go back, and henceforth I believe the management of the kitchen was conducted on more reasonable lines. Certainly he recovered his normal weight, and soon after his return was actually twelve stone. As a matter of fact, even before he left the sanatorium, he protested that he was actually getting obese.
He was perfectly conscious after these experiences at Folkestone, and the east of England, that he owed very much both to Lake and Rivers. In fact he wrote to the doctor afterwards, saying that he and Rivers had picked him out of a very swampy place. He had always a great admiration for Rivers as a writer, and used to marvel wonderfully at his success. It seemed an extraordinary thing to Maitland that a man could do good work and succeed by it in England.
It was in 1902 that Maitland and Thérèse took up their abode in St. Pée d'Ascain, under the shadow of the Pyrenees. From there he wrote me very frequently, and seemed to be doing a great deal of work. He liked the place, and, as there was an English colony in the town, had made not a few friends or acquaintances. By now it was a very long time since I had seen him, for we had not met during the time of his illness in England; and as I had been very much overworked, it occurred to me that three or four days at sea, might do something for me, and that I could combine this with a visit to my old friend. I did not, however, write to him that I was coming. Knowing his ways and his peculiar nervousness, which at this time most visibly grew upon him, I thought it best to say nothing until I actually came to Bordeaux. When I reached the city on the Gironde I put up at a hotel and telegraphed to know whether he could receive me. The answer I got was one word only, "Venez," and I went down by the early train, through the melancholy Landes, and came at last to St. Pée by the way of Bayonne. He met me at the station—which, by the way, has one of the most beautiful views I know—and I found him looking almost exactly as he had looked before, save that he wore his hair for the time a little differently from his custom in order to hide a fading scar upon his forehead, the result of that mysterious skin trouble. We were, I know, very glad to meet.
I stayed at a little hotel by myself as he could not put me up, but went later to his house. It was now that I at last met Thérèse. As I have said, she was a very beautiful woman, tall and slender, of a pale, but clear complexion, very melancholy lovely eyes, and a voice that was absolute music. I could not help thinking that he had at last come home, for at that time my knowledge of their little domestic difficulties owing to the warring customs of their different countries was very vague, and she impressed me greatly. And yet I knew before I left that night that all was not well with Maitland, though it seemed so well with him. He complained to me when we were alone about his health, and even then protested somewhat forcibly against the meals. The house itself, or their apartment, was—from the foreign point of view—quite comfortable, but it did not suggest the kind of surroundings which I knew Maitland loved. There is, save in the best, a certain air of cold barrenness about so many foreign houses. The absence of rugs or carpets and curtains, the polish and exiguity of the furniture, the general air of having no more in the rooms than that which will just serve the purposes of life did not suit his sense of abundance and luxury.
Blake has said, though I doubt if I quote with accuracy: "We do not know that we have enough until we have had too much," and this is a saying of wisdom as well concerning the things of the mind as those of the body. He had had at last a little too much domesticity, and, besides that, his desires were set towards London and the British Museum, with possibly half the year spent in Devonshire. He yearned to get away from the little polished French home he had made for himself and take Thérèse back to England with him. But this was impossible, for her mother still lived with them and naturally would not consent to expatriate herself at her age from her beloved France. It had been truly no little sacrifice for her, a very gentle and delicate woman even then suffering from cardiac trouble, to leave Paris and its neighbourhood and stay with her child nigh upon the frontier of Spain, almost beyond the borders of French civilisation.
I stayed barely a week in St. Pée d'Ascain, but during that time we talked much both of his work and of mine. Once more his romance of the sixth century was in his mind and on his desk, though he worked more, perhaps, at necessary pot-boilers than at this long pondered task. Although he did not write so much as of old I found it almost impossible to get him to go out with me, save now and again for half an hour in the warmest and quietest part of the day. He had developed a great fear of death, and life seemed to him extraordinarily fragile. Such a feeling is ever the greatest warning to those who know, and yet I think if he had been rather more courageous and had faced the weather a little more, it might have been better for him. During these few days I became very friendly with Madame Espinel and her daughter, but more especially with the latter, because she spoke English, and my French has never been very fluent. It requires at least a month's painful practice for me to become more or less intelligible to those who speak it by nature. As I went away he gave me a copy of his new book "The Meditations of Mark Sumner." It is one of those odd things which occur so frequently in literary life that I myself had in a way given to him the notion of this book. It was not that I suggested that he should write it, indeed I had developed the idea of such a book to him upon my own account, for I proposed at that time to write a short life of an imaginary man of letters to whom I meant to attribute what I afterwards published in "Apteryx." Perhaps this seed had lain dormant in Maitland's mind for years, and when he at last wrote the book he had wholly forgotten that it was I who first suggested the idea. Certainly no two books could have been more different, although my own plan was originally much more like his. In the same way I now believe that my story "The Purification" owed its inception without my being aware of it to the suppressed passage in "Outside the Pale" of which I spoke some time ago. This passage I never read; but, when Maitland told me of it, it struck me greatly and remained in my mind. These influences are one of the great uses of literary companionship among men of letters. As Henry Maitland used to say: "We come together and strike out sparks."
As I went north by train from St. Pée d'Ascain to Bordeaux, passing ancient Dax and all the sombre silences of the wounded serried rows of pines which have made an infertile soil yield something to commerce, Maitland's spirit, his wounded and often sickly spirit, was with me. I say "sickly" with a certain reluctance, and yet that is what I felt, for I know I read "The Meditations" with great revolt in spite of its obvious beauty and literary sincerity. Life, as I know well, is hard and bitter enough to break any man's spirit, and I knew that Maitland had been through a fire that not many men had known, yet as I read I thought, and still think, that in this book he showed an undue failure of courage. If he had been through so many disasters yet there was still much left for him, or should have been. He had not suffered the greatest disaster of all, for since the death of his father in his early youth he had lost none that he loved. The calculated dispirited air of the book afflicted me, and yet, naturally enough, I found it wonderfully interesting; for here was so much of my lifelong friend, even though now and again there are little lapses in sincerity when he put another face on things, and pretended, even to himself, that he had felt in one way and not in another. There is in it only a brief mention of myself, when he refers to the one solitary friend he possessed in London through so many years which were only not barren to him in the acquisition of knowledge.
But even as I read in the falling night I came to the passage in which he speaks of the Anabasis. It is curious to think of, but I doubt if he had ever heard that modern scholarship refuses to believe it was Xenophon who wrote this book. Most assuredly had he heard it he would have rejected so revolutionary a notion with rage and indignation, for to him Xenophon and the Anabasis were one. In speaking of the march of the Greeks he quotes the passage where they rewarded and dismissed the guide who had led them through very dangerous country. The text says: "when evening came he took leave of us, and went his way by night." On reaching Bordeaux I surprised and troubled the telegraph clerk at the railway station by telegraphing to Henry Maitland those words in the original Greek, though naturally I had to write them in common script. Often-times I had been his guide but had never led him in safety.
