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Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013458561 
 
THE PRIVATE LIFE OF 
 
 HENRY MAITLAND 
 
THE PRIVATE LIFE OE 
 
 HENRY MAITLAND 
 
 A RECORD DICTATED BY J.H. 
 REVISED AND EDITED BY 
 
 MORLEY ROBERTS 
 
 Second Edition 
 
 LONDON 
 EVELEIGH NASH 
 
 1912 
 
INSOBIBED 
 TO THE MEMORY OF 
 
 MY WIFE 
 
PREFACE 
 
 This book was dictated by J. H. mostly in my 
 presence, and I consider it well worth publish- 
 ing. No doubt Henry Maitland is not famous, 
 though since his death much has been written of 
 him. Most of it, however, outside of literary 
 criticism, has been futile and uninstructed. But 
 J, H. really knew the man, and here is what he 
 has said of him. We shall be told, no doubt, 
 that we have used Maitland's memory for our 
 own ends. Let that be as it may ; such an 
 accusation can only be met by denial. When 
 there is no proof of guilt, there may well be none 
 of innocence. The fact remains that Henry 
 Maitland's life was worth doing, even in the 
 abbreviated and censored form in which it now 
 appears. The man was not eminent, only be- 
 cause he was not popular and did not live long 
 enough. One gets to eminence nowadays by 
 longevity or by bad work. While Maitland 
 starved, X or Y or Z may wallow in a million 
 sixpences. In this almost childishly simple 
 account of a man's life there is the essence of our 
 
 ivii 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 literary epoch. Here is a writing man put down, 
 crudely it may be, but with a certain power. 
 There is no book quite like it in the English tongue, 
 and the critic may take what advantage he will of 
 that opening for his wit. 
 
 At any rate here we have a portrait emerging 
 which is real. Henry Maitland stands on his feet, 
 and on his living feet. He is not a British statue 
 done in the best mortuary manner. There is 
 far too little sincere biography in English. We 
 are a mealy-mouthed race, hypocrites by the 
 grave and the monument. Ten words of natural 
 eulogy, and another ten of curious and sympathetic 
 comment, may be better than tons of marble 
 built up by a hired liar with his tongue in his 
 cheek. In the whole book, which cannot be 
 published now, there are things worth waiting 
 for. I have cut and retrenched with pain, for I 
 wanted to risk the whole, but no writer or editor 
 is his own master in England. I am content 
 to have omitted some truth if I have permitted 
 nothing false. The reader who can say truly, 
 " I should not have liked to meet Henry Maitland," 
 is a fool or a fanatic, or more probably both. 
 Neither of those who are primarily responsible 
 for this little book is answerable to such. We 
 do not desire his praise, or even his mere allowance. 
 Such as are interested in the art of letters, and 
 
PREFACE ix 
 
 in those who practise in the High Court of 
 Literature, will perceive what we had in our 
 minds. Here is life, not a story or a constructed 
 diary, and the art with which it is done is a 
 secondary matter. If Henry Maitland bleeds and 
 howls, so did Philoctetes, and the outcry of Henry 
 Maitland is more pertinent to our lives. For all 
 life, even at its best, is tragic ; and there is much 
 in Maitland's which is dramatically common to 
 our world as we see it and live in it. If we have 
 lessened him at times from the point of view of a 
 hireling in biographic praise, we have set him 
 down life size all the same ; and as we ask no 
 praise, we care for no blame. Here is the man. 
 
 MoRLEY Roberts. 
 
 Note. — ^The full manuscript, which may possibly 
 be published after some years, is, in the meantime, 
 placed in safe custody. 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 It is never an easy thing to write the hfe, or even 
 such a sketch as I propose making, of a friend 
 whom one knew well, and in Henry Maitland's 
 case it is most uncommonly difficult. The usual 
 biographer is content with writing panegyric, 
 and as he must depend for his material, and even 
 sometimes for his eventual remuneration, on the 
 relatives of his subject, he is from the start in a 
 hopeless position, except, it may be, as regards 
 the public side of the life in question. But in the 
 case of a man of letters the personal element is 
 the only real and valuable one, or so it seems to 
 me, and even if I were totally ignorant of Maitland's 
 work I think it would yet be possible for me to do 
 a somewhat lifelike and live sketch of him. I 
 believe, moreover, that it is my duty to do it, 
 although no doubt in some ways it must be painful 
 to those connected with him. Yet soon after his 
 death many came to me desiring me to write 
 his biography. It was an understood thing that 
 of all his friends I knew him best, and was certainly 
 the greatest and chief authority on his career 
 
 11 
 
12 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 from the Moorhampton College days up to his final 
 break with his second wife. But in 1904 there 
 were many obstacles to my doing this work. 
 His two sons were young. His sisters and his 
 mother were still alive. I say nothing of the wife 
 herself, then being taken care of, or of a third 
 lady of whom I must speak presently. Several 
 people came to me with proposals about a book 
 on Henry Maitland. One of the partners of a big 
 publishing house made me a definite offer for it 
 on behalf of his firm. On the other hand one of 
 his executors, Miss Kingdon, a most kindly and 
 amiable and very able woman employed in a great 
 accountant's office in the city, who had done 
 very much for Henry Maitland in his later life, 
 begged me not to do the book, or if I did it to hold 
 it over until her responsibilities as executrix and 
 trustee for the sons were at an end. But it is 
 now nearly nine years since he died, and I feel 
 that if I do not put down at once what I knew of 
 him it never will be written, and something will 
 be lost, something which has perhaps a little 
 value, even though it is not so great as those 
 could wish who laiew and loved Henry Maitland. 
 
 There is no doubt many people will accuse me 
 of desiring to use his memory for my own ad- 
 vantage. "My withers are unwrung." Those 
 who speak in this way must have little knowledge 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 18 
 
 of the poor profit to be derived from writing such 
 a book, and the proportion of that profit to the 
 labour employed in it. On three separate occasions 
 I spoke to Maitland about writing his biography, 
 and it was an understood thing between us that 
 if he died before me I was to write his hfe and tell 
 the whole and absolute truth about him. This 
 he gave me the most definite permission to do. 
 I believe he felt that it might in some ways be 
 of service to humanity for such a book to be 
 written. Only the other day, when I wrote 
 to Miss Kingdon concerning the biography, she 
 answered me : " If I seem lacking in cordiality 
 in this matter do not attribute it to any want of 
 sympathy with you. I am not attempting to 
 dissuade you. Henry Maitland was sent into hell 
 for the purpose of saving souls ; perhaps it is a 
 necessary thing that his story should be written 
 by all sorts of people from their different points of 
 view." Once I proposed to him to use his 
 character and career as the chief figure in a long 
 story. He wrote to me, " By all means. Why 
 not ? " Had I not the letter in which he said this 
 I should myself almost doubt my own recollection, 
 but it is certain that he knew the value of his own 
 experience, and felt that he might perhaps by his 
 example save some from suffering as he did. 
 
 No doubt very much that I say of him will not 
 
14 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 be true to others. To myself it is true at any 
 rate. We know very little of each other, and 
 after all it is perhaps in biography that one is 
 most acutely conscious of the truth in the prag- 
 matic view of truth. Those things are true in 
 Henry Maitland's life and character which fit in 
 wholly with all my experience of him and make 
 a coherent and likely theory. I used to think I 
 knew him very well, and yet when I remember 
 and reflect it seems to me that I know exceedingly 
 little about him. And yet again, I am certain 
 that of the two people in the world that I was 
 best acquainted with he was one. We go through 
 life believing that we know many, but if we sit 
 down and attempt to draw them we find here and 
 there unrelated facts and many vague incoherencies. 
 We are in a fog about our very dear friend whom 
 but yesterday we were ready to judge and criticise 
 with an air of final knowledge. There is something 
 humiliating in this, and yet how should we, who 
 know so little of ourselves, know even those we 
 love ? To my mind, with all his weaknesses, 
 which I shall not extenuate, Maitland was a noble 
 and notable character, and if anything I should 
 write may endure but a little while it is because 
 there is really something of him in my words. 
 I am far more concerned to write about Henry 
 Maitland for those who loved him than for those 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 15 
 
 who loved him not, and I shall be much better 
 pleased if what I do about him takes the shape 
 of an impression rather than of anything like an 
 ordinary biography. Every important and un- 
 important political fool who dies nowadays is 
 buried under obituary notices and a mausoleum 
 in two volumes — ^a mausoleum which is, as a rule, 
 about as high a work of art as the angels on 
 tombstones in an early Victorian cemetery. But 
 Maitland, I think, deserves, if not a better, a more 
 sympathetic tribute. 
 
 When I left Radford Grammar School my father, 
 being in the Civil Service, was sent to Moorhampton 
 as Surveyor of Taxes, and his family shortly 
 followed him. I continued my own education at 
 Moorhampton College, which was then beginning 
 to earn a high reputation as an educational centre. 
 Some months before I met Maitland personally 
 I knew his reputation was that of an extra- 
 ordinary young scholar. Even as a boy of sixteen 
 he swept everything before him. There was 
 nobody in the place who could touch him at 
 classical learning, and everybody prophesied the 
 very greatest future for the boy. I met him first 
 in a little hotel not very far from the College 
 where some of us young fellows used to go between 
 the intervals of lectures to play a game of billiards. 
 I remember quite well seeing him sit on a little 
 
16 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 table swinging his legs, and to this day I can 
 remember somewhat of the impression he made 
 upon me. He was curiously bright, with a very 
 mobile face. He had abundant masses of brown 
 hair combed backwards over his head, grey-blue 
 eyes, a very sympathetic mouth, an extraordinarily 
 well-shaped chin — ^although perhaps both mouth 
 and chin were a little weak — and a great capacity 
 for talking and laughing. 
 
 Henceforth he and I became very firm friends 
 at the College, although we belonged to two 
 entirely different sets. I was supposed to be an 
 extraordinarily rowdy person, and was always 
 getting into trouble both with the authorities 
 and with my fellows, and he was a man who 
 loathed anything hke rowdiness, could not fight 
 if he tried, objected even then to the Empire, 
 hated patriotism, and thought about nothing 
 but ancient Greece and Rome, or so it would 
 appear to those who knew him at that time. 
 
 I learnt then a little of his early history. Even 
 when he was but a boy of ten or eleven he was 
 recognised as a creature of most brilliant promise. 
 He always believed that he owed most, and perhaps 
 everything, to his father, who must have been a 
 very remarkable man. Henry never spoke about 
 him in later life without emotion and affection. 
 I have often thought since that Maitland felt 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 17 
 
 that most of his disasters sprang from the pre- 
 mature death of his father, whom he loved so 
 tenderly. Indeed the elder man must have been 
 a remarkable figure, a gentle, courtly, and most 
 kindly man, himself born in exile and placed in 
 alien circumstances. Maitland often used to speak, 
 with a catch in his voice, of the way his father 
 read to him. I remember not what books, but 
 they were the classic authors of England ; Shake- 
 speare, Wordsworth, and Tennyson. Some seem 
 to imagine that the father had what is called a 
 well-stocked library. This was not true, but he 
 had many good books and taught his son to love 
 them. Among these there was one great volume 
 of Hogarth's drawings which came into Henry 
 Maitland's personal possession, only, I think, 
 when he was finally domiciled in a London flat, 
 where he and I often looked at it. It is curious 
 that as a boy Hogarth had a fascination for him. 
 He sometimes copied these drawings, for as a child 
 he had no little skill as a draughtsman. What 
 appealed to him in later days in Hogarth was the 
 power of the man's satire, his painful bitternessi 
 which can only be equalled by the ironies of Swift 
 in another medium. Although personally I admire 
 Hogarth I could never look at him with anything 
 like pleasure or, indeed, without acute discomfort. 
 I remember that Maitland in later years said in 
 
 B 
 
18 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 his book about the Victorian novehst : " With 
 these faces who would spend hours of leisure ? 
 Hogarth copied in the strict sense of the word. He 
 gives us life and we cannot bear it." 
 
 Maitland's family came, I think, from Worcester, 
 but something led the elder Maitland to Mire- 
 field's, and there he came in contact with a chemist 
 called Lake, whose business he presently bought. 
 Perhaps the elder Maitland was not a wholly 
 happy man. He was very gentle, but not a person 
 of marked religious feeling. Indeed I think the 
 attitude of the family at that time was that of 
 free thought. From everything that Henry said 
 of his father it always seemed to me that the man 
 had been an alien in the cold Yorkshire town where 
 his son was born. And Maitland knew that had 
 his father lived he would never have been thrown 
 alone into the great city of Moorhampton, " Lord 
 of himself, that heritage of woe." Not all women 
 understand the dangers that their sons may meet 
 in such surroundings, and those who had charge 
 of Henry Maitland's future never understood or 
 recognised them in his youth. But his father 
 would have known. In one chapter of " The 
 Vortex," there is very much of Maitland. It is a 
 curiously wrought picture of a father and his son 
 in which he himself played alternately the part 
 of father and child, I knew his anxieties for his 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 19 
 
 own children, and on reading that chapter one 
 sees them renewed. But in it there was much that 
 was not himself. It was drawn rather from what 
 he believed his father had felt. In " The Vortex " 
 the little boy spends an hour alone with his father 
 just before bedtime, and he calls it " A golden 
 hour, sacred to memories of the world's own 
 childhood." 
 