When I reached England again I wrote him a very long letter about "The Meditations," and in answer received one which I may here quote: "My dear old boy, it is right and good that the first word about 'Mark Sumner' should come from you. I am delighted that you find it readable. For a good ten years I had this book in mind vaguely, and for two years have been getting it into shape. You will find that there is not very much reminiscence; more philosophising. Why, of course, the solitary friend is you. Good old Schmidt is mentioned later. But the thing is a curious blend, of course, of truth and fiction. Why, it's just because the world is 'inexplicable' that I feel my interest in it and its future grows less and less. I am a little oppressed by 'the burden of the mystery'; not seldom I think with deep content of the time when speculation will be at an end. But my delight in the beauty of the visible world, and my enjoyment of the great things of literature, grow stronger. My one desire now is toutterthis passion—yet the result of one's attempt is rather a poor culmination for Life."
During this year, and indeed during the greater part of 1902, I was myself very ill and much troubled, though I worked exceedingly hard upon my longest book, "Rachel." In consequence of all I went through during the year I wrote to him very seldom until the beginning of the following spring I was able to send him the book. For a long time after discovering the almost impossibility of making more than a mere living out of fiction, I had in a sense given up writing for the public, as every man is more or less bound to do at last if he be not gratified with commercial success. Indeed for many years I wrote for some three people: for my wife; for Rawson, the naturalist, my almost lifelong friend; and for Maitland, the only man I had known longer than Rawson. Provided they approved, and were a little enthusiastic, I thought all was well, even though I could earn no more than a mere living. And yet I was conscious through all these working years that I had never actually conquered Maitland's utmost approval. For I knew what his enthusiasm was when he was really roused; how obvious, how sincere, and how tremendous. When I reflect that I did at last conquer it just before he died I have a certain melancholy pleasure in thinking of that book of mine, which indeed in many ways means very much to me, much more than I can put down, or would put down for any one now living. Were this book which I am now doing a life of myself rather than a sketch of him, I should certainly put in the letter, knowing that I should be forgiven for inserting it because it was a letter of Maitland's. It was, indeed, a highly characteristic epistle, for when he praised he praised indeed, and his words carried conviction to me, ever somewhat sceptical of most men's approval. He did even more than write to me, for I learnt that he spoke about this book to other friends of his, especially, as I know, to Edmund Roden; and also to George Meredith, who talked to me about it with obvious satisfaction when I next met him. Nothing pleased Maitland better than that any one he loved should do good work. If ever a man lived who was free from the prevalent vices of artistic and literary jealousy, it was Maitland.
But now his time was drawing to an end. He and Thérèse and Madame Espinel left St. Pée d'Ascain in June 1903 and went thirty miles further into the Pyrenees. He wrote to me a few days after reaching the little mountain town of St. Christophe. The change apparently did him good. He declared that he had now no more sciatica, of which disease, by the way, I had not previously heard, and he admitted that his general health was improving. St. Christophe is very picturesquely situated, and Maitland loved it not the less for its associations in ancient legend, since it is not very far from the Port or Col de Roncesvalles, where the legendary Roland was slain fighting in the rearguard to protect Charlemagne's army. He and Thérèse went once further down the valley and stayed a night at Roncesvalles. If any man's live imagination heard the horn of Roland blow I think it should be Maitland. And yet though he took a great pleasure in this country of his, it was not England, nor had he all things at his command which he desired. I find that he now greatly missed the British Museum, which readers of "The Meditations" will know he much frequented in those old days. For he was once more hard at work upon "Basil," and wrote to me that he was greatly in want of exact knowledge as to the procedure in the execution of wills under the later Roman Empire. This was a request for information, and such requests I not infrequently received, always doing my best to tell him what I could discover, or to give him the names of authorities not known to himself. He frequently referred to me about points of difficulty, even when he was in England but away from London. At that time, naturally enough, I knew nothing whatever about wills under the Roman Empire, but in less than a week after he had written to me I think it highly probable that I knew more than any lawyer in London who was not actually lecturing on the subject to some pupils. I sent him a long screed on the matter. Before this reached him I got another letter giving me more details of what he required, and since this is certainly of some interest as showing his literary methods and conscientiousness I think it may be quoted. He says: "And now, hearty thanks for troubling about the legal question. The time with which I am concerned is about A.D. 540. I know, of course, that degeneration and the Gothic War made semi-chaos of Roman civilisation; but as a matter of fact the Roman law still existed. The Goths never interfered with it, and portions even have been handed down. Now the testator is a senator. He has one child only, a daughter, and to her leaves most of his estate. There are legacies to two nephews, and to a sister. A very simple will, you see—no difficulty about it. But he dying, all the legatees being with him at the time, how, as a matter of fact, were things settled? Was an executor appointed? Might an executor be a legatee?
Probate, I think, as you say, there was none, but who inherited? Still fantastic things were done in those times, but what would the law have dictated? Funny, too, that this is the only real difficulty which bothers me in the course of my story. As regards all else that enters into the book I believe I know as much as one can without being a Mommsen. The senator owns property in Rome and elsewhere. I rather suppose it was a case of taking possession if you could, and holding if no one interfered with you. Wills of this date were frequently set aside on the mere assertion of a powerful senator that the testator had verbally expressed a wish to benefit him.... It is a glorious age for the romancer." As a full answer to this letter I borrowed and sent to him Saunders' "Justinian," and received typically exaggerated thanks.
Now again he and I were but correspondents, and I do not think that in those days when I had so much to do, and had also very bad health, I was a very good correspondent. Maitland, although he sometimes apologised humorously, or even nervously, for writing at great length, was an admirable letter writer. He practised a lost art. Sometimes he put into his letters very valuable sketches of people. He did so both to me and to Rivers, and to others, and frequently made sharply etched portraits of people whom he knew at St Pée. He had a curious habit of nicknaming everybody. These nicknames were perhaps not the highest form of art, nor were they even always humorous, still it was a practice of his. He had a peculiarly verbal humor in these matters. Never by any chance, unless he was exceedingly serious, did he call any man by his actual name. Rawson, my most particular friend, whom he knew well, and whose books he admired very much for their style, was always known as "The Rawsonian," and I myself was referred to by a similarly formed name. These are matters of no particular importance, but still they show the man in his familiar moods and therefore have a kind of value—as if one were to show a score of photographs or sketches that were serious and then insert one where the wise man plays the child, or even the fool. There was not a person of any importance in St. Pée d'Ascain, although nobody knew it, who did not rejoice in some absurd nickname.
However he went further than mere nicknames, and there is in one letter of his to Rivers a very admirable sketch of a certain personage: "one of the most cantankerous men I ever came across; fierce against the modern tendencies of science, especially in England; an anti-Darwinite &c. He rages against Huxley, accusing him of having used his position for personal vanity and gain, and of ruining the scientific and industrial prospects of England; charges of the paltriest dishonesty against H. and other such men abound in his conversation. X., it seems, was one of the original students of the Jermyn Street School of Mines, and his root grievance is the transformation of that establishment—brought about, he declares, for the personal profit of Huxley and of—the clerks of the War Office!You, he regards as a most valuable demonstration of the evils resulting from the last half-century of 'progress,' protesting loudly that every one of your books is a bitter satire on Huxley, his congeners, and his disciples. The man tells me that no scientific papers in England will print his writing, merely from personal enmity. He has also quarrelled with the scientific societies of France, and now, being a polyglot, he writes for Spain and Germany—the only two countries in Europe where scientific impartiality is to be found."