 Maitland went to school in Mirefields and this 
 school has been called a kind of " Dotheboys 
 Hall," which of course is absolutely ridiculous. 
 It was not, in fact, a boarding-school at all, but 
 a day school. The man who ran it was called 
 Hinkson. Maitland said he was an uneducated 
 man, or at any rate uneducated from his point of 
 view in later years, yet he was a person of very 
 remarkable character, and did very good work, 
 taking it all round. A man named Christopher 
 started this school and sold it to Hinkson, who 
 had, I believe, some kind of a degree obtained 
 at Durham. The boys who attended it were 
 good middle class and lower middle class, some 
 the sons of professional men, some the offspring 
 of the richer tradesmen. Upon the whole it was 
 a remarkably good school for that time. Many of 
 the boys actually left the Grammar School at 
 Mirefields to attend it. Henry Maitland always 
 owned that Hinkson took great pains with his 
 
20 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 scholars, and affirmed that many owed him much. 
 As I said, the general religious air of Maitland's 
 home at that time was one of free thought. I 
 believe the feminine members of the family 
 attended a Unitarian Church, but the father did 
 not go to church at all. One example of this 
 religious attitude of his home came out when 
 Hinkson called on his boys to repeat the collect 
 of the day and Maitland replied with an abrupt 
 negative that they did not do that kind of thing 
 at home. Whereupon Hinkson promptly set him 
 to acquire it, saying sternly that it would do him 
 no harm. 
 
 For the most part in those early days the elder 
 Maitland and his son spent Sunday afternoon in 
 the garden belonging to their Mirefields house. 
 Oddly enough this garden was not attached to the 
 dwelling but was a kind of allotment. It has been 
 photographically reproduced by Henry Maitland 
 in the seventh chapter of the first volume of 
 " Morning." Very often Henry Maitland's father 
 read to him in that garden. 
 
 One of Maitland's schoolfellows at Hinkson 's 
 school was the son of the man from whom his 
 fatlier had bought the druggist's business. The 
 elder Lake was a friend of Barry Sullivan, and 
 theatrically mad. He started plays in which 
 Henry always took some part, though not the 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 21 
 
 prominent part which has been attributed to him 
 by some. Nevertheless he was always interested 
 in plays and had a very dramatic way of reading 
 anything that was capable of dramatic inter- 
 pretation. He always loved the sound of words, 
 and even when he was a boy of about twelve he 
 took down a German book and read some of it 
 aloud to the younger Lake, who did not know 
 German and said so. Whereupon Maitland shook 
 his fist at him and said : " But Lake, listen, 
 listen, listen — doesn't it sound fine ? " This en- 
 dured through all his life. At this same time he 
 used to read Oliver Wendell Holmes aloud to 
 some of the other boys. This was when he was 
 thirteen. Even then he always mouthed the 
 words and loved their rhythm. 
 
 Naturally enough, his father being a poor man, 
 there would have been no opportunity of Henry 
 Maitland's going to Moorhampton and to its great 
 college if he had not obtained some scholarship. 
 This, I think, was the notion that his father had 
 at the time, and the necessity for it became more 
 imperative when his father died. He did obtain 
 this scholarship when he was somewhere about 
 sixteen, and immediately afterwards was sent over 
 to Moorhampton quite alone and put into lodgings 
 there. At his school in Mirefields he had taken 
 every possible prize, and I think it was two 
 
22 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 exhibitions from the London University which 
 enabled him to go to Moorhampton. The college 
 was a curious institution, one of the earliest 
 endeavours to create a kind of university centre 
 in a great provincial city. We certainly had 
 a very wonderful staff there, especially on the 
 scientific side. Among the men of science at the 
 college were Sir Henry Bissell ; Schorstein, the 
 great chemist ; Hahn, also a chemist, and 
 Balfour, the physicist. On the classical side 
 were Professor Little and Professor Henry Parker, 
 who were not by any means so eminent as their 
 scientific colleagues. The eminence of our scientific 
 professors did not matter very much from Henry 
 Maitland's point of view, perhaps, for from the 
 day of his birth to the day of his death, he took 
 no interest whatever in science and loathed all 
 forms of speculative thought with a peculiar and 
 almost amusing horror. Mathematics he detested, 
 and if in later years I ever attempted to touch upon 
 metaphysical questions he used to shut up, to use 
 an American phrase, just hke a clam. But on the 
 classical side he was much more than merely 
 successful. He took every possible prize that was 
 open to him. In his book " The Exile," there is 
 a picture of a youth on prize day going up to 
 receive prize after prize, and I know that this 
 chapter contains much of what he himself must 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 23 
 
 have felt when I saw him retire to a modest back 
 bench loaded with books bound in calf and tooled 
 in gold. 
 
 Of course a college of this description, which 
 was not, properly speaking, a university, could only 
 be regarded, for a boy of his culture, as a stepping- 
 stone to one of the older universities, probably 
 Cambridge, since most of my own friends who 
 did go to the university went there from Moor- 
 hampton. I do not think there was a professor 
 or lecturer or a single student in the college who 
 did not anticipate for Henry Maitland one of the 
 brightest possible futures, so far as success at the 
 university could make it so. It is possible that I 
 alone out of those who regarded him with ad- 
 miration and affection had some doubt of this, 
 and that was not because I disagreed as a boy with 
 any of the estimates that had been formed of 
 him, but simply because for some reason or another 
 he chose me as a confidant. Many years after- 
 wards he said to me with painful bitterness : "It 
 was a cruel and most undesirable thing that I, 
 at the age of sixteen, should have been turned 
 loose in a big city, compelled to live alone in 
 lodgings, with nobody interested in me but those at 
 the college. I see now that one of my sisters 
 should certainly have been sent with me to 
 Moorhampton." 
 
24 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 One day he showed me a photograph. It was 
 that of a young girl, aged perhaps seventeen — 
 he at the time being very httle more — with her 
 hair down her back. She was not beautiful, but 
 she had a certain prettiness, the mere prettiness 
 of youth, and she Was undoubtedly not a lady. 
 After some interrogation on my part he told me 
 that she was a young prostitute whom he knew, 
 and I do not think I am exaggerating my own 
 feelings when I say that I recognised instinctively 
 and at once that if his relations with her were not 
 put an end to some kind of disaster was in front 
 of him. It was not that I knew very much about 
 life, for what could a boy of less than eighteen 
 really know about it ? — but I had some kind of 
 instinctive sense in me, and I was perfectly aware, 
 even then, that Henry Maitland had about as little 
 savoir-vivre as anybody I had ever met up to that 
 time, or anybody I could ever expect to meet. 
 It may seem strange to some that even at that 
 time I had no moral views, and extremely little 
 religion, although I may say incidentally that 
 I thought about it sufficiently to become deli- 
 berately a Unitarian, refusing to be confirmed in 
 the English Church, very much to the rage of the 
 parish clergyman, and with the result of much 
 friction with my father. Yet although I had no 
 moral views I did my best to get Maitland to give 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 25 
 
 up this girl, but he would not do it. The thing 
 went on, so far as I am aware, for the best part of 
 a year. He did all he could, apparently, to get 
 Marian Hilton to leave the streets. He even 
 bought a sewing machine and gave it her with 
 this view. That was another sample of his early 
 idealism. 
 
 This was in 1876, and the younger Lake, who 
 was three years older than Maitland, had by then 
 just qualified as a doctor. He was an assistant 
 at Darwen and one day went over to Moorhampton 
 to see Henry, who told him what he had told me 
 about this Marian Hilton. He even went so far 
 as to say that he was going ito marry her. Dr. 
 Lake, of course, being an older man, and knowing 
 something of life fhrough his own profession, did 
 not approve of this and strongly objected. After- 
 wards he regretted a thousand times that he had 
 not written direct to Maitland's people to tell 
 them of what was going on. Still, although he 
 was the older man, he was not so much older as 
 to have got rid of the boyish loyalty of one youth 
 to another, and he did not do what he knew he 
 ought to have done. He found out that Maitland 
 had even sold his father's watch to help this girl. 
 This affair was also known to a young accountant 
 who came from Mirefields whom I did not know, 
 and also to another man at the college who is now 
 
26 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 in the (Government Service. So far as I remember 
 the accountant was not a good influence, but his 
 other friend did what he could to get Maitland to 
 break off this very undesirable relationship, with 
 no more success than myself. 
 
 I have never understood how it was that he got 
 into such frightful financial difficulties. I can 
 only imagine that Marian must have had, in one 
 way or another, the greater portion of the income 
 which he got from the scholarships he held. I 
 do know that his affection for her seemed at this 
 time to be very sincere. And out of that affection 
 there grew up, very naturally, a horror in his 
 sensitive mind for the life this poor child was 
 leading. He haunted the streets which she 
 haunted, and sometimes saw her with other men. 
 I suppose even then she must have been frightfully 
 extravagant, and perhaps given to drink, but 
 considering what his income was I think he should 
 have been able to give her a pound a week if 
 necessary, and yet have had sufficient to live on 
 without great difficulty. Nevertheless he did get 
 into difficulties, and never even spoke to me about 
 it. I was quite aware, in a kind of dim way, that 
 he was in trouble and looked very ill, but he did 
 not give me his fullest confidence, although one 
 day he told me, as he had told Lake, that he 
 proposed marrying her. I was only a boy, but I 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 27 
 
 was absolutely enraged at the notion and used 
 every possible means to prevent hijn committing 
 such an absurd act of folly. When I met him I 
 discussed it with him. When I was away from 
 him I wrote him letters. I suppose I wrote him a 
 dozen letters begging that he would do no such 
 foolish thing. I told him that he would wrong 
 himself, and could do the girl no possible good. 
 My instincts told me even then that she would, 
 instead of being raised, pull him down. These 
 letters of mine were afterwards discovered in his 
 rooms when the tragedy had happened. 
 
 During that time in 1876, we students at Moor- 
 hampton College were much disturbed by a series 
 of thefts in the common room, and from a locker 
 room in which we kept our books and papers and 
 our overcoats. Books disappeared unaccountably 
 and so did coats. Money was taken from the 
 pockets of coats left in the room, and nobody 
 knew who was to blame for this. Naturally 
 enough we suspected a porter or one of the lower 
 staff, but we were wrong. Without our knowledge 
 the college authorities set a detective to discover 
 who was to blame. One day I went into the 
 common room, and standing in front of the fire 
 found a man, a young fellow about my age, called 
 Sarle, with whom I frequently played chess — 
 he was afterwards president of the chess club at 
 
28 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 Oxford— and he said to me : " Have you heard 
 the news ? " " What news ? " I asked. " Your 
 friend, Henry Maitland, has been stealing those 
 things that we have lost," he said. And when 
 he said it I very nearly struck him, for it seemed 
 a gross and incredible slander. But unfortunately 
 it was true, and at that very moment Maitland 
 was in gaol. A detective had hidden himself 
 in the small room leading out of the bigger room 
 where the lockers were and had caught him in the 
 act. It was a very ghastly business and certainly 
 the first great shock I ever got in my life. I 
 think it was the same for everybody who knew 
 the boy. The whole college was in a most extra- 
 ordinary ferment, and, indeed, I may say the 
 whole of Moorhampton which took any real 
 interest in the college. 
 
 Professor Little, who was then the head of the 
 college, sent for me and asked me what I knew 
 of the matter. I soon discovered that this was 
 because the police had found letters from me in 
 Maitland's room which referred to Marian Hilton. 
 I told the professor with the utmost frankness 
 everything that I knew about the affair, and 
 maintained that I had done my utmost to get him 
 to break with her, a statement which all my letters 
 supported. I have often imagined a certain 
 suspicion, in the minds of some of those Avho are 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 29 
 
 given to suspicion, that I myself had been leading 
 the same kind of life as Henry Maitland. This 
 was certainly not true ; but I believe that one or 
 two of those who did not like me — ^and there are 
 always some — ^threw out hints that I knew Maitland 
 had been taking these things. Yet after my very 
 painful interview with Professor Little, who was 
 a very delightful and kindly personality — ^though 
 certainly not so strong a man as the head of such 
 an institution should be — I saw that he gave me 
 every credit for what I had tried to do. Among 
 my own friends at the college was a young fellow, 
 Edward Wolff, the son of the Rev. Mr. Wolff, the 
 Unitarian minister at the chapel in Broad Street. 
 Edward was afterwards fifth wrangler of his year 
 at Cambridge. He got his father to interest 
 himself in Henry Maitland's future. Mr. Wolff 
 and several other men of some eminence in the 
 city did what they could for him. They got to- 
 gether a little money and on his release from prison 
 sent him away to America. He was met on 
 coming out of prison by Dr. Lake's father, who 
 also helped him in every possible way. 
 