In another letter of his he says: "By the bye, an English paper states that Henley died worth something more than eight hundred pounds." One might imagine that he would then proceed to condole with him on having had so little to leave, but that was not our Maitland. He went on: "Amazing! How on earth did he amass that wealth? I am rejoiced to know that his latter years have been passed without struggle for bread."
The long letter about the Roman Empire and Roman law from which I quoted in the last chapter, was dated August 6, 1903, and I did not hear again from Maitland until November 1. I had written to him proposing to pay another visit to the south-west of France in order to see him in his Pyrenean home, but he replied very gloomily, saying that he was in evil case, that Thérèse had laryngitis, and that everything was made worse by incredibly bad weather. The workhouse—still the workhouse—was staring him in the face. He had to labour a certain number of hours each day in direly unfavourable conditions. If he did not finish his book at the end of the year sheer pauperdom would come upon him. In these circumstances I was to see that he dreaded a visit from any friend, indeed he was afraid that they would not be able to stay in St. Christophe on account of its excessive dampness. According to this pathetically exaggerated account they lived in a thick mist day and night. How on earth it came to be thought that such a dreadful country was good for consumptive people he could not imagine; though he owned, somewhat grudgingly, that he himself had got a good deal of strength there. He told me that as soon as the eternal rain ceased they were going down to Bayonne to see a doctor, and if he did no good Thérèse would go to the south of France. Finally, he was hanged if he knew how it would be managed. He ended up with: "In short I have not often in my life been nearer to an appalling crisis." At the end of this dismal letter, which did not affect me so much as might be thought, he spoke to me of my book, "Rachel," and said: "I have been turning the pages with great pleasure to keep my thoughts from the workhouse."
As I have hinted, those will have gathered very little of Maitland who imagine that I took thisau pied de lettre. Maitland had cried "Wolf!" so often, that I had almost ceased to believe that there were wolves, even in the Pyrenees. All things had gradually become appalling crises and dreadful disasters. A mere disturbance and an actual catastrophe were alike dire and irremediable calamities. And yet, alas, there was more truth underlying his words than even he knew. If a man lives for ever in shadow the hour comes at last when there is no more light; and even for those who look forward, one would think with a certain relief, to the workhouse, there comes a day that they shall work no more. I smiled when I read this letter, but, of course, telegraphed to him deferring my visit until the rain had ceased, or laryngitis had departed from his house, or until his spirits recovered their tone on the completion of his great romance. One could do no other, much as I desired to see him and have one of our prodigious and preposterously long talks in his new home. I do not think that I wrote to him after this lamentable reply of his, but on November 16 I received my last communication from him. It was three lines on a post-card, still dated from St. Christophe. He referred in it once more to my book, and said: "Delighted to see the advertisement in ——— to-day, especially after their very base notice last week. Hurrah! Illness and struggle still going on here." The struggle I believed in, but, as ever with one's friends, one doubted if the illness were serious. And yet the catastrophe was coming.
At this time I was myself seriously ill. A chronic disease which had not been diagnosed resulted in a more or less serious infection of my own lungs, and, if I recollect truly, I had been in bed for nearly a fortnight. During the early days of my convalescence I went down to my club, and there one afternoon got this telegram from Rivers: "Have received following telegram from Maitland, 'Henry dying. Entreat you to come. In greatest haste.' I cannot go, can you?" This message to me was dated Folkestone, where Rivers was then living. Now at this time I was feeling very ill and utterly unfit to travel. I hardly knew what to do, but thought it best to go home and consult with my wife before I replied to Rivers. Anxious as she was to do everything possible for Maitland, she implored me not to venture on so long a journey, especially as it was mid-winter, just at Christmas-time. If I had not felt really ill she would not have placed any obstacles in my path, of that I am sure. She would, indeed, have urged me to go. After a little reflection I therefore replied to Rivers that I was myself very ill, but added that if he could not possibly go I would. At the same time I telegraphed to Maitland, or rather to Thérèse, saying that I was ill, but that I would come if she found it absolutely necessary. I do not think I received any answer to this message, a fact one easily understands when one learns how desperate things really were; but on December 26 I got another telegram from Rivers. I found that he had gone to St. Christophe in spite of not being well. He wired to me: "No nurse. Nursing help may save Maitland. Come if possibly can. Am here but ill." Such an appeal could not be resisted. I went straight home, and showing this telegram to my wife she agreed with me that I ought to go. If Rivers was ill at St. Christophe it now seemed my absolute duty to go, whatever my own state of health.
I left London that night by the late train, crossing to Paris by way of Newhaven and Dieppe in order that I might get at least three hours of rest in a recumbent position in the steamer, as I did not at that time feel justified in going all the way first class and taking a sleeper. I did manage to obtain some rest during the sea-passage, but on reaching Paris early in the morning I felt exceedingly unwell, and at the Gare St.-Lazare found at that hour no means of obtaining even a cup of coffee. I drove over to the Quai d'Orsay, and spent an hour or two in the coffee-room waiting for the departure of the express to Bordeaux. Ill as I was, and full of anxiety about Maitland, and now about Rivers, that journey was one long nightmare to me. I had not been able to take the Sud Express, and when at last, late in the evening, I reached Bayonne, I found that the last train to St. Christophe in its high Pyrenean valley had already gone hours before my arrival. While I was on my journey I had again telegraphed from Morcenx to Rivers or to Thérèse asking them to telegraph to me at the Hotel du Commerce, Bayonne, in case I was unable to get on that night, as I had indeed feared, although I was unable to get accurate information. On reaching this hotel I found waiting for me a telegram, which I have now lost, that was somehow exceedingly obscure but yet portended disaster. That I expected the worst I know, for I telegraphed to my wife the news in code that Maitland was dying and that the doctor gave no hope.
If I had been a rich man, or even moderately furnished with money on that journey, I should have taken a motor-car if it could have been obtained, and have gone on at once without waiting for the morning. But now I was obliged to spend the night in that little old-fashioned hotel in the old English city of Bayonne, the city whose fortress bears the proud emblem "Nunquam polluta." I wondered much if I should yet see my old friend alive. It was possible, and I hoped. At any rate, he must know that I was coming and was near at hand if only he were yet conscious. How much I was needed I did not know till afterwards, for even as I was going south Rivers was once more returning to Paris on his homeward journey. As I learnt afterwards, he was far too unwell to stay. In the morning I took the first train to St. Christophe, passing Cambo, where Rostand, the poet, makes his home. On reaching the town where Maitland lived I found no one waiting for me as I had expected; for, naturally enough, I thought it possible that unless Rivers were very ill he would be able to meet me. It was a cold and gloomy morning when I left the station. Taking my bag in my hand, I hired a small boy to show me the house in which Maitland lived on the outskirts of the little Pyrenean town. This house, it seems, was let in flats, and the Maitlands occupied the first floor. On entering the hall I found a servant washing down the stone flooring. I said to her, "Comment Monsieur se porte-t-il?" and she replied, "Monsieur est mort." I then asked her where I should find the other Englishman. She answered that he had gone back to England the day before, and then took me upstairs and went in to tell Thérèse that I had come.