 It seemed to me then that I had probably seen 
 the last of Maitland, and the turn my own career 
 took shortly afterwards rendered this even more 
 likely. In the middle of 1876 I had a very serious 
 disagreement with my father, who was a man of 
 
30 HENRY MAITLAND 
 
 great ability but very violent temper, and left 
 home. On September 23 of that year I sailed 
 for Australia and remained there, working mostly 
 in the bush, for the best part of three years. 
 During all that time I heard little of Henry 
 Maitland, though I have some dim remembrance 
 of a letter I received from him telling me that 
 he was in America. It was in 1879 that I shipped 
 before the mast at Melbourne in a Blackwall 
 barque and came back to England as a seaman. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 A PSYCHOLOGIST or a romancer might comment 
 on the matter of the last chapter till the sun went 
 down, but the world perhaps would not be much 
 further advanced. It is better, I think, for the 
 man's apology or condemnation to come out of the 
 drama that followed. This is where Life mocks 
 at Art. The tragic climax and catastrophe are 
 in the first act, and the remainder is a long and 
 bitter commentary. Maitland and I never dis- 
 cussed his early life. Practically we never spoke 
 of Moorhampton though we often enough touched 
 on ancient things by implication. His whole 
 life as I saw it, and as I shall relate it, is but a 
 development of the nature which made his disaster 
 possible. 
 
 So one comes back to my own return from 
 Australia. I had gone out there as a boy, and 
 came back a man, for I had had a man's ex- 
 periences ; work, adventure, travel, hunger, and 
 thirst. All this hardened a somewhat neurotic 
 temperament, at any rate for the time, till life 
 in a city, and the humaner world of books removed 
 
 3i 
 
32 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 the temper which one gets when plunged in the 
 baths of the ocean. During some months I 
 worked for a position in the Civil Service and 
 thought very little of Maitland, for he was lost. 
 Yet as I got back into the classics he returned to 
 me at times, and I wrote to my own friends in 
 Moorhampton about him. They sent me vague 
 reports of him in the United States, and then at 
 last there came word that he was once more in 
 England ; possibly, and even probably, in London. 
 Soon afterwards I found an advertisement in 
 the Aihenoeum of a book entitled " Children of the 
 Dawn," by Henry Maitland. As soon as I saw it 
 I went straightway to the firm which published it, 
 and being ignorant of the ways of publishers, 
 demanded Maitland's address, which was promptly 
 and very properly refused — for all they knew 
 I might have been a creditor. They promised, 
 however, to send on a letter to him, and I wrote 
 one at once, receiving an answer the very next 
 day. He appointed as our meeting-place the 
 smoking-room of the Horse Shoe Hotel at the 
 bottom of Tottenham Court Road. Conceivably 
 it was one of the most curious meetings that had 
 ever taken place in such a locality. We met late 
 at night in the crowded smoking-room, and I 
 found him very much his old self, for he was 
 still a handsome and intelligent boy, though 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 83 
 
 somewhat worn and haggard considering his years. 
 As for myself, I remember that he told me, 
 chuckling, that I looked like a soldier, which was 
 no doubt the result of some years on horseback — 
 possibly I walked with a cavalry stride. We sat 
 and drank coflee, and had whiskey, and smoked, 
 until we were turned out of the hotel at half-past 
 twelve. It was perhaps owing to the fact that I 
 was ever the greater talker that he learnt more of 
 my life in Australia than I learnt of his in the 
 United States. He was, in fact, somewhat re- 
 served as to his adventures there. And yet, 
 little by little, I learnt a great deal — ^it was always 
 a case of little by little with him. At no time did 
 he possess any great fluency or power of words 
 when speaking of his own life. 
 
 It seems that friends had given him some letters 
 to writers and others in New York, and he made the 
 acquaintance there of many whose names I forget. 
 I only recollect the name of Lloyd Garrison, the 
 poet. Maitland told me that upon one occasion 
 Lloyd Garrison induced him to go home with him 
 about two o'clock in the morning to hear a sonnet 
 on which Garrison had been working, as he 
 affirmed almost with tears, for three whole 
 months. As Maitland said, the result hardly 
 justified the toil. Among the friends that he 
 made there were a few of artistic and literary 
 
 c 
 
34 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 tendencies who had made a little club, where it 
 was de rigueur at certain times to produce something 
 in the form of a poem. Maitland showed me the 
 set of verses with which he had paid his literary 
 footing ; they were amusing, but of no great 
 importance. So long as Maitland's money lasted 
 in New York he had not an unpleasant time. It 
 was only when he exhausted his means and had to 
 earn a living by using his wits that he found 
 himself in great difficulties, which were certainly 
 not to be mitigated by the production of verse. 
 But Maitland never pretended to write poetry, 
 though he sometimes tried. I still have a few 
 of his poems in my possession, one of them a set 
 of love verses which he put into one of his books 
 but omitted on my most fervent recommendation. 
 I believe, however, that there is still much verse 
 by him in existence, if he did not destroy it in 
 later years when circumstances, his wanderings 
 and his poverty, made it inconvenient to preserve 
 comparatively worthless papers. And yet, if he 
 did not destroy it, it might now be of no small 
 interest to men of letters. 
 
 When his means were almost exhausted he went 
 to Boston, and from there drifted to Chicago. 
 With a very few comments and alterations, the 
 account given in " Paternoster Row," contains 
 the essence ^of Maitland's own adventures in 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 35 
 
 America. It is, of course, written in a very light 
 style, and is more or less tinged with humour. 
 This humour, however, is purely literary, for he 
 felt very little of it when he was telling me the 
 story. He certainly lived during two days, for 
 instance, upon peanuts, and he did it in a town 
 called Troy. I never gathered what actually 
 drove him to Chicago : it was, perhaps, the 
 general idea that one gets in America that if one 
 goes west one goes to the land of chances, but it 
 certainly was not the land for Henry Maitland. 
 Nevertheless, as he relates in " Paternoster Row," 
 he reached it with less than five dollars in his 
 pocket, and with a courage which he himself 
 marvelled at, paid four and a half dollars for a 
 week's board and lodging, which made him secure 
 for the moment. This boarding-house he once or 
 twice described to me. It was an unclean place 
 somewhere on Wabash Avenue, and was occupied 
 very largely by small actors and hangers-on at 
 the Chicago theatres. The food was poor, the 
 service was worse, and there was only one common 
 room, in which they ate and lived. It was at this 
 time, when he had taken a look round Chicago 
 and found it very like Hell or Glasgow, which, 
 indeed, it is, that he determined to attack the 
 editor of the Chicago Tribune. The description 
 he gives of this scene in " Paternoster Row " is 
 
86 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 not wholly accurate. I remember he said that he 
 walked to and fro for hours outside the offices of 
 the paper before he took what remained of his 
 courage in both hands, rushed into the elevator, 
 and was carried to an upper storey. He asked 
 for work, and the accessible and genial editor 
 demanded, in return, what experience he had had 
 with journalism. He said, with desperate bold- 
 ness, " None whatever," and the editor, not at all 
 unkindly, asked him what he thought he could do 
 for them. He replied, " There is one thing that is 
 wanting in your paper." "What is that?" 
 asked the editor. " Fiction," said Maitland, " I 
 should like to write you some." The editor con- 
 sidered the matter, and said that he had no objec- 
 tion to using a story provided it was good ; it 
 would serve for one of the weekly supplements, 
 because these American papers at the end of the 
 week have amazing supplements, full of all sorts 
 of conceivable matter. Maitland asked if he might 
 try him with a story of English life, and got per- 
 mission to do so. 
 
 He went away and walked up and down the 
 lake shore for hours in the bitter wind, trying to 
 think out a story, and at last discovered one. 
 On his way home he bought a pen, ink, and paper, 
 which they did not supply at the boarding-house. 
 As it was impossible to write in Ws bedrooip, 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 37 
 
 where there was, of course, no fire, and no proper 
 heating, it being so poor a place, he was compelled 
 to write on the table of the common room with 
 a dozen other men there, talking, smoking, and 
 no doubt quarreUing. He wrote this story in a 
 couple of days, and it was long enough to fill 
 several columns of the paper. To his intense 
 relief it was accepted by the editor after a day 
 or two's waiting, and he got eighteen dollars 
 according to " Paternoster Row," though I believe 
 as a matter of fact it was less in reality. He 
 stayed for some time in Chicago working for the 
 Tribune, but at last found that he could write no 
 more. I believe the editor himself suggested that 
 the stories were perhaps not quite what he wanted. 
 The one that I saw I only remember vaguely. 
 It was, however, a sort of psychological love-story 
 placed in London, written without much distinction. 
 The account Broughton gives in " Paternoster 
 Row " of his visit to Troy is iairly representative 
 of Maitland's experiences. It was there that he 
 lived for two or three days on peanuts, buying 
 five cents' worth in the street now and then at 
 some Italian peanut stand. In " Paternoster Row " 
 he calls them loathsome, and no doubt they 
 soon do become loathsome. A few are rather 
 pleasing, more than a few are objectionable ; 
 and when anybody tries a whole diet of them for 
 
38 THE PRIVATE LlPfi 
 
 a day or two there is no doubt " loathsome " would 
 be the proper word. After that he worked for a 
 photographer for a few days, and then, I think, 
 for a plumber, but of this I remember very little. 
 It is quite certain that he never earned enough 
 money in America to enable him to return to 
 England, but who lent it to him I have no idea. 
 To have been twenty-four hours with no more 
 than a handful of peanuts in his pocket was no 
 doubt an unpleasant experience, but, as I told 
 him, it seemed very little to me. On one occasion 
 in Australia I had been rather more than four and 
 a half days without food when caught in a flood. 
 Nevertheless this starvation was for him one of 
 the initiation ceremonies into the mysteries of 
 literature, and he was always accustomed to say, 
 " How can such an one write ? He never starved." 
 Nevertheless to have been hard up in Chicago 
 was a very great experience, as every one knows 
 who knows that desperate city of the plains. 
 Since that time I myself have known Chicago well, 
 and have been there " dead broke." Thus I can 
 imagine the state that he must have been in, and 
 how desperate he must have become, to get out of 
 his difficulties in the way that he actually em- 
 ployed. The endeavour to obtain work in a 
 hustling country like the United States is ever 
 a desperate proceeding for a nervous and sensitive 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 39 
 
 man, and what it must have been to Henry 
 Maitland to do what he did with the editor of the 
 Chicago Tribune can only be imagined by those 
 who knew him. In many ways he was the most 
 modest and the shyest man who ever hved, and yet 
 he actually told this editor : " I have come to 
 point out to you there is a serious lack in your 
 paper." To those who knew Maitland this must 
 seem as surprising as it did to myself, and in 
 later years he sometimes thought of that incident 
 with inexpressible joy in his own courage. Of 
 course the oddest thing about the whole affair 
 is that up to that moment he had never written 
 fiction at all, and only did it because he was 
 driven to desperation. As will be seen when I 
 come later to discuss his qualifications as a writer 
 this is a curious comment on much of his bigger 
 work. To me it seems that he should never have 
 written fiction at all, although he did it so ad- 
 mirably. I think it would be very interesting if 
 some American student of Maitland would turn 
 over the files of the Tribune in the years 1878 and 
 1879 and disinter the work he did there. This is 
 practically all I ever learnt about his life on the 
 other side of the Atlantic. I was, indeed, more 
 anxious to discover how he lived in London, and 
 in what circumstances. I asked him as delicately 
 as possible about his domestic circumstances, 
 
40 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 and he then told me that he was married, and that 
 his wife was with him in London. 
 
 It is very curious to think that I never actually 
 met his first wife. I had, of course, seen her 
 photograph, and I have on several occasions 
 been in the next room to her. On those occasions 
 she was usually unable to be seen, mostly because 
 she was intoxicated. When we renewed our 
 acquaintance in the Horse Shoe Tavern he was 
 then living in mean apartments in one of the back 
 streets off Tottenham Court Road not very far 
 from the hotel and indeed not far from a cellar 
 that he once occupied in a neighbouring 
 street. Little by little as I met him again 
 and again I began to get some hold upon his 
 actual life. Gradually he became more con- 
 fidential, and I gathered from him that the habits 
 of his wife were perpetually compelling him to 
 move from one house to another. From what he 
 told me, sometimes hopefully, and more often in 
 desperation, it seems that this poor creature 
 made vain and violent efforts to reform, generally 
 after some long debauch. And of this I am very 
 sure, that no man on earth could have made more 
 desperate efforts to help her than he made. But 
 the actual fact remains that they were turned 
 out of one lodging after the other, for even the 
 poorest places, it seems, could hardly stand a 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 41 
 
 woman of her character in the house. I fear it 
 was not only that she drank, but at intervals she 
 deserted him and went back, for the sake of more 
 drink, and for the sake of money with which he 
 was unable to supply her, to her old melancholy 
 trade. And yet she returned again with tears, 
 and he took her in, doing his best for her. It 
 was six months after our first meeting in Tottenham 
 Court Road that he asked me to go and spend an 
 evening with him. Naturally enough I then 
 expected to make Mrs. Maitland's acquaintance, 
 but on my arrival he showed some disturbance 
 of mind and told me that she was ill and would 
 be unable to see me. The house they lived in 
 then was not very far from Mornington Crescent. 
 It was certainly in some dull neighbourhood not 
 half a mile away. The street was, I think, a 
 cul-de-sac. It was full of children of the lower 
 orders playing in the roadwaj . Their fathers and 
 mothers, it being Saturday night, sat upon the 
 doorsteps, or quarrelled, or talked in the road. 
 The front room in which he received me was both 
 mean and dirty. The servant who took me 
 upstairs was a poor foul slut, and I do not think 
 the room had been properly cleaned or dusted for 
 a very long time. The whole of the furniture in 
 it was certainly not worth seven and sixpence 
 from the point of view of the ordinary furniture 
 
42 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 dealer. There were signs in it that it had been 
 occupied by a woman, and one without the common 
 elements of decency and cleanliness. Under a 
 miserable and broken sofa lay a pair of dirty 
 feminine boots. And yet on one set of poor 
 shelves there were, still shining with gold, the 
 prizes Maitland had won at Moorhampton College, 
 and his painfully acquired stock of books that he 
 loved so much. 
 