I found her with her mother. She was the only woman who had given him any happiness. Now she was completely broken down by the anxiety and distress which had come upon her so suddenly. For indeed it seems that it had been sudden. Only four or five days ago Maitland had been working hard upon "Basil," the book from which he hoped so much, and in which he believed so fervently. Then it seems that he developed what he called a cold, some slight affection of the lungs which raised his temperature a little. Strangely enough he did not take the care of himself that he should have taken, or that care which I should have expected him to use, considering his curiously expressed nervousness about himself. By some odd fatality he became suddenly courageous at the wrong time, and went out for a walk in desperately bad weather. On the following day he was obviously very seriously ill, and sent for the doctor, who suspended judgment but feared that he had pneumonia. On the day succeeding this yet another doctor was called into consultation, and the diagnosis of pneumonia was confirmed without any doubt. But that was not, perhaps, what actually killed him. There was a very serious complication, according to Maitland's first physician, with whom I afterwards had a long conversation, partly through the intermediary of the nurse, an Englishwoman from Bayonne, who talked French more fluently than myself. He considered that Maitland also had myocarditis. I certainly did not think, and do not think, that he was right in this. Myocarditis is rarely accompanied with much or severe pain, while the anguish of violent pericarditis is often very great, and Maitland had suffered most atrociously. He was not now a strong man, not one with big reserves and powers of passive endurance, and in his agony he cried aloud for death.
In these agonies there were periods of comparative ease when he rested and was quiet, and even spoke a little. In one of these intermissions Thérèse came to him and told him that I was now actually on my way. There is no reason, I think, why I should not write what he said. It was simply, "Good old H——." By this time Rivers had gone; but before his departure he had, I understand, procured the nurse. The last struggle came early that morning, December 28, while I was at the Bayonne hotel preparing to catch the early train. He died quietly just before dawn, I think at six o'clock.
I was taken in to see Thérèse, who was still in bed, and found her mother with her. They were two desolate and lonely women, and I had some fears that Thérèse would hardly recover from the blow, so deeply did his death affect her. She was always a delicate woman, and came from a delicate, neurotic stock, as one could see so plainly in the elder woman. I did my best to say what one could say, though all that can possibly be said in such cases is nothing after all. There is no physic for grief but the slow, inevitable years. I stayed not long, but went into the other chamber and saw my dead friend. The bed on which he lay stood in a little alcove at the end of the room farthest from the window. I remember that the nurse, who behaved most considerately to me, stood by the window while I said farewell to him. He looked strangely and peculiarly intellectual, as so often happens after death. The final relaxation of the muscles about his chin and mouth accentuated most markedly the strong form of the actual skull. Curiously enough, as he had grown a little beard in his last illness, it seemed to me that he resembled very strongly another English writer not yet dead, one whom nature had, indeed, marked out as a story-teller, but who lacked all those qualities which made Maitland what he was. As I stood by this dead-bed knowing, as I did know, that he had died at last in the strange anguish which I was aware he had feared, it seemed to me that here was a man who had been born to inherit grief. He had never known pure peace or utter joy as even some of the very humblest know it. I looked back across the toilsome path by which he had come hither to the end, and it seemed to me that from the very first he had been doomed. In other times or some other age he might have had a better fate, but he was born out of his time and died in exile doubly. I put my hand upon his forehead and said farewell to him and left the room, for I knew that there was much to do and that in some way I had to do it.
Thérèse was most anxious that he should not be buried in St. Christophe, of which she had conceived a natural horror. There was at this time an English clergyman in the village, the chaplain of the English church at St. Pée, about whom I shall have something to say later. With him I concerted what was to be done, and he obtained the necessary papers from themairie. And all this time, across the road from the stone house in which Henry Maitland lay dead, I heard the sound of his coffin being made in the little carpenter's shop which stood there. When all was done that could be done, and everything was in order, I went to the little hotel and had my lunch all alone, and afterwards dined alone and slept that night in the same hotel. The next day, late in the afternoon, I went down to St. Pée d'Ascain in charge of his body. During this journey the young doctor who had attended Maitland accompanied me part of the way, and for the rest of it his nurse was my companion. At St. Pée d'Ascain, where it was then quite dark, we were received by the clergyman, who had preceded us, and by a hearse, into which we carried Maitland's body. I accompanied it to the English chapel, where it remained all night before the altar. I slept at my old hotel, where I was known, as I had stayed there at the time I last saw Maitland alive.
In the morning a service was held for him according to the rites of the English Church. This was the desire of Thérèse and Madame Espinel, who, if it had been possible, I think would have desired to bury him according to the rites of the Catholic Church. Maitland, of course, had no orthodox belief. He refused to think of these things, for they were disturbing and led no-whither. Attending this service there were many English people, some who knew him, and some again who did not know him but went there out of respect for his name and reputation, and perhaps because they felt that they and he were alike in exile. We buried him in the common cemetery of St. Pée, a place not unbeautiful, nor unbeautifully situated. And while the service went on over his grave I was somehow reminded of the lovely cemetery at Lisbon where another English man of letters lies in a tomb far from his own country. I speak of Fielding.
I left Thérèse and Madame Espinel still at St. Christophe, and did not see them again before I started for England. They, I knew, would probably return to Paris, or perhaps would go to relatives of theirs in Spain. I could help them no more, and by now I discovered that my winter journey, or perhaps even my short visit to the death-chamber of Henry Maitland, had given me some kind of pulmonary catarrh which in my overwrought and nervous state seemed likely, perhaps, to result in something more serious. Therefore, having done all that I could, and having seen him put in the earth, I returned home hurriedly. On reaching England I was very ill for many days, but recovered without any serious results. Soon afterwards some one, I know not who it was, sent me a paragraph published in a religious paper which claimed Maitland as a disciple of the Church, for it said that he had died "in the fear of God's holy name, and with the comfort and strength of the Catholic faith." When some men die there are for ever crows and vultures about. Although I was very loath to say anything which would raise an angry discussion, I felt that this could not be passed by and that he would not have wished it to be passed by. Had he not written of a certain character in one of his books "that he should be buried as a son of the Church, to whom he had never belonged, was a matter of indignation"? That others felt as I did is proved by a letter I got from his friend Edmund Roden, who wrote to me: "You have seen the report that the ecclesiastical buzzards have got hold of Henry Maitland in articulo mortis and dragged him into the fold."
My own views upon religion did not matter. They were stronger and more pronounced, and, it may be, more atheistical than his own. Nevertheless I knew what he felt about these things, and in consequence wrote the following letter to the editor of the paper which had claimed him for the Church: "My attention has been drawn to a statement in your columns that Henry Maitland died in communion with the Church of England, and I shall be much obliged if you will give to this contradiction the same publicity you granted, without investigation, to the calumny. I was intimate with Maitland for thirty years, and had every opportunity of noting his attitude towards all theological speculation. He not only accepted none of the dogmas formulated in the creeds and articles of the Church of England, but he considered it impossible that any Church's definition of the undefinable could have any significance for any intelligent man. During the whole of our long intimacy I never knew him to waver from that point of view.
"What communication may have reached you from any one who visited Maitland during his illness I do not know. But I presume you do not maintain that a change in his theological standpoint can reasonably be inferred from any words which he may have been induced to speak in a condition in which, according to the law of every civilised country, he would have been incompetent to sign a codicil to his will.
"The attempt to draw such a deduction will seem dishonest to every fair-minded man; and I rely upon your courtesy to publish this vindication of the memory of an honest and consistent thinker which you have, however unintentionally, aspersed."
Of course this letter was refused publication. The editor answered it in a note in which he maintained the position that the paper had taken up, stating that he was thoroughly satisfied with the sources of his information. Naturally enough I knew what those sources were, and I wrote a letter in anger to the chaplain of St. Pée, which, I fear, was full of very gross insults.
Seeing that the paper refused my letter admission to its columns, on the advice of certain other people I wrote to a London daily saying: "As the intimate friend of Henry Maitland for thirty years, I beg to state definitely that he had not the slightest intellectual sympathy with any creed whatsoever. From his early youth he had none, save for a short period when, for reasons other than intellectual, he inclined to a vague and nebulous Positivism. His mental attitude towards all theological explanations was more than critical, it was absolutely indifferent; he could hardly understand how any one in the full possession of his faculties could subscribe to any formulated doctrines. No more than John Stuart Mill or Herbert Spencer could he have entered into communion with any Church."
Of course I knew, as any man must know who is acquainted with humanity and its frailties, that it was possible for Maitland, during the last few poisoned hours of his life, to have gone back in his delirium upon the whole of his previous convictions. He knew that he was dying. When he asked to know the truth he had been told it. In such circumstances some men break down. There are what people call death-bed repentances. Therefore I did my best to satisfy myself as to whether anything whatever had occurred which would give any colour to these theologic lies. I could not trouble Thérèse upon this particular point, but it occurred to me that the nurse, who was a very intelligent woman, must be in a position to know something of the matter, and I therefore wrote to her asking her to tell me all she knew. She replied to me about the middle of January, telling me that she had just then had a long talk with Mrs. Maitland, and giving me the following facts.
It appears that on Monday, December 21, Maitland was so ill that a consultation was thought necessary, and that both the doctors agreed that it was impossible for the patient to live through the night, though in fact he did not die till nearly a week afterwards. On Thursday, December 24, the chaplain was sent for, not for any religious reasons, or because Maitland had called for him, but simply because Thérèse thought that he might find some pleasure in seeing an English face. When the clergyman came it did indeed have this effect, for Maitland's face lit up and he shook him heartily by the hand. At this moment the young doctor came in and told the clergyman privately that Maitland had no chance whatever, and that it was a wonder that he was still alive. It is quite certain that there was no religious conversation between the clergyman and the patient at this time. The nurse arrived at eleven o'clock on Sunday morning, and insisted on absolute quietness in the room. The clergyman simply peeped in at the door to say good-bye, for at that time Mr. Rivers was in charge in the bedroom.
The chaplain did not see Maitland again until the day I myself came to St. Christophe, when all was over. While Maitland was delirious it appears that he chanted some kind ofTe Deumrepeatedly. To what this was attributable no man can say with certainty, but it is a curious thing to reflect upon that "Basil" was about the time of Gregory, and that Maitland had been studying most minutely the history of the early Church in many ecclesiastical works. According to those who heard his delirious talk, it seems that all he did say had reference to "Basil," the book about which he had been so anxious, and was never to finish. At any rate it is absolutely certain that Maitland never accepted the offices of the Church before his death, even in delirium. Before I leave this matter I may mention that the chaplain complicated matters in no small degree before he retired from the scene, by declaring most disingenuously that he had not written the notice which appeared in print. Now this was perfectly true. He did not write it. He had asked a friend of his to do so. When he learnt the truth this friend very much regretted having undertaken the task. I understand that though the editor refused to withdraw this statement the authorities of the paper wrote to the chaplain in no pleased spirit after they had received my somewhat severely phrased communication. It is a sad and disagreeable subject, and I am glad to leave it.
For ever on looking backwards one is filled with regrets, and one thing I regret greatly about Henry Maitland is that, though I might perhaps have purchased his little library, the books he had accumulated with so much joy and such self-sacrifice, I never thought of this until it was too late. Books made up so much of his life, and few of his had not been bought at the cost of what others would consider pleasure, or by the sacrifice of some sensation which he himself would have enjoyed at the time. Now I possess none of his books but those he gave me, save only the little "Anthologia Latina" which Thérèse herself sent to me. This was a volume in which he took peculiar delight, perhaps even more delight than he did in the Greek anthology, which I myself preferred so far as my Greek would then carry me. Many times I have seen him take down the little Eton anthology and read aloud. Now I myself may quote:
Animula vagula, blandula,Hospes comesque corporis,Qua nunc abibis in locaPallidula, rigida, nudula——
I believe his library was sold in Paris, for now that Thérèse had no settled home it was impossible to carry it about with her. Among these books were all those beautifully bound volumes which he had obtained as prizes at Moorhampton College, and others which he had picked up at various times in the various bookshops of London, so many of which he speaks of in "The Meditations"—his old Gibbon in quarto, and some hundreds of others chosen with joy because they appealed to him in a way only a book-lover can understand. He had a strange pleasure in buying old copies of the classics, which shows that he was perhaps after all more of a bookman than a scholar. He would perhaps have rather possessed such a copy of Lucretius as is on my own shelves, which has no notes but is wonderfully printed, than the newest edition by the newest editor. He was conscious that his chief desire was literature rather than scholarship. Few indeed there are who know the classics as well as he did, who read them for ever with so much delight.