 As I came in by arrangement after my own 
 dinner, we simply sat and smoked and drank a 
 little whiskey. Twice in the course of an hour our 
 conversation was interrupted by the servant 
 knocking at the door and beckoning to Maitland 
 to come out. In the next room I then heard 
 voices, sometimes raised, sometimes pleading. 
 When Maitland returned the first time he said to 
 me, " I am very sorry to have to leave you for a 
 few minutes. My wife is really unwell." But I 
 knew by now the disease from which she suffered. 
 Twice or thrice I was within an ace of getting up 
 and saying, " Don't you think I'd better go, old 
 chap ? " And then he was called out again. He 
 came back at last in a state of obvious misery and 
 perturbation, and said, " My dear man, my wife 
 is so ill that I think I must ask you to go." I 
 shook hands with him in silence and went, for I 
 understood. A little afterwards he told me that 
 
OF HENRY MaItLaND 4S 
 
 that very afternoon his wife had gone out, and 
 obtaining drink in some way had brought it home 
 with her, and that she was then almost insane 
 with alcohol. This was the kind of life that Henry 
 Maitland, perhaps a great man of letters, lived for 
 years. Comfortable people talk of his pessimism, 
 and his greyness of outlook, and never understand. 
 The man really was a hedonist, he loved things 
 beautiful — beautiful and orderly. He rejoiced in 
 every form of Art, in books and in music, and in 
 all the finer inheritance of the past. But this was 
 the life he lived, and the life he seemed to be 
 doomed to live from the very first. 
 
 When a weak man has a powerful sense of duty 
 he is hard to handle by those who have some 
 wisdom. In the early days I had done my best 
 to induce him to give up this woman, long before 
 he married her, when he was but a foolish boy. 
 Now I once more did my best to get him to leave 
 her, but I cannot pretend for an instant that any- 
 thing I said or did would have had any grave 
 effect if it had not been that the poor woman 
 was herself doomed to be her own destroyer. 
 Her outbreaks became more frequent, her de- 
 partures from his miserable roof more prolonged. 
 The windy gaslight of the slums appealed to her, 
 and the money that she earned therein ; and 
 finally when it seemed that she would return no 
 
44 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 more he changed his rooms, and through the land- 
 lady of the wretched house at which he found she 
 was staying he arranged to pay her ten shillings 
 a week. As I know, he often made much less 
 than ten shillings a week, and frequently found 
 himself starving that she might have so much 
 more to spend in drink. 
 
 This went on for years. It was still going on in 
 1884 when I left England again and went out to 
 Texas. I had not succeeded in making a successful 
 attack upon the English Civil Service, and the 
 hateful work I did afterwards caused my health to 
 break down. I was in America for three years. 
 During that time I wrote fully and with a certain 
 regularity to Maitland. When I came back and 
 was writing "The Western Trail," he returned 
 me the letters he had received from me. Among 
 them I found some, frequently dealing with literary 
 subjects, addressed from Texas, Minnesota, Iowa, 
 the Rocky Mountains, Lower British Columbia, 
 Oregon, and California, In his letters to me he 
 never referred to Marian, but I gathered that his 
 life was very hard, and, of course, I understood, 
 without his saying it, that he was still supporting 
 her. I found that this was so when I returned to 
 England in 1887. At that time, by dint of hard, 
 laborious work, which included a great deal of 
 teaching, he was making for the first time some- 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 45 
 
 thing of a living. He occupied a respectable 
 but very dismal flat somewhere at the back of 
 Madame Tussaud's, in a place at that time called 
 " Cumberland Residences." It was afterwards 
 renamed " Cumberland Mansions," and I well 
 remember Maitland's frightful and really superflu- 
 ous scorn of the snobbery which spoke in such a 
 change of name. As I said, we corresponded 
 the whole of the time I was in America. I used 
 to send him a great deal of verse, some of which 
 he pronounced actually poetry. No doubt this 
 pleased me amazingly, and I wish that I still 
 possessed his criticisms written to me while I was 
 abroad. It is, from any point of view, a very great 
 disaster that in some way which I cannot account 
 for I have lost all his letters written to me previous 
 to 1894. Our prolonged, and practically un- 
 interrupted correspondence began in 1884, so I 
 have actually lost the letters of ten whole years. 
 They were interesting from many points of 
 view. Much to my surprise, while I was in 
 America, they came to me, not dated in the 
 ordinary way, but according to the Comtist 
 calendar. I wrote to him for an explanation, 
 because up to that time I had never heard 
 of it. In his answering letter he told me that 
 he had become a Positivist. This was doubtless 
 owing to the fact that he had come acciden- 
 
46 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 tally under the influence of some well-known 
 Positivists. 
 
 It seems that in desperation at his utter failure 
 to make a real living at literature he had taken 
 again to a tutor's work, which in a way was where 
 he began. I find that in the marriage certificate 
 between him and Marian Hilton he called himself 
 a teacher of languages. But undoubtedly he 
 loathed teaching save in those rare instances 
 where he had an intelligent and enthusiastic 
 pupil. At the time that I came back to England 
 he was teaching Harold Edgeworth's sons. With- 
 out a doubt Harold Edgeworth was extremely 
 kind to Henry Maitland and perhaps to some little 
 extent appreciated him, in spite of the preface 
 which he wrote in later years to the posthumous 
 "Basil." He was not only tutor to Harold 
 Edgeworth's sons, but was also received at his 
 house as a guest. He met there many men of a 
 certain literary eminence ; Cotter Morrison, for 
 instance, of whom he sometimes spoke to me, 
 especially of his once characterising a social 
 chatterer as a cloaca maxima of small talk. He 
 also met Edmund Roden, with whom he remained 
 on terms of friendship to the last, often visiting 
 him in his house at Felixstowe, which is known 
 to many men of letters. I think the fact that 
 Edmund Roden was not only a man of letters but 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 47 
 
 also, oddly enough, the manager of a great business, 
 appealed in some way to Maitland's sense of 
 humour. He liked Roden amazingly, and it was 
 through him, if I remember rightly, that he became 
 socially acquainted with George Meredith, whom, 
 however, he had met in a business way when 
 Meredith was reading for some firm of publishers 
 at a salary of two hundred a year. 
 
 Nevertheless, in spite of his making money by 
 some tutorial work, Maitland was still as poor as a 
 rat in a cellar, and the absurd antinomy between 
 the society he frequented at times and his real 
 position, made him sometimes shout with laughter 
 which was Hot always really humorous. It was 
 during this period of his life that a lady asked him 
 at an " at-home " what his experience was in the 
 management of butlers. According to what he 
 told me he replied seriously that he always strictly 
 refrained from having anything to do with men 
 servants, as he much preferred a smart-looking 
 young maid. It was during this period that he 
 did some work with a man employed, I think, at 
 the London Skin Hospital. This poor fellow, it 
 seemed, desired to rise in life, and possessed 
 ambition. He wanted to pass the London matri- 
 culation examination and thus become, as he 
 imagined, somebody of importance. Naturally 
 enough, being but a clerk, he lacked time for work, 
 
48 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 and the arrangement come to between him and 
 Maitland was that his teacher should go to his 
 lodgings at seven o'clock in the morning and 
 give him his lesson in bed before breakfast. As 
 this was just before the time that Maitland worked 
 for Mr. Harold Edgeworth, he was too poor, so 
 he said, to pay bus fares from the slum in which 
 he lived, and as a result he had to rise at six 
 o'clock in the morning, walk for a whole hour to 
 his pupil's lodgings, and then was very frequently 
 met with the message that Mr. So-and-so felt much 
 too tired that morning to receive him, and begged 
 Mr, Maitland would excuse him. It is a curious 
 comment on the authority of " The Meditations 
 of Mark Sumner," which many cling to as un- 
 doubtedly authentic, that he mentions this in- 
 cident as if he did not mind it. As a matter of 
 fact he was furiously wrath with this man for not 
 rising to receive him, and used to go away in a state 
 of almost ungovernable rage, as he told me many 
 and many a time. 
 
 After my return from America we used to meet 
 regularly once a week on Sunday afternoons, for 
 I had now commenced my own initiation into the 
 mystery of letters, and had become an author. 
 By Maitland's advice, and, if I may say so, almost 
 by his inspiration — most certainly his encourage- 
 ment — I wrote " The Western Trail," and tavin^f 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 49 
 
 actually printed a book I felt that there was still 
 another bond between me and Maitland. I used 
 to turn up regularly at 7 K Cumberland Residences 
 at three o'clock on Sundays. From then till 
 seven we talked of our work, of Latin and of 
 Greek, of French, and of everything on earth that 
 touched on literature. Long before seven Maitland 
 used to apply himself very seriously to the subject 
 of cooking. As he could not afford two fires he 
 usually cooked his pot on the fire of the sitting- 
 room. This pot of his was a great institution. 
 It reminds me sometimes of the gypsies' pot in 
 which they put everything that comes to hand. 
 Maitland's idea of cooking was fatness and a 
 certain amount of gross abundance. He used to 
 put into this pot potatoes, carrots, turnips, 
 portions of meat, perhaps a steak, or on great days 
 a whole rabbit, all of which he had bought himself, 
 and carried home with his own hands. We used 
 to watch the pot boiling, and perhaps about 
 seven or half -past he would investigate its contents, 
 with a long, two-pronged iron fork, and finally 
 decide much to our joy and contentment that the 
 contents were edible. After our meal, for which 
 I was usually ready, as I was practically starving 
 much of this time myself, we removed the debris, 
 washed up in company, and resumed our literary 
 conversation, which sometimes lasted until ten 
 
 D 
 
50 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 or eleven. By that time Maitland usually turned 
 me out, although my own day was not necessarily 
 done for several hours. At those times when I 
 was writing at all, I used to write between midnight 
 and six o'clock in the morning. 
 
 Those were great talks that we had, but they 
 were nearly always talks about ancient times, 
 about the Greeks and Romans, so far as we strayed 
 from English literature. It may seem an odd 
 thing, and it is odd until it is explained, that he 
 had very little interest in the Renaissance. There 
 is still in existence a letter of his to Edmund 
 Roden saying how much he regretted that he 
 took no interest in it. That letter was, I think, 
 dated from Siena, a city of the Renaissance. 
 The truth of the matter is that he was essentially 
 a creature of the Renaissance himself, a pure 
 Humanist. For this very reason he displayed 
 no particular pleasure in that period. He was 
 interested in the time in which the men of the 
 Renaissance revelled after its rediscovery and the 
 new birth of learning. He would have been 
 at his best if he had been born when that time 
 was in flower. The fathers of the Renaissance 
 rediscovered Rome and Athens, and so did he. 
 No one can persuade me that if this had been his 
 fate his name would not now have been as sacred 
 to all who love literature as those of Petrarch and 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 51 
 
 his glorious fellows. As a matter of fact it was 
 this very quality of his which gave him such a 
 lofty and lordly contempt for the obscurantist 
 theologian. In my mind I can see him treating 
 with that irony which was ever his favourite 
 weapon, some relic of the dark ages of the schools, 
 In those hours that we spent together it was 
 wonderful to hear him talk of Greece even before 
 he knew it, for he saw it as it had been, or as his 
 mind made him think it had been, not with the 
 modern Greek — who is perhaps not a Greek at 
 all — shouting in the market-place. I think that 
 he had a historical imagination of a very high 
 order, even though he undoubtedly failed when 
 endeavouring to use it. That was because he 
 used it in the wrong medium. But when he saw 
 the Acropolis in his mind he saw it before the 
 Turks had stabled their horses in the Parthenon, and 
 before the English, worse vandals than the Turks, 
 had brought away to the biting smoke of London 
 the marbles of Pheidias. Even as a boy he loved 
 the roar and fume of Rome, although he had not 
 yet seen it and could only imagine it. He saw in 
 Italy the land of Dante and Boccaccio, a land 
 still peopled in the south towards Sicily with such 
 folks as these and Horace had known. My own 
 education had been wrought out in strange, rough 
 places in the new lands. It was a fresh education 
 
52 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 for me to come back to London and sit with 
 Maitland on these marvellous Sunday afternoons 
 and evenings when he wondered if the time would 
 ever come for him to see Italy and Greece in all 
 reality. It was for the little touches of realism, 
 the little pictures in the Odes, that he loved 
 Horace, and loved still more his Virgil ; and, 
 even more, Theocritus and Moschos, for Theocritus 
 wrote things which were ancient and yet modern, 
 full of the truth of humanity. Like all the men 
 of the Renaissance he turned his eyes wistfully 
 to the immemorial past, renewed in the magic 
 alembic of his own mind. 
 
 Nevertheless, great as these hours were that we 
 spent together, they were sometimes deeply 
 melancholy, and he had nothing to console him 
 for the miseries which were ever in the background. 
 It was upon one of these Sundays, I think early in 
 January 1888, that I found him in a peculiarly 
 melancholy and desperate condition. No doubt he 
 was overworked, for he always was overworked ; 
 but he said that he could stand it no longer, he 
 must get out of London for a few days or so. For 
 some reason which I cannot for the world under- 
 stand, he decided to go to Eastbourne, and begged 
 me to go with him. Why he should have selected, 
 m Christmas weather and an east wind, what is 
 possibly the coldest town in England in such 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 58 
 
 conditions, I cannot say, but I remember that the 
 journey down to the sea was mercilessly cold. 
 Of course we went third class, and the carriages 
 were totally unheated. We were both of us 
 practically in extreme poverty. I was living in 
 a single room in Chelsea, for which I paid four 
 shillings a week, and for many months my total 
 weekly expenses were something under twelve 
 shillings. At that particular moment he was 
 doing extremely badly, and the ten shillings that 
 he paid regularly to his wife frequently left him 
 with insufficient to live upon. I can hardly 
 understand how it was that he determined to spend 
 even the little extra money needed for such a 
 journey. When we reached Eastbourne we walked 
 with our bags in our hands down to the sea front, 
 and then, going into a poor back street, selected 
 rooms. It was perhaps what he and I often 
 called " the native malignity of matter," and his 
 extreme ill luck in the matter of landladies, which 
 pursued him for ever throughout his life in 
 lodgings, that the particular landlady of the 
 house in which we took refuge was extraordinarily 
 incapable. The dwelling itself was miserably 
 draughty and cold, and wretchedly furnished 
 The east wind which blows over the flat marshes 
 between Eastbourne and the Downs entered the 
 house at every crack, and there were many of 
 
54 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 them. The first night we were in the town it 
 snowed very heavily, and in our shabby httle 
 sitting-room we shivered in spite of the starved 
 fire. We sat there with our overcoats on and 
 did our best to be cheerful. Heaven alone knows 
 what we talked of, but most likely, and very 
 possibly, it may have been Greek metres, always 
 his great passion. Yet neither of us was in 
 good case. We both had trouble enough on our 
 shoulders. I remember that he spoke very little 
 of his wife, for I would not let him do so, although 
 I knew she was most tremendously on his mind, 
 and was, in fact, what had driven him for the 
 moment out of London. Of course, he had a 
 very natural desire that she should die and have 
 done with life, with that life which must have been 
 a torment to herself as it was a perpetual torture 
 and a running sore to liim. At the same time 
 the poor fellow felt that he had no right to wish 
 that she would die, but I could see the wish in his 
 eyes, and heaven knows that I wished it fervently 
 for him. 
 
 The next morning we went for a long walk 
 across the Downs to the little village of East 
 Dean. It was blowing a whole gale from the 
 north east, and it was quite impossible to go near 
 the steep cliffs. The snow was in places two feet 
 deep, and a sunk road across the Downs was level 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 55 
 
 with the turf, I think now that none but madmen 
 would have gone out on such a day. Doubtless 
 we were mad enough ; at any rate we were writers, 
 and by all traditions had the right to be mad. 
 But when we once got started we meant going 
 through it at all events. I did not remember 
 many colder days, in spite of my travels, but we 
 persevered, and at last came to the little village 
 and there took refuge in the public-house and 
 drank beer. Maitland, with his extraordinary 
 mixture of fine taste and something which was 
 almost grossness in regard to food, loved all malt 
 liquors — I think partly because he felt some 
 strange charm in their being historically English 
 drinks. The walk back to Eastbourne tried us 
 both hard, for neither of us had been well fed for 
 months, and the wind and snow in our faces 
 made walking heavy and difficult. Nevertheless 
 Maitland was now almost boisterously cheerful, 
 as he often was outwardly when he had most reason 
 to be the opposite. While he walked back the 
 chief topic of conversation was the very excellent 
 nature of the pudding which he had instructed 
 our landlady to prepare against a hungry return. 
 
 He was always extraordinarily fond of rich, 
 succulent dishes. A fritto misto for instance, 
 made him shout for joy, though he never met with 
 it until he went to Italy. With what inimitable 
 
56 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 fervour of the gastronomic mind would he declare 
 these preferences I Dr. Johnson said that in a 
 haggis there was much " fine, confused feeding," 
 and Maitland undoubtedly agreed with him, 
 as he always said when he quoted the passage. 
 In many of his books there are examples of his 
 curious feeling with regard to food. They are 
 especially frequent in " Paternoster Row " ; as, 
 for instance, when one character says : " Better 
 dripping this than I've had for a long time. . , . 
 Now, with a little pepper and salt, this bread and 
 dripping is as appetising a food as I know. I often 
 make a dinner of it." To which the other rephes : 
 " I have done the same myself before now. Do 
 you ever buy pease-pudding ? " and to this 
 the Irishman's reply was enthusiastic. " I should 
 think so ! I get magnificent pennyworths at a 
 shop in Cleveland Street, of a very rich quality 
 indeed. Excellent faggots they have there, too. 
 I'll give you a supper of them one night before 
 you go." I had often heard of this particular 
 shop in Cleveland Street, and of one shop where 
 they sold beef, kept by a man whose pride was that 
 he had been carving beef behind the counter for 
 thirty years without a holiday. 
 
 And now we were hurrying back to Eastbourne, 
 Maitland said, not because it was cold ; not be- 
 cause the north-east wind blew ; not because we 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 57 
 
 were exposed to the very bitterest weather we 
 remembered ; but because of an exceedingly 
 rich compound known as an apple pudding. 
 He and the wind worked me up to an almost 
 equal expression of ardour, and thus we came 
 back to our poverty-stricken den in good spirits. 
 But, alas, the dinner that day was actually 
 disastrous. The meat was grossly overdone, the 
 vegetables were badly cooked, the beer was thin 
 and flat. We were in dismay, but still we said 
 to each other hopefully that there was the pudding 
 to come. It was brought on and looked very 
 fine, and Maitland cut into it with great joy and 
 gave me a generous helping. I know that I 
 tasted it eagerly, but to my tongue there was 
 an alien flavour about it. I looked up and said 
 to Maitland, " It is very curious, but this pudding 
 seems to me to taste of kerosene." Maitland 
 laughed, but when his turn came to try he laughed 
 no longer, for the pudding actually did taste of 
 lamp oil. It appeared, on plaintive and bitter 
 inquiry, that our unfortunate landlady after 
 making it had put it under the shelf on which she 
 kept her lamp gear. We subsided on melancholy 
 and mouldy cheese. This disappointment, how- 
 ever childish it may appear to the better fed, was 
 to Henry Maitland something really serious. 
 Those who have read " The Meditations of Mark 
 
58 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 Sumner," without falling into the error of thinking 
 that the talk about food in that melancholy book 
 was only his fun, will understand that it was a very 
 serious matter with Maitland. It took all his 
 philosophy and a very great deal of mine to survive 
 the tragedy, and to go on talking as we did of new 
 words and the riches of philology. And as we 
 talked the wind roared down our street in a vicious 
 frenzy. It was a monstrously bad time to have 
 come to Eastbourne, and we had no compensations. 
 It was the next night that the great news came. 
 In spite of the dreariest weather we had spent most 
 of the day in the open air. After our dinner, 
 which this time was more of a success, or at any 
 rate less of a tragic failure, we were sitting hugging 
 the fire to keep warm when a telegram was brought 
 in for him. He read it in silence and handed it 
 over to me with the very strangest look upon his 
 face that I had ever seen. It was unsigned, and 
 came from London. The message was : " Your 
 wife is dead." There was nothing on earth more 
 desirable for him than that she should die, the poor 
 wretch truly being like a destructive wind, for she 
 had torn his heart, scorched his very soul, and 
 destroyed him in the beginning of his life. All 
 irreparable disasters came from her, and through 
 her, Had it not been for her he might then have 
 held, or have begun to hope for, a great position at 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 59 
 
 one of the universities. And now a voice out of the 
 unknown cried that she was dead. 
 
 He said to me, with a shaking voice and shaking 
 hands, " I cannot believe it — I cannot beheve 
 it." He was as white as paper ; for it meant so 
 much — not only freedom from the disaster and 
 shame and misery that drained his life-blood, but 
 it would mean a cessation of money payments at 
 a time when every shilling was very hard to win. 
 And yet this was when he was comparatively 
 well known, for it was two years after the publica- 
 tion of " The Mob." And still, though his books 
 ran into many editions, for some inexplicable 
 reason, which I yet hope to explain, he sold them 
 one after another for fifty pounds. And I knew 
 how he worked ; how hard, how remorselessly. 
 I knew who the chief character was in " Paternoster 
 Row " before " Paternoster Row " was written, 
 I knew with what inexpressible anguish of soul he 
 laboured, with what dumb rage against destiny. 
 And now here was something like freedom at 
 last, if only it were true. 
 
 This message came so late at night that there 
 was no possibility of telegraphing to London to 
 verify it even if he had been sure that he could get 
 to the original sender. It was also much too late 
 to go up to town. We sat silently for hours, 
 and I knew that he was going back over the 
 
60 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 burning marl of the past. Sometimes he did speak, 
 asking once and again if it could be true, and I 
 saw that while he was still uncertain he was bitter 
 and pitiless. Yet if she were only really dead . . . 
 We went up to town together in the morning. 
 In the train he told me that while he was still un- 
 certain, he could not possibly visit the place she 
 lived in, and he begged me to go there straight 
 and bring him word as to the truth of this report. 
 I was to explore the desperate slum in the New 
 Cut in which she had exhausted the last dreadful 
 years of her life, and upon leaving him I went 
 there at once. With Maitland's full permission 
 I described something of the milieu in " John 
 Quest." On reaching the New Cut I dived into 
 an inner slum from an outer one, and at last 
 found myself in a kitchen which was only about 
 eight or nine feet square. It was, of course, 
 exceedingly dirty. The person in charge of it 
 was a cheerful red-headed girl of about eighteen 
 years of age. On learning the cause of my visit 
 she went out and brought in her mother, and I 
 soon verified the fact that Marian Maitland was 
 dead. She had died the first bitter night we spent 
 at Eastbourne, and was found next morning 
 without any blankets, and with no covering for 
 her emaciated body but a damp and draggled 
 gown. 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 61 
 
 Presently the neighbours came in to see the 
 gentleman who was interested in this woman's 
 death. They talked eagerly of the funeral, for, 
 as Maitland knew only too well, a funeral, to these 
 people, is one of their great irregular but recurring 
 festivals. At Maitland's desire I gave them carte 
 blanche up to a certain sum, and I think they felt 
 that, as the agent of the husband, I behaved very 
 well. Of course they knew all about the poor girl 
 who lay dead upstairs, and although they were 
 honest enough people in their way, and though 
 the red-headed girl to whom I first talked worked 
 hard in a factory making hooks and eyes, as she 
 told me, they seemed to have no moral feelings 
 whatever about her very obvious profession. I 
 myself did not see the dead woman. I was not 
 then acquainted with death, save among strangers. 
 I could not bring myself to look upon her. Al- 
 though death is so dreadful always, the surround- 
 ings of death may make things worse. But still, she 
 was dead, and I hastened back to Maitland to tell 
 him so. It was a terrible and a painful relief to 
 him ; and when he was sure she was gone, he 
 grieved for her, grieved for what she might have 
 been, and for what she was. He remembered now 
 that at intervals she used to send him heart- 
 breaking messages asking to be forgiven, messages 
 that even his unwisdom at last could not listen 
 