Maitland, for an Englishman, knew many languages. His Greek, though not extraordinarily deep, was most familiar. He could read Aristophanes lying on the sofa, thoroughly enjoying it, and rarely rising to consult Liddell and Scott, a book which he adored in the most odd fashion, perhaps because it knew so much Greek. There was no Latin author whom he could not read fluently. I myself frequently took him up a difficult passage in Juvenal and Persius, and rarely, if ever, found him at fault, or slow to give me help. French he knew very nearly as well as a Frenchman, and spoke it very fluently. His Italian was also very good, and he spoke that too without hesitation. Spanish he only read; I do not think he often attempted to speak it. Nevertheless he read "Don Quixote" in the original; and his Italian can be judged by the fact that he read Dante's "Divina Commedia" almost as easily as he read his Virgil. German too was an open book to him, and he had read most of the great men who wrote in it, understanding even the obscurities of "Titan." I marked down the other day many of the books in which he chiefly delighted, or rather, let me say, many of the authors. Homer, of course, stood at the head of the list, for Homer he knew as well as he knew Shakespeare. His adoration for Shakespeare was, indeed, I think, excessive, but the less said of that the better, for I have no desire to express fully what I think concerning the general English over-estimation of that particular author. I do, however, understand how it was that Maitland worshipped him so, for whatever may be thought of Shakespeare's dramatic ability, or his characterisation, or his general psychology, there can be no dispute about his having been a master of "beautiful words." Milton he loved marvellously, and sometimes he read his sonnets to me. Much of "Lycidas" he knew by heart, and some of "Il Penseroso." Among the Latins, Virgil, Catullus, and Tibullus were his favourites, although he took a curious interest in Cicero, a thing in which I was never able to follow him. I once showed to Maitland in the "Tusculan Disputations" what Cicero seemed to think a good joke. It betrayed such an extraordinary lack of humour that I was satisfied to leave the "Disputations" alone henceforth. The only Latin book which I myself introduced to Maitland was the "Letters" of Pliny. They afterwards became great favourites with him because some of them dealt with his beloved Naples and Vesuvius. Lucian's "Dialogues" he admired very much, finding them, as indeed they are, always delightful; and it was very interesting to him when I showed him to what extent Disraeli was indebted to Lucian in those cleverjeux d'esprit"Ixion in Heaven," "Popanilla," and "The Infernal Marriage." The "Golden Ass" of Apuleius he knew almost by heart. Petronius he read very frequently; it contained some of the actual life of the old world. He knew Diogenes Laertius very well, though he read that author, as Montaigne did, rather for the light he throws upon the private life of the Greeks than for the philosophy in the book; and he frequently dipped into Athenæus the Deipnosophist. Occasionally, but very occasionally, he did read some ancient metaphysics, for Plato was a favourite of his—not, I think, on account of his philosophy, but because he wrote so beautifully. Aristotle he rarely touched, although he knew the "Poetics." He had a peculiar admiration for the Stoic Marcus Aurelius, in which I never followed him because the Stoic philosophy is so peculiarly inhuman. But, after all, among the Greeks his chief joy was the tragedians, and there was no single play or fragment of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides that he did not know almost by heart. Among the Frenchmen his great favourites were Rabelais and Montaigne and, later, Flaubert, Maupassant, Victor Hugo, Zola, Balzac, and the Goncourts. As I have said before, he had a great admiration for the Russian writers of eminence, and much regretted that he did not know Russian. He once even attempted it, but put it aside. I think Balzac was the only writer of importance that he read much of who did not possess a style; he owned that he found him on that account at times almost impossible to read. Nevertheless he did read him, and learnt much from him; but his chief admiration among the French on the ground of their being artists was for Flaubert and Maupassant. Zola's style did not appeal to him; in fact in many of his books it is little better than Balzac's. Maitland's love of beautiful words and the rhythms of prose was as deep as that of Meredith; and as I have said, his adoration of Shakespeare was founded on the fact that Shakespeare still remains the great enchanter in the world of phrases. He read English very deeply. There was little among the fields of English prose that he did not know well; but again he loved best those who had a noble style of their own, notably Sir Thomas Browne. If a man had something to say and did not say it well, Maitland read him with difficulty and held him at a discount. That is why he loved Landor at his best, why he loved Meredith, and why he often adored Hardy, especially in Hardy's earlier works, before he began to "rail at the universe" and disturb him. I think among other living writers of English fiction I can hardly mention more than one of whom he spoke with much respect, and he was Henry James. As he was a conservative he was especially a conservative critic. He found it difficult to appreciate anything which was wholly new, and the rising school of Celtic literature, which means much, and may mean more, in English literature, did not appeal to him greatly. He lived in the past, even in English, and often went back to Chaucer and drank at his well and at the everlasting fountain of Malory. So, as I have said, he loved old Walton. Boswell he read yearly at least, for he had an amazing admiration for old Johnson, a notable truth-teller. The man who could say what he thought, and say it plainly, was ever his favourite, although I could never induce him to admire Machiavelli, for the coldness of Machiavelli's intellect was a little too much for him. The pure intellect never appealed to Maitland. I think if he had attempted "The Critique of Pure Reason" he would have died before he had learnt Kant's vocabulary. Yet I once gave him a copy of it in the original. The only very modern writer that he took to was Walt Whitman, and the trouble I had in getting him to see anything in him was amazing, though at last he succumbed and was characteristically enthusiastic.
What he wanted in literature was emotion, feeling, and humour—literature that affected him sensuously, and made him happy, and made him forget. For it is strange when one looks back at his books to think how much he loved pure beauty, though he found himself compelled to write, only too often, of the sheer brutality of modern civilisation and the foulest life of London. Of course he loved satire, and his own mind was essentially in some ways satiric. His greatest gift was perhaps that of irony, which he frequently exercised at the expense of his public. I remember very well his joy when something he had written which was ironically intended from the first word to the last was treated seriously by the critics. He was reminded, as he indeed reminded me, of Samuel Butler's "Fairhaven," that book on Christianity which was reviewed by one great religious paper as an essay in religious apologetics. This recalls to my mind the fact that I have forgotten to say how much he loved Samuel Butler's books, or those with which he was more particularly acquainted, "Erewhon" and "Erewhon Revisited." Anything which dug knives into the gross stupidity of the mass of English opinion afforded him the intensest gratification. If it attacked their religion or their vanity he was equally delighted, and when it came to their hypocrisy—in spite of the defence he made later in "The Meditations" of English hypocrisy—he was equally pleased. In this connection I am reminded of a very little thing of no particular importance which occurred to him when he was upon one occasion at the Royal Academy. That year Sir Frederick Leighton exhibited a very fine decorative panel of a nude figure. While Maitland was looking at it a typical English matron with three young flappers of daughters passed him. One of the girls stood in front of this nude and said, "Oh, mamma, what is this?" Whereupon her mother replied hurriedly, "Only a goddess, my dear, only a goddess! Come along,—only a goddess." And he quoted to himself and afterwards to me, from "Roman Women": "And yet I love you not, nor ever can, Distinguished woman on the Pincian!" If I remember rightly, the notable address to Englishwomen in T.E. Brown's poem was published separately in a magazine which I brought to him. It gave great occasion for chuckling.
I have not attempted to give any far-reaching notion of all Maitland's reading, but I think what I have said will indicate not unfairly what its reach was. What he desired was to read the best that had been written in all western languages; and I think, indeed, that very few men have read so much, although he made, in some ways, but little use of it. Nevertheless this life among books was his true life. Among books he lived, and among them he would have died. Had any globe-trotting Gillman offered to show him the world, he would have declined, I think, to leave the littoral of the Mediterranean, though with a book-loving Gillman he might have explored all literature.
There have been few men so persecuted by Fortune as to lead lives of unhappiness, lighted only by transient gleams of the sun, who are yet pursued beyond the grave by outcries and misfortune, but this was undoubtedly the case with Maitland. Of course he always had notable ill luck, as men might say and indeed do say, but his ill luck sprang from his nature as well as from the nature of things. When a man puts himself into circumstances to which he is equal he may have misfortunes, or sometimes disasters, but he has not perpetual adversity. Maitland's nature was for ever thrusting him into positions to which he was not equal. His disposition, his very heredity, seems to have invited trouble. So out of his first great disaster sprang all the rest. He had not been equal to the stress laid upon him, and in later life he was never equal to the stress he laid upon himself. This is what ill luck is. It is an instinctive lack of wisdom. I think I said some chapters ago that I had not entirely disposed of the question of his health. I return to the subject with some reluctance. Nevertheless I think what I have to say should be said. It at any rate curiously links the last days of Maitland's life to the earlier times of his trouble, or so it will seem to physicians. I shall do no more than quote a few lines from a letter which he wrote to Lake. He says: "You remember that patch of skin disease on my forehead? Nothing would touch it; it had lasted for more than two years, and was steadily extending itself. At last a fortnight ago I was advised to try iodide of potassium. Result—perfect cure after week's treatment! I had resigned myself to being disfigured for the rest of my life; the rapidity of the cure is extraordinary. I am thinking of substituting iodide of potassium for coffee at breakfast and wine at the other meals. I am also meditating a poem in its praise—which may perhaps appear in theFortnightly Review." Dr. Lake replied to these dithyrambs with a letter which Maitland did not answer. There is no need to comment upon this more particularly; it will at any rate be clear to those who are not uninstructed in medicine.