62 HENRY MAITLAND 
 
 to. But he said very little. So far as the expres- 
 sion of his emotions went he often had very great 
 self-control. It is a pity that his self-control so 
 rarely extended itself to acts. But now he was 
 free. Those who have forged their own chains, 
 and lived in a hell of their own dreadful making, 
 can understand what this is and what it means. 
 But he did go down to the pit in which she died, 
 and when I saw him a day or two later he was 
 strangely quiet, even for him. He said to me, 
 " My dear chap, she had kept my photograph, 
 and a very little engraving of the Madonna di 
 San Sisto, all these years of horrible degradation." 
 He spoke in the almost inaudible tone that was 
 characteristic of him, especially at that time. 
 We arranged the funeral together, and she was 
 buried. If only all the misery that she had 
 caused him could have been buried with her, it 
 would have been well. She died of what I may 
 call, euphemistically, specific laryngitis. Once he 
 told me a dreadful story about her in hospital. 
 One of the doctors at St. Thomas's had questioned 
 her, and after her answers sent for Maitland, and 
 speaking to him on the information given him by 
 the wife, was very bitter. Henry, even as he told 
 me of this years after, shook with rage and in- 
 dignation. He had not been able to defend himself 
 without exposing his wife's career. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 There are many methods of writing biography. 
 Each has its advantages, even the chronological 
 compilation. But chronology is no strong point of 
 mine, and in this sketch I shall put but little stress 
 on dates. There is great advantage in describing 
 things as they impress themselves on the writer. 
 A portrait gains in coherency and completeness 
 by temporary omissions more than it can ever 
 gain by the empty endeavour to handle each 
 period fully. In this last chapter I might have 
 endeavoured to describe Maitland at work, or to 
 speak of his ambitions, or even to criticise what 
 he had already done, or to give my own views of 
 what he meant to achieve. There is authority for 
 every method, and most authorities are bad, save 
 Boswell — ^and few would pine for Boswell's qualities 
 at the price of his failings. Yet one gets help 
 from him everywhere, little as it may show. 
 Only the other day I came across a passage in 
 the " Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides " which 
 has some value. Reporting Johnson, he writes : 
 " Talking of biography, he said he did not think 
 
 63 
 
64 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 the life of any literary man in England had been 
 well written. Besides the common incidents of life 
 it should tell us his studies, his mode of living, 
 the means by which he attained to excellence, 
 and his opinion of his own works." Such I shall 
 endeavour to do. Nevertheless Johnson was 
 wrong. Good work had then been done in bio- 
 graphy by Walton, whose Lives, by the way, 
 Maitland loved ; and Johnson himself was not 
 far from great excellence when he described his 
 friend Savage in the " Lives of the Poets " in spite 
 of its want of colloquial ease. There came in then 
 the value of friendship and actual personal know- 
 ledge, as it did in Boswell's "Life," I can only 
 hope that my own deep acquaintance with Maitland 
 will compensate for my want of skill in the art 
 of writing lives, for which novel-writing is but 
 a poor training. Yet the deeper one's knowledge 
 the better it is to simplify as one goes, taking 
 things by themselves, going forwards or back- 
 wards as may seem best, without care of tradition, 
 especially where tradition is mostly bad. We 
 do not write biography in England now as Romain 
 Rolland writes that of Beethoven. Seldom are 
 we grieved for our heroes, or rejoice with them. 
 Photography, or the photographic portrait, is more 
 in request than an impression. However, to resume 
 in my own way, having to be content with that. 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 65 
 
 and caring little for opinion, that fluctuant 
 critic. 
 
 Long as our friendship existed it is perhaps 
 curious that we never called each other, except 
 on very rare occasions, by anything but our 
 surnames. This, I think, is due to the fact that 
 we had been at Moorhampton College together. 
 It is, I imagine, the same thing with all school- 
 boys. Provided there is no nickname given, men 
 who have been chums at school seem to prefer 
 the surname by which they knew their friends 
 in the early days. I have often noticed there is 
 a certain savage tendency on the part of boys 
 to suppress their Christian names, their own 
 peculiar mark. And sometimes I have wondered 
 whether this is not in some obscure way a survival 
 of the savage custom of many tribes in which 
 nobody is ever mentioned by bis right name, 
 because in that name there inheres mysteriously 
 the very essence of his being and inheritance, the 
 knowledge of which by others may expose him to 
 some occult danger. 
 
 I believe I said above that from the time I first 
 met Maitland after my return from Australia, 
 until I went away again to Arizona, I was working 
 in the Admiralty and the India Office as a writer 
 at tenpence an hour. No doubt I thought the pay 
 exiguous, and my prospects worth nothing. Yet 
 
 E 
 
66 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 when I came back from America and found him 
 domiciled at 7 K Cumberland Residences, my 
 economic basis in life became even more exiguous, 
 Avhatever hope might have said of my literary 
 future. I was, in fact, a great deal poorer than 
 Maitland. He lived in a flat and had at least two 
 rooms and a kitchen. Yet it was a horrible place 
 of extraordinary gloom, and its back Avindows 
 overlooked the roaring steam engines of the 
 Metropolitan Railway. In some ways no doubt 
 my own apartment, when I took to living by 
 myself in Chelsea, was superior in cheerfulness 
 to 7 K. Shortly after my return to England, 
 when I had expended the fifty pounds I received 
 for my first book, "The Western Trail," I took 
 a single room in Chelsea, put in a few sticks of 
 furniture given to me by my people, and com- 
 menced housekeeping on my own account on all 
 I could make and the temporary ten shillings a 
 week allowed me by my father, who at that time, 
 for all his native respect for literature, regarded 
 the practice of it with small hope and much 
 suspicion. I know that it greatly amused Maitland 
 to hear of his views on the subject of the self 
 revelations in "The Western Trail," which dealt 
 Avith my life in Western America. After reading 
 that book he did not speak to me for three days, 
 and told my younger brother, " These are pretty 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 67 
 
 revelations about your brother having been a 
 common loafer." At this Maitland roared, but 
 he roared none the less when he understood that 
 three columns of laudation in one of the reviews 
 entirely changed my father's view of that parti- 
 cular book. 
 
 I should not trouble to say anything about my 
 own particular surroundings if it were not that in 
 a sense they also became Maitland 's, although 
 I went more frequently to him than he came to 
 me. Nevertheless he was quite familiar with my 
 one room and often had meals there which I 
 cooked for him. Of course at that time, from 
 one point of view, I was but a literary beginner 
 and aspirant, while Maitland was a rising and 
 respected man, who certainly might be poor, and 
 was poor, but still he had published " The Mob " 
 and other books, his name was well known, and 
 his prospects, from the literary, if not from the 
 financial point of view, seemed very good. I was 
 the author of one book, the result of three years' 
 bitter hard experience, written in twenty-six days 
 as a tour de force, and though I had ambition 
 I seemed to have nothing more to write about. 
 From my own point of view Maitland was, of 
 course, very successful. His flat with more rooms 
 than one in it was a mansion, and he was certainly 
 making something like a hundred a year. Still, 
 
68 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 I think that when he came down to me and found 
 me comparatively independent, he rather envied 
 me. At any rate I had not to keep an errant 
 wife on the money that I made with infinite 
 difficulty. He came to see me in Chelsea in my 
 very early days, and took great joy in my con- 
 ditions. For one thing I had no attendance with 
 this room. I was supposed to look after it for 
 myself in every way. This, he assured me, made 
 my estate the more gracious, as any one can 
 understand who remembers all that he has said 
 about landladies and lodging-house servants and 
 charwomen. He was overjoyed with the list of 
 things I bought : a fender and fire-irons, a coal- 
 scuttle, a dust-bin, and blacking brushes. He 
 found me one day shaving by the aid of my own 
 dim reflection in the glass of an etching which 
 I had brought from home, because I had no 
 looking-glass and no money to spare to buy one. 
 I remember we frequently went together over the 
 question of finance. Incidentally I found his own 
 habit of buying cooked meat peculiarly extra- 
 vagant. I have a book somewhere among my 
 papers in which I kept accounts for my first 
 three months in Chelsea to see how I was going 
 to live on ten shillings a week, which Maitland 
 assured me was preposterous riches, even if I 
 P^anaged tq make no more, 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 69 
 
 Naturally enough, seeing that we had been 
 friends for so long, and seeing that he had en- 
 couraged me so greatly to write my first book, 
 he took a vast interest in all my proceedings, and 
 was very joyous, as he would have said, to observe 
 that I could not afford sheets but slept in the 
 blankets which I had carried all over America. 
 I seek no sympathy on this point, for after all it 
 was not a matter of my being unable to afford 
 linen ; it is impossible for the average comfortable 
 citizen to understand how disagreeable sheets 
 become after some thousands of nights spent 
 camping in mere wool, even of the cheapest. It 
 took me years to learn to resign myself to cold 
 linen, or even more sympathetic cotton, when I 
 became a respectable householder. 
 
 In the neighbourhood where I lived there was, 
 of course, a great artistic colony, and as I knew one 
 or two artists already, I soon became acquainted 
 with all the others. Many of them were no richer 
 than myself, and as Bohemia and the belief that 
 there was still a Bohemia formed one of Maitland's 
 greatest joys, he was always delighted to hear of 
 any of our remarkable shifts to live. It is an 
 odd thing to reflect that A. D. Mack, Frank 
 Wynne, Albert Croft, and three other artists whose 
 names I now forget, and I once had a glorious supper 
 of fried fish served in a newspaper on the floor of an 
 
70 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 empty studio. The only thing I missed on that 
 particular occasion was Maitland's presence, but, of 
 course, the trouble was that Maitland would seldom 
 associate with anybody whom he did not know 
 already, and I could rarely get him to make the ac- 
 quaintance of my own friends. Yet such experiences 
 as we were sometimes reduced to more than proved 
 to him that his dear Bohemia existed, though later 
 in his life, as one sees in "Mark Sumner," he often 
 seemed to doubt whether it was still extant. On 
 this point I used to console him, saying that where 
 any two artists butted their foolish heads against 
 the economic system, there was Bohemia ; 
 Bohemia, in fact, was living on a course of high 
 ideals, whatever the world said of them. At this 
 hour there are writers learning their business on 
 a little oatmeal, as George Meredith did, or 
 destroying their digestions, as I did mine and 
 Henry Maitland's, on canned corned beef. Even 
 yet, perhaps, some writers and artists are making 
 their one big meal a day on fried fish. 
 
 One Sunday when I missed going to Maitland's, 
 because he was then out of town visiting his 
 family, I had a tale for him on his return. It 
 appeared that I had been writing, and had got 
 so disgusted with the result of it that I found 
 I could not possibly stay in my room, and so 
 determined to go round to my friend Mack. No 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 7i 
 
 sooner had I made up my mind on this subject 
 than there was a knock at the door, and presently 
 in came Mack himself. I said promptly, " It is 
 no good your coming here, for I was just going 
 round to you." Whereupon he rephed, " It is no 
 good your coming to me because I have no coal, 
 no coke, and nobody will give me any more 
 because I owe for so much already." I rephed 
 that I was not going to stay in my room in any 
 case, and affirmed that I would rather be in his 
 studio in the cold than the room where I was. 
 Whereupon he suddenly discovered that my scuttle 
 was actually full of coal, and proposed to take it 
 round to the studio. This seemed a really brilliant 
 idea, and after much discussion of ways and means 
 my inventive faculty produced an old portman- 
 teau and several newspapers, and after wrapping 
 up lumps of coal in separate pieces of paper we 
 packed the portmanteau with the coal and carried 
 it round to the studio in Manresa Road. This 
 seemed to Maitland so characteristic of an artist's 
 life that he was very much delighted when I told 
 him. 
 
 It is an odd thing that in one matter Maitland 
 and I were at that time much alike. From most 
 points of view there can hardly have been two 
 more different men, for he was essentially a man 
 of the study and the cloister, while I was far more 
 
72 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 naturally a man of the open air. Nevertheless, 
 when it came to journalism we were both of the 
 same mind. While I was away from England 
 and he was teaching Harold Edgeworth's sons, 
 Edgeworth introduced him to John Harley, then 
 editing the Piccadilly Gazette, who offered, and 
 would no doubt have kept to it, to use as much 
 matter as possible if Maitland would supply him 
 with something in the journalistic form. Ap- 
 parently he found it too much against his natural 
 grain to do this work, and I was now in the same 
 predicament. It is true that I had something of 
 a natural journalistic flair which he lacked, but my 
 nose for a likely article was rendered entirely 
 useless to me by the fact that I never could write 
 anything until I had thought about it for several 
 days, by which time it was stale, and much too 
 late from the newspaper point of view. Never- 
 theless Maitland did occasionally do a little odd 
 journalism, for I remember once, before I went 
 to America, being with him when he received the 
 proofs of an article from the St. James' Gazette, 
 and picking up " Mark Sumner " one may read : 
 " I thought of this as I sat yesterday watching a 
 noble sunset, which brought back to my memory 
 the sunsets of a London autumn, thirty years ago. 
 It happened that, on one such evening, I was 
 by the river at Chelsea, with nothing to do except 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 73 
 
 to feel that I was hungry, and to reflect that, 
 before morning, I should be hungrier still. I 
 loitered upon Battersea Bridge — the old pic- 
 turesque wooden bridge, and there the western 
 sky took hold upon me. Half an hour later 
 I was speeding home I sat down, and wrote a 
 description of what I had seen, and straightway 
 sent it to an evening paper, which, to my astonish- 
 ment, published the thing next day — ' On Battersea 
 Bridge.' " I have never seen that article since 
 I saw the proof of it, but there was something so 
 characteristic in it that I think it would be worth 
 some one's while to hunt up the files of the St. 
 James' Gazette in order to find it. It appears that 
 while he was leaning over the bridge, enjoying, the 
 sunset, there was also a workman looking at it. 
 The river was at a low stage, for it was at least 
 three-quarters-ebb, and on each side of the river 
 there were great patches of shining mud, in which 
 the glorious western sky was reflected, turning the 
 ooze into a mass of most wonderful colour. Mait- 
 land said to me, " Of course I was pleased to 
 see somebody else, especially a poor fellow 
 like that, enjoying the beauty of the sunset. 
 But presently my companion edged a little 
 closer to me, and seeing my eyes directed 
 towards the mud which showed such heavenly 
 colouring, he remarked to me, with an air of 
 
7*4 THE PRIVATE LlFE 
 
 the deepest interest, ' Throws up an 'eap of mud, 
 don't she ? '" 
 
 Sometimes when Maitland came down to me in 
 Danvers Street he used to go over my accounts 
 and discuss means of making them less. I think 
 his chief joy in them was the feehng that some of 
 his more respectable friends, such as Harold 
 Edgeworth, would have been horrified at my 
 peculiarly squalid existence. In a sense it was, 
 no doubt, squalid, and yet in another it was 
 perhaps the greatest time in my life, and Maitland 
 knew it. In the little book in Avhich I kept my 
 expenses he came across one day on which I had 
 absolutely spent nothing. This was a great joy 
 to him. On another day he found a penny put 
 down as "charity." On looking up the book 
 I find that a note still declares that this penny 
 was given to a little girl to pay her fare in the 
 bus. I remember quite well that this beneficence 
 on my part necessitated my walldng all the way 
 to Chelsea from Hyde Park Corner. Yet Maitland 
 assured me that, compared with himself at times, 
 I was practically a millionaire, although he owned 
 that he had very rarely beaten my record for 
 some weeks when all expenditure on food was but 
 three-and-sixpence. One week it actually totalled 
 no more than one-and-elevenpence, but I have no 
 doubt that I went out to eat with somebody else 
 
OF HENRY MAlTLAKD tS 
 
 on those days — ^unless it was at the time my liver 
 protested, and gave me such an attack of gloom 
 that I went to bed and lay there for three days 
 without eating, firmly determined to die and 
 have done with the literary struggle. This fast 
 did me a great deal of good. On the fourth day 
 I got up and rustled vigorously for a meal, and 
 did some financing with the admirable result of 
 producing a whole half-crown. 
 
 Whenever Maitland came to me I cooked his food 
 and my own on a little grid, or in a frying-pan, 
 over the fire in my one room. This fire cost me 
 on an average a whole shilling a week, or perhaps 
 a penny or two more if the coals, which I bought 
 in the street, went up in price. This means that 
 I ran a fire on a hundredweight of coal each week, 
 or sixteen pounds of coal a day. Maitland, who 
 was an expert in coal, assured me that I was 
 extremely extravagant, and that a fire could 
 be kept going for much less. On trying, I found 
 out that when I was exceedingly hard up I could 
 keep in a very little fire for several hours a day on 
 only eight pounds of coal, but sometimes I had to 
 let it go out, and run round to a studio to get 
 warm by some artist's stove, — ^provided always 
 that the merchant in coke who supplied him had 
 not refused my especial friend any further credit. 
 At this time Maitland and I were both accus- 
 
76 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 tomed to work late, although he was just then 
 beginning to labour at ntiore reasonable times, 
 though not to write fewer hours. As for me, I 
 used to find getting up in the morning at a proper 
 hour quite impossible. Probably this was due to 
 some inherited gout, to poisonous indigestion from 
 my own cooking, or to a continued diet of desic- 
 cated soups and " Jungle " beef from Chicago. 
 However, it seemed to Maitland that I was quite 
 in the proper tradition of letters while I was 
 working on a long novel, only published years 
 afterwards, which I used to begin at ten or eleven 
 o'clock at night, frequently finishing at six o'clock 
 in the morning when the sparrows began to cliirp 
 outside my window. 
 
 As a result of this night- work I used to get up 
 at four o'clock in the afternoon, sometimes even 
 later, to make my own breakfast. Afterwards 
 I would go out to see some of my friends in their 
 studios, and at the time most people were thinking 
 of going to bed I sat down to the wonderfully 
 morbid piece of work which I believed was to 
 bring me fame. This was a rather odd book, 
 called "The Fate of Hilary Dale." It has no 
 claim whatever to any immortality, and from my 
 point of view its only value lies in the fact that 
 there is a very brief sketch of Maitland in it. He 
 is described in these words : " Will Curgenven 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 77 
 
 writer, teacher, and general apostle of culture, 
 as it is understood by the elect, had been hard at 
 work for some hours on an essay on Greek metres, 
 and was growing tired of it. His dingy subject 
 and dingy Baker Street flat began to pall on him, 
 and he rose to pace his narrow room." Now Will 
 Curgenven, of course, was Maitland and the dingy 
 Baker Street flat was 7 K. " ' Damn the nature 
 of things,' as Porson said when he swallowed 
 embrocation instead of whisky 1 " was what 
 I went on to put into his mouth. This, indeed, 
 was one of Maitland's favourite exclamations. 
 It stood with him for all the strange and blas- 
 phemous and eccentric oaths with which I then 
 decorated my language, the result of my experi- 
 ences in the back blocks of Australia and the 
 Pacific Slope of America. In this book I went 
 on to make a little fun of his great joy in Greek 
 metres. I remember that once he turned to me 
 with an assumed air of strange amazement and 
 exclaimed : " Why, my dear fellow, do you know 
 there are actually miserable men who do not 
 know — ^who have never even heard of — ^the minuter 
 differences between Dochmiacs and Antispasts ! " 
 That, again, reminds me of a passage in " Pater- 
 noster Row," which always gives me acute pleasure 
 because it recalls Maitland so wonderfully. It is. 
 where one of the characters came in to the hero 
 
78 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 and wanted his opinion on the scansion of a 
 particular chorus in the " CEdipus Rex." Maydon 
 laid hold of the book, thought a bit, and began to 
 read the chorus aloud. Whereupon the other one 
 cried : " Choriambics, eh ? Possible, of course ; 
 but treat them as Ionics a minore with an anacrusis, 
 and see if they don't go better." Now in this 
 passage the speaker is really Maitland, for he 
 involved himself in terms of pedantry with such 
 delight that his eyes gleamed. No doubt it was an 
 absurd thing, but Greek metres afforded so bright 
 a refuge from the world of literary struggle and 
 pressing financial difficulty. 
 
 " Damn the nature of things ! " was Porson's 
 oath. Now Maitland had a very peculiar admira- 
 tion for Porson. Porson was a Grecian. He 
 loved Greek. That was sufficient for Maitland. 
 In addition to that claim on his love, it is obvious 
 that Porson was a man of a certain Rabelaisian 
 turn of mind, and that again was a sufficient pass- 
 port to his favour. No doubt if Porson had 
 invited Maitland to his rooms, and had then got 
 wildly drunk, it would have annoyed Maitland 
 greatly ; but the picture of Porson shouting 
 Greek and drinking heavily attracted him im- 
 mensely. He often quoted all the little stories 
 told of Porson, such as the very well-known one 
 of another scholar calling on him by invitation 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 79 
 
 late one evening, and finding the room in darkness 
 and Porson on the floor. This was when his 
 visitor called out : " Porson, where are the candles, 
 and Where's the whiskey ? " and Porson answered, 
 still upon the floor, but neither forgetful of Greek 
 nor of his native wit. 
 
 When any man of our acquaintance was alluded 
 to with hostility, or if one animadverted on some 
 popular person who was obviously uneducated, 
 Maitland always vowed that he did not know 
 Greek, and probably or certainly had never 
 starved. His not knowing Greek was, of course, 
 a very great offence to Maitland, for he used to 
 quote Porson on Hermann : 
 
 " The Germans in Greek 
 Arep3» to seek. 
 Not one in five score. 
 But ninety-nine more. 
 All save only Hermann, 
 And Hermann's a German." 
 
 Of course a man who lacked Greek, and had not 
 starved, was anathema — not to be considered. 
 And whatever Porson may have done he did 
 know Greek, and that saved his soul. Maitland 
 often quoted very joyfully what he declared to 
 be some of the most charming lines in the English 
 language : 
 
80 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 " / went to Strasburg, and there got drunk 
 With the most learned Professor Runck. 
 I went to Wortz, and got more drunken 
 With the more learned Professor Buncken." 
 
 But if the spirit was willing, the flesh was weak. 
 I never saw Maitland drunk in his life. Indeed 
 he was no real expert in drinking. He had never 
 had any education in the wines he loved. Any 
 amateur of the product of the vine will know how 
 to estimate his actual qualifications as a judge, 
 when I say that Asti, Capri, and especially Chianti 
 seemed to him the greatest wines in the world, 
 since by no means could he obtain the right 
 Falernian of Horace, which, by the way, was 
 probably a most atrocious vintage. As it hap- 
 pened I had been employed for many months on 
 a great vineyard in California, and there had learnt 
 not a little about the making and blending of wine. 
 Added to this I had some natural taste in it, and 
 had read a great deal about wine- making and the 
 great vintages of France and Germany. One 
 could always interest Maitland by telhng him 
 something about wine, provided one missed out 
 the scientific side of it. But it was sad that I 
 lacked, from his point of view, the proper 
 enthusiasm for Chianti. Tet, indeed, one knows 
 what was in his classic mind, from the fact that 
 a poor vintage in a real Italian flask, or in some- 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 81 
 
 thing shaped hke an amphora, would have made 
 him chuckle with joy far more readily than if a 
 rich man had offered him in a bottle some glorious 
 first growth of the M^doc, Laffitte, Latour, or Haut- 
 Brion. But, indeed, he and I, even when I refused 
 indignantly to touch the Italians, and declared 
 with resolution for a wine of Burgundy or the 
 M6doc, rarely got beyond a Bourgeois vintage. 
 
 Nevertheless though I aspired to be his tutor 
 in wines I owed him more than is possible to say 
 in the greater matters of education. My debt to 
 him is really very big. It was, naturally enough, 
 through his influence, that while I was still in my 
 one room in Danvers Street I commenced to read 
 again all the Greek tragedies. By an odd chance 
 I came across a clergyman's son in Chelsea who 
 also had a certain passion for Greek. He used 
 to come to my room and there we re-read the 
 tragedies. Oddly enough I think my new friend 
 never met Maitland, for Maitland rarely came to 
 my room save on Sundays, and those days I 
 reserved specially for him. But whenever we met, 
 either there or at 7 K, we always read or recited 
 Greek to each other, and then entered into a 
 discussion of the metrical value of the choruses — 
 in which branch of learning I trust I showed 
 proper humility, for in prosody he was remark- 
 ably learned. As for me, I knew nothing of it 
 
 F 
 
82 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 beyond what he told me, and cared very little, 
 personally, for the technical side of poetry. Never- 
 theless it was not easy to resist Maitland's en- 
 thusiasm, and I succumbed to it so greatly that 
 I at last imagined that I was really interested 
 in what appealed so to him. Heaven knows, in 
 those days I did at least learn something of the 
 matter. 
 
 We talked of rhythm, and of Arsis or Ictus. 
 Pyrrhics we spoke of, and trochees and spondees 
 were familiar on our lips. Especially did he 
 declare that he had a passion for anapaests, and 
 when it came to the actual metres, Choriambics 
 and Galliambics were an infinite joy to him. He 
 explained to me most seriously the differences 
 between trimeter Iambics when they were cata- 
 lectic, acatalectic, hypercatalectic. What he knew 
 about comic tetrameter was at my service, and 
 in a short time I knew, as I imagined, almost all 
 that he did about Minor Ionic, Sapphic, and 
 Alcaic verse. Once more these things are to me 
 little more than words, and yet I never hear one 
 of them mentioned — as one does occasionally 
 when one comes across a characteristic enthusiast 
 — but I think of Henry Maitland and his gravely 
 joyous lectures to me on that vastly important 
 subject. No doubt many people will think that 
 such little details as these are worth nothing, 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 83 
 
 but I shall have failed greatly in putting Maitland 
 down if they do not seem something in the end. 
 These trifles are, after all, touches in the portrait 
 as I see the man, and that they all meant much to 
 him I know very well. To get through the early 
 days of literary poverty one must have ambition 
 and enthusiasm of many kinds. Enthusiasm alone 
 is nothing, and ambition by itself is too often barren, 
 but the two together are something that the gods 
 may fight against in vain. I know that this 
 association with him, when I was his only friend, 
 and he was my chief friend, was great for both of 
 us, for he had much to endure, and I was not 
 without my troubles. Yet we made fun together 
 of our squalor, and rejoiced in our poverty, so 
 long as it did not mean acute suffering ; and 
 when it did mean that, we oftentimes got some- 
 thing out of literature to help us to forget. On 
 looking back, I know that many things happened 
 which seem to me dreadful, but then they appeared 
 but part of the day's work. 
 