His ill luck began early. It lasted even beyond the grave. Some men have accounted it a calamity to have a biography written of them. The first who said so must have been English, for in this country the absence of biographic art is rendered the more peculiarly dreadful by the existence in our language of one or two masterpieces. In some ways I would very willingly cease to speak now, for I have written nearly all that I had in my mind, and I know that I have spoken nothing which would really hurt him. As I have said in the very first chapter, he had an earnest desire that if anything were written about him after his death it should be something true. Still there are some things yet to be put down, especially about "Basil" and its publication. He left this book unfinished: it still lacked some few chapters which would have dealt with the final catastrophe. It fell to the executors to arrange for the publication of the incomplete book. As Maitland had left no money, certainly not that two thousand pounds which he vainly hoped for, there were still his children to consider; and it was thought necessary, for reasons I do not appreciate, to get a preface written for the book with a view, which seemed to me idle, of procuring it a great sale.
It appears that Rivers offered to write this preface if it were wanted. What he wrote was afterwards published. The executors did not approve it, again for reasons which I do not appreciate, for I think that it was on the whole a very admirable piece of work. Yet I do not believe Rivers was sincere in the view he took of "Basil" as a work of art. In later years he acknowledged as much to me, but he thought it was his duty to say everything that could possibly be said with a view of imposing it on a reluctant public. The passage in this article mainly objected to was that which speaks obscurely of his early life at Moorhampton College and refers as obscurely to his initial great disaster. The reference was needed, and could hardly be avoided. Rivers said nothing openly but referred to "an abrupt incongruous reaction and collapse." This no doubt excited certain curiosities in certain people, but seeing that so many already knew the truth, I cannot perceive what was to be gained by entire silence. However, this preface was rejected and Mr. Harold Edgeworth was asked to write another. This he did, but it was a frigid performance. The writer acknowledged his ignorance of much that Maitland had written, and avowed his want of sympathy with most of it.
Naturally enough, the trouble growing out of this dispute gave rise to considerable comment. As some theological buzzards had dropped out of a murky sky upon Maitland's corpse, so some literary kites now found a subject to gloat upon. Nevertheless the matter presently passed. "Basil," unhappily, was no success; and if one must speak the truth, it was rightly a failure. It is curious and bitter to think of that when he was dealing at the last in some kind of peace and quiet with his one chosen subject, that he had thought of for so many years and prepared for so carefully, it should by no means have proved what he believed it. There is, indeed, no such proof as "Basil" in the whole history of letters that the writer was not doing the work that his nature called for. Who that knows "Magna Graecia," and who, indeed, that ever spoke with him, will not feel that if he had visited one by one all the places that he mentions in the book, and had written about them and about the historical characters that he hoped to realise, the book might have been as great or even greater than the shining pages of "Magna Graecia"? It was in the consideration of these things, while reviving the aspects of the past that he felt so deeply and loved so much, that his native and natural genius came out. In fiction it was only when rage and anger and disgust inspired him that he could hope to equal anything of the passion which he felt about his temperamental and proper work. Those books in which he let himself go perfectly naturally, and those books which came out of him as a terrible protest against modern civilisation, are alone great. Yet it is hard to speak without emotion and without pain of "Basil." He believed in it so greatly, and yet believed in it no more than any writer must while he is at work. The artist's own illusion of a book's strength and beauty is necessary to any accomplishment. He must believe with faith or do nothing. Maitland failed because it was not his real work.
In one sense the great books of his middle period were what writers and artists know as "pot-boilers." They were, indeed, written for an actual living, for bread and for cheese and occasionally a very little butter. But they had to be written. He was obliged to do something, and did these best; he could do no other. He was always in exile. That was the point in my mind when I wrote one long article about him in a promising but passing magazine which preened its wings in Bond Street and died before the end of its first month. This article I called "The Exile of Henry Maitland." There is something of the same feeling in much that has been written of him by men perhaps qualified in many ways better than myself had they known him as well as I did. I have, I believe, spoken of the able criticism Thomas Sackville wrote of him in the foreword of the book of short stories which was published after Maitland's death. In theFortnightly ReviewEdwin Warren wrote a feeling and sympathetic article about him. Jacob Levy wrote not without discernment of the man. And of one thing all these men seemed tolerably sure, that in himself Maitland stood alone. But he only stood alone, I think, in the best work of his middle period. And even that work was alien from his native mind.
In an early article written about him while he yet lived I said that he stood in a high and solitary place, because he belonged to no school, and most certainly not to any English school. No one could imitate, and no one could truly even caricature him. The essence of his best work was that it was founded on deep and accurate knowledge and keen observation. Its power lay in a bent, in a mood of mind, not by any means in any subject, even though his satiric discussion of what he called the "ignobly decent" showed his strength, and indirectly his inner character. His very repugnance to his early subjects led him to choose them. He showed what he wished the world to be by declaring and proving that it possessed every conceivable opposite to his desires. I pointed out some time ago, but should like to insist upon it again, that in one sense he showed an instinctive affinity for the lucid and subtle Tourgeniev. There is no more intensely depressing book in the entire English language than "Isabel." The hero's desires reached to the stars, but he was not able to steal or take so much as a farthing rushlight. Not even Demetri Roudine, that futile essence of futility, equals this, Maitland's literary child of bitter, unable ambitions. These Russians indeed were the writers with whom Maitland had most sympathy. They moved what Zola had never been able to stir in him, for he was never a Zolaist, either in mind or method. No man without a style could really influence him for more than a moment. Even his beloved Balzac, fecund and insatiable, had no lasting hold upon him, much as he admired the man's ambitions, his unparalleled industry, his mighty construction. For Balzac was truly architectonic, even if barbarous, and though these constructions of his are often imaginary and his perspectives a mystery. But great construction is obviously alien from Maitland. He wanted no elaborate architecture to do his thinking in. He would have been contented in a porch, or preferably in a cloister.
I have declared that his greatest book is "The Exile"—I mean his greatest book among his novels. To say it is a masterpiece is for once not to abuse the word; for it is intense, deeply psychological, moving, true. "L'anatomia presuppone il cadavere," says Gabriele D'Annunzio, but "The Exile" is intolerable and wonderful vivisection. Yet men do bleed and live, and the protagonist in this book—in much, in very much, Henry Maitland—bleeds but will not die. He was born out of the leisured classes and resented it with an incredible bitterness, with a bitterness unparalleled in literature. I know that on one occasion Maitland spoke to me with a certain joy of somebody who had written to him about his books and had selected "The Exile" as the greatest of them. I think he knew it was great. It was, of course, an ineffable failure from the commercial point of view.