 It rarely happened that I went to him without 
 some story of the week's happenings, to be told 
 again in return something which had occurred to 
 him. For instance, there was that story of the 
 lady who asked him his experience with regard to 
 the management of butlers. In return I could 
 tell him of going out to dinner at houses where 
 
84 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 people would have been horrified to learn that 
 I had eaten nothing that day, and possibly nothing 
 the day before. For us to consort with the com- 
 fortably situated sometimes seemed to both of 
 us an intolerably fine jest, which was added to 
 by the difference of these comfortable people 
 from the others we knew. Here and there we 
 came across some fatly rich person who, by accident, 
 had once been deprived of his usual dinner. It 
 seemed to give him a sympathetic feeling for the 
 very poor. But, after all, though I did sometimes 
 associate with such people, I was happier in my 
 own room with Maitland, or in his flat, where we 
 discussed our jEschylus, or wrought upon metres 
 or figures of speech — always a great joy to us. 
 Upon these, too, Maitland was really quite learned. 
 He was full of examples of brachyology. Anaco- 
 luthon he was well acquainted with. Not even 
 Farrar, in his " Greek Syntax," or some greater 
 man, knew more examples of chiasmus, asyndeton, 
 or hendiadys. In these byways he generally 
 rejoiced, and we were never satisfied unless at 
 each meeting, wherever it might be, we discovered 
 some new phrase, or new word, or new quotation. 
 Once at 7 K I quoted to him from Keats' 
 " Endymion " the lines about those people who 
 " unpen their baaing vanities to browse away the 
 green and comfortable juicy hay of human 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 85 
 
 pastures." All that evening he was denouncing 
 various comfortable people who fed their baaing 
 vanity on everything delightful. He declared they 
 browsed away all that made life worth while, and 
 in return for my gift to him of this noble quotation 
 he produced something rather more astounding, 
 and perhaps not quite so quotable, out of Zola's 
 "Nana." We had been talking of realism, and 
 of speaking the truth, of being direct, of not being 
 mealy-mouthed ; in fact, of not letting loose 
 " baaing vanities," and suddenly he took down 
 " Nana " and said, " Here Zola has put a phrase 
 in her mouth which rejoices me exceedingly. It 
 is a plain, straightforward, absolutely char- 
 acteristic sentiment, such as we in England are 
 not allowed to represent. Nana, on being 
 remonstrated with by her lover-in-chief for her 
 infidelities, returns him the plain and direct reply 
 ' Quand je vois un homme qui me plait, je couche 
 avec ' " He went on to declare that writing any 
 novels in England was indeed a very sickening 
 business, but he added, " I really think we begin 
 to get somewhat better in this. However, up to 
 the last few years, it has been practically im- 
 possible to write anything more abnormal about 
 a man's relations with women than a mere bigamy." 
 Things have certainly altered, but I think he was 
 one of those who helped to break down that undue 
 
86 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 sense of the value of current naorality which has 
 done so much harm to the studj'^ of hfe in general, 
 and indeed to life itself. His general rage and 
 quarrel with that current morality, for which 
 he had not only a contempt, but a loathing which 
 often made him speechless, comes out well in 
 what he thought and expressed about the Harold 
 Frederick affair. There was, of course, as every- 
 body knows, a second illegitimate family. While 
 the good and orthodox made a certain amount 
 of effort to help the wife and the legal children, 
 they did their very best to ignore the second 
 family. However, to Maitland's great joy, there 
 were certain people, notably Mrs. Stephens, who 
 did their very best for the other children and for 
 the poor mother. Maitland himself subscribed, 
 before he knew the actual position, to both families 
 and betrayed extraordinary rage when he learnt 
 how that second family had been treated, and 
 heard of the endeavours of the " unco' guid " to 
 ignore them wholly. But then such actions and 
 such hypocrisy are characteristic of the middle 
 class in this country and not in this country alone. 
 He loathed their morals which become a system of 
 cruelty ; their greed and its concomitant selfish- 
 ness : their timidity which grows brutal in defence 
 of a position to which only chance and their 
 rapacity have entitled them, 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 87 
 
 Apropos of his hatred oi current morahty, it is 
 a curious thing that the only quarrel I ever had 
 with him showed his early point of view rather 
 oddly. Among the few men he knew there was one, 
 with whom I was a little acquainted, who had picked 
 up a young girl in a tavern and taken her to live 
 with him. My own acquaintance with her led to 
 some jealousy between me and the man who was 
 keeping her, and he wrote to Maitland com- 
 plaining of me, and telling him many things 
 which were certainly untrue. Maitland when he 
 considered the fact of his having ruined his own 
 life for ever and ever by his relations with a woman 
 of this order, had naturally built up a kind of 
 theory of these things as a justification for him- 
 self. This may seem a piece of extravagant 
 psychology, but I have not the least doubt that it 
 is true. Without asking my view of the affair 
 he wrote to me very angrily, and declared that 
 I had behaved badly. He added that he wished 
 me to understand that he considered an affair 
 of that description as sacred as any marriage. 
 Though he was young, and in these matters no 
 little of a prig, I was also young, and of a hot 
 temper. That he had not made any inquiries 
 of me, or even asked my version of the circum- 
 stances, so angered me that I wrote back to him 
 saying that if he spoke to me in that way I should 
 
88 HENRY MAITLAND 
 
 decline to have anything more to do with him. 
 As he was convinced, most unjustly, that his 
 view was entirely sound, this naturally enough 
 led to an estrangeiilent which lasted for the best 
 part of a year, but I am glad to remember that 
 I myself made it up by writing to him about 
 one of his books. This was before I went to 
 America, and although I was working, it was a 
 great grief to me that we did not meet during 
 this estrangement for any of our great talks, 
 which, both then and afterwards, were part of 
 my life, and no little part of it. Often when 
 I think of him I recollect those lines of Callimachus 
 to Heracleitus in Corey's " lonica " : 
 
 " They told me, Heracleitus, they told me you were 
 
 dead ; 
 They brought me hitter news to hear and hitter tears 
 
 to shed. 
 I wept as I remembered how often you and I 
 Had tired the sun with talking, and sent him down 
 
 the sky," 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 In the last chapter I quoted from Boswell, always 
 a favourite of Maitland's, as he is of all true men 
 of letters. But there is yet another quotation 
 from the same work which might stand as a motto 
 for this book, as it might for the final and authori- 
 tative biography of Maitland which perhaps will 
 some day be done : " He asked me whether he 
 had mentioned, in any of the papers of the 
 ' Rambler,' the description in Virgil of the entrance 
 into Hell, with an application to the Press ; ' for,' 
 said he, ' I do not much remember them.' I 
 told him, ' No.' Upon which he repeated it : 
 
 ' Vestibulum ante ipsum primisque infaucibus Orci, 
 Lucius et ultrices posuere cubilia Curce ; 
 Pallentesque habitant Morbi, tristisque Senectus, 
 Et Metus, et malesuada Fames, ac turpis Egestas ; 
 Terribiles visuformce : Letumque, Labosque.' 
 
 'Now,' said he, 'almost all these apply exactly 
 to an author ; all these are the concomitants of 
 a printing-house.'" Nevertheless, although cares, 
 and sometimes sullen sorrows, want and fear, still 
 dwelt with Maitland, a little time now began for 
 
 89 
 
90 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 him in which he had some peace of mind, if not 
 happiness. That was a plant he never cultivated. 
 One of his favourite passages from Charlotte 
 Bronte, whose work was in many ways a passion 
 to him, is that in which she exclaims : " Cultivate 
 happiness I Happiness is not a potato," and 
 indeed he never grew it. Still there were two 
 periods in his life in which he had some peace, 
 and the first period now began. I speak of the 
 time after the death of his first wife. The drain of 
 ten shillings a week — which must seem so absurdly 
 little to many — had been far more than he could 
 stand, and many times he had gone without the 
 merest necessities of life so that the poor alien 
 in the New Cut should have money, even though 
 he knew that she spent it at once upon drink 
 and forgetfulness. Ten shillings a week was very 
 much to him. For one thing it might mean a 
 little more food and better food. It meant 
 following up his one great hobby of buying books. 
 Those who know the " The Meditations," know 
 what he thought of books, for in that respect 
 this record is a true guide, even if it should be 
 read with caution in most things. Nevertheless 
 although he was happier and easier, it is curious 
 that his most unhappy and despairing books 
 were written during this particular period. " In 
 the Morning," it is true, was done before his wife 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 91 
 
 died, and some people who do not know the inner 
 history of the book may not regard it as a tragedy. 
 In one sense, however, it was one of the greatest 
 literary tragedies of Henry Maitland's life, accord- 
 ing to his own statement to me. 
 
 At that time he was publishing books with the 
 firm of Miller and Company, and, of course, he 
 knew John Glass, who read for them, very well 
 indeed. It seems that Glass, who had naturally 
 enough, considering his period, certain old- 
 fashioned ideas on the subject of books and their 
 endings, absolutely and flatly declined to re- 
 commend his firm to publish " In the Morning," 
 unless Maitland re-wrote the natural tragic end 
 of the book and made it turn out happily. I 
 think nothing on earth, or in some hell for men 
 of letters, could have made Maitland more angry 
 and wretched. If there was one thing that he 
 clung to during the whole of his working time, it 
 was sincerity, and sincerity in literary work implies 
 an absolute freedom from alien and extrinsic 
 influence. I can well remember what he said to 
 me about Glass' suggestion. He abused him and 
 the publishers ; the public, England, the world, 
 and the very universe. He almost burst into 
 tears as he explained to me what he had been 
 obliged to do for the sake of the great fifty pounds 
 he was to get for the book. For at this time he 
 
92 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 only got fifty pounds for a long three-volume 
 novel. He always wrote with the greatest pain 
 and labour, but I do not suppose he ever put 
 anything on paper in his life which cost him such 
 acute mental suffering as the last three chapters 
 of this book which were written to John Glass' 
 barbaric order. 
 
 After his wife's death he wrote " The Under- 
 World," "Bond and Free," "Paternoster Row," 
 and " The Exile." It is a curious fact, although 
 it was not always obvious even to himself, and 
 is not now obvious to anybody but me, that I 
 stood as a model to him in many of these books, 
 especially, if I remember rightly, for one par- 
 ticular character in " Bond and Free." Some of 
 these sketches are fairly complimentary, and 
 many are much the reverse. The reason of this 
 use of me was that till much later he knew very 
 few men intimately but myself ; and when he 
 wanted anybody in his books of a more or less 
 robust character, and sometimes more or less of a 
 kind that he did not like, I, perforce, had to stand 
 for him. On one occasion he acknowledged 
 this to me, and once he was not at all sure how 
 I should take it. As a matter of fact the most 
 life-like portrait of me ends as a villain, and, as 
 he had touched me off to the very life in the first 
 volume, it did make me a little sorer than I 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 93 
 
 acknowledged. I leave the curious to discover 
 this particular scoundrel. Of course it was only 
 natural that my wild habits and customs, the 
 relics of Australia and America, afforded him 
 a great deal of amusement and study. On one 
 occasion they cost him, temporarily, the very 
 large sum of three pounds. As he said, he used 
 to look upon me as a kind of hybrid, a very 
 ridiculous wild man with strong literary leanings, 
 with an enormous amount of general and un- 
 related knowledge ; and at the same time as a 
 totally unregulated or ill-regulated ruffian. This 
 was a favourite epithet of his, for which I daresay 
 there was something to be said. Now one Sunday 
 it happened that I was going up to see him at 
 7 K, and came from Chelsea with two or three 
 books in my hand, and, as it happened, a pair of 
 spectacles on my nose. At that time I sometimes 
 carried an umbrella, and no doubt looked ex- 
 ceedingly peaceful. As a result of this a young 
 man, who turned out afterwards to be a pro- 
 fessional cricketer, thought I was a very easy 
 person to deal with, and to insult. As I came 
 to York Place, which was then almost empty of 
 passers by, I was walking close to the railings and 
 this individual came up and pushing rudely past 
 me, stepped right in front of me. Now this was 
 a most outrageous proceeding, because he had 
 
94 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 fifteen free feet of pavement, and I naturally 
 resented it, I made a little longer step than I 
 should otherwise have done and " galled his 
 kibe." He turned round upon me and, using very 
 bad language, asked me where I was going to, 
 who I thought I was, and what I proposed to do 
 about it. I did not propose to do anything, but 
 did it. I smote him very hard with the umbrella, 
 knocking him down. He remained on the pave- 
 ment for a considerable time, and then only got 
 up at the third endeavour, and promptly gave me 
 into custody. The policeman, who had happened 
 to see the whole affair, explained to me, with 
 that civility common among the custodians of 
 order to those classes whose dress suggests they 
 are their masters, that he was compelled to take 
 the charge. I was removed to Lower Seymour 
 Street and put in a cell for male prisoners only, 
 where I remained fully half an hour. 
 
 While I was in this cell a small boy of about 
 nine was introduced and left there. I went 
 over to him and said, " Hullo, my son, what's 
 brought you here ? " Naturally enough he im- 
 agined that I was not a prisoner but a powerful 
 official, and bursting into tears he said, " Oh, 
 please, sir, it warn't me as nicked the steak ! " 
 I consoled him to the best of my ability