On more than one occasion, as it was known that I was acquainted with Maitland, men asked me to write about him. I never did so without asking his permission to do it. This happened once in 1895. He answered me: "What objection could I possibly have, unless it were that I should not like to hear you reviled for log-rolling? But it seems to me that you might well write an article which would incur no such charge; and indeed, by so doing, you would render me a very great service. For I have in mind at present a careful and well-written attack in the currentSpectator. Have you seen it? Now I will tell you what my feelings are about this frequent attitude in my critics."
Maitland's views upon critics and reviewing were often somewhat astounding. He resented their folly very bitterly. Naturally enough, we often spoke of reviewers, for both of us, in a sense, had some grievances. Mine, however, were not bitter. Luckily for me, I sometimes did work which appealed more to the general, while his appeal was always to the particular. Apropos of a review of one of Rivers' books he says: "I have also, unfortunately, seen the ——. Now, can you tell me (in moments of extreme idleness one wishes to know such things) who the people are who review fiction for the ——? Are they women, soured by celibacy, and by ineffectual attempts to succeed as authors? Even as they treat you this time they have consistently treated me—one continuous snarl and sneer. They are beastly creatures—I can think of no other term."
It was unfortunate that he took these things so seriously, for nobody knows so well as the reviewers that their work is not serious. Yet, according to them the general effect of Maitland's books, especially "Jubilee," was false, misleading, and libellous; and was in essence caricature. One particular critic spoke of "the brutish stupefaction of his men and women," and said, "his realism inheres only in his rendering of detail." Now Maitland declared that the writer exhibited a twofold ignorance—first of the life he depicted, and again of the books in which he depicted it. Maitland went on to say: "He—the critic—speaks specially of 'Jubilee,' so for the moment we will stick to that. I have selected from the great mass of lower middle-class life a group of people who represent certain of its grossnesses, weaknesses, &c., peculiar to our day. Now in the first place, this group of people, on its worst side, represents a degradation of which the critic has obviously no idea. In the second place, my book, if properly read, contains abundant evidence of good feeling and right thinking in those members of the group who are not hopelessly base. Pass to instances: 'The seniors live a ... life unglorified by a single fine emotion or elevating instinct.' Indeed? What about Mr. Ward, who is there precisely to show that there can be, and are, these emotions and instincts in individuals? Of the young people (to say not a word about Nancy, at heart an admirable woman), how is it possible to miss the notes of fine character in poor Halley? Is not the passionate love of one's child an 'elevating instinct'? nor yet a fine emotion? Why, even Nancy's brother shows at the end that favourable circumstances could bring out in him gentleness and goodness."
There indeed spoke Maitland. He felt that everything was circumstance, and that for nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand circumstance was truly too much, as it had been for him. It appears that the critic added that the general effect of the book was false; and Maitland replied that it would be so to a very rapid skimmer of the book, precisely as the general effect upon a rapid observer of the people themselves would be false. He was enraged to think that though people thought it worth while to write at length about his books, they would not take the trouble to study them seriously. He added: "In this section of the lower middle class the good is not on the surface; neither will it be found on the surface of my narrative."
In this letter he went on to say something more of his books in general. Apropos of a paragraph written by Mr. Glass about his work as a whole, he said: "My books deal with people of many social strata; there are the vile working class, the aspiring and capable working class, the vile lower middle, the aspiring and capable lower middle, and a few representatives of the upper middle class. My characters range from the vileness of 'Arry Parson to the genial and cultured respectability of Mr. Comberbatch. There are books as disparate as 'The Under World' and 'The Unchosen.' But what I desire to insist upon is this, that the most characteristic, the most important, part of my work is that which deals with a class of young men distinctive of our time—well-educated, fairly bred,but without money. It is this fact, as I gather from reviews and conversation, of the poverty of my people which tells against their recognition as civilised beings. 'Oh,' said some one to Butler, 'do ask Mr. Maitland to make his people a little better off.' There you have it."
And there one has also the source of Maitland's fountain of bitterness. He went on to say: "Now think of some of these young men, Hendon, Gifford, Medwin, Pick, Early, Hillward, Mallow. Do you mean to say that books containing such a number of such men deal, first and foremost, with the commonplace and the sordid? Why, these fellows are the very reverse of commonplace; most of them are martyred by the fact of possessing uncommon endowments. Is it not so? This side of my work, to me the most important, I have never yet seen recognised. I suppose Glass would class these men as 'at best genteel, and not so very genteel.' Why, 'ods bodikins! there's nothing in the world so hateful to them as gentility. But you know all this, and can you not write of it rather trenchantly? I say nothing about my women. That is a moot point. But surely there are some of them who help to give colour to the groups I draw." The end of the letter was: "I write with a numbed hand. I haven't been warm for weeks. This weather crushes me. Let me have a line about this letter."
The sort of poverty which crushed the aspiring is the keynote to the best work he did. He knew it, and was right in knowing it. He played all these parts himself. In many protean forms Maitland himself is discerned under the colour and character of his chosen names; and so far as he depicted a class hitherto untouched, or practically untouched, in England, as he declares, he was a great writer of fiction. But he was not a romantic writer. There were some books of romance he loved greatly. We often and often spoke of Murger's "Vie de Bohème." I do not think there was any passage in that book which so appealed to him as when Rodolphe worked in his adventitious fur-coat in his windy garret, declaring genially: "Maintenant le thermomètre va être furieusement vexé." Nevertheless, as I have said before, he knew, and few knew so well, the very bitter truth that Murger only vaguely indicated here and there in scattered passages. In the "Vie de Bohème" these characters "range" themselves at last; but mostly such men did not. They went under, they died in the hospital, they poisoned themselves, they blew out their brains, they sank and became degraded parasites of an uncomprehending bourgeoisie.
I spoke some time back of the painful hour when Maitland came to me to declare his considered opinion that I myself could not write successful fiction. It is an odd thing that I never returned the compliment in any way, for though I knew he could, and did, write great fiction, I knew his best work would not have been fiction in other circumstances. Out of martyrdom may come great things, but not out of martyrdom spring the natural blossoms of the natural mind. That he lived in the devil's twilight between the Dan of Camberwell and the Beersheba of Camden Town, when his natural environment should have been Italy, and Rome, or Sorrento, is an unfading tragedy. Only once or twice in his life did a spring or summer come to him in which he might grow the flowers he loved best and knew to be his natural destiny. The greatest tragedy of all, to my mind, is that final tragedy of "Basil" where at last, after long years of toil in fiction while fiction was yet necessary to his livelihood, he was compelled by his training to put into the form of a novel a theme not fit for such treatment save in the hands of a native and easy story-teller.
I have said nothing, or little except by implication, of the man's style. In many ways it was notable and even noble. To such a literary intelligence, informed with all the learning of the past towards which he leant, much of his style was inevitable; it was the man and his own. For the greater part it is lucid rather than sparkling, clear, if not cold; yet with a subdued rhythm, the result of much Latin and more Greek, for the metres of the Greek tragedies always inspired him with their noble rhythms. Though he was often cold and bitter, especially in his employment of irony, of which he is the only complete master in English literature except Samuel Butler, he could rise to heights of passionate description; and here and there a sense of luxury tinges his words with Tyrian purple—and this in spite of all his sense of restraint, which was more marked than that of almost any living writer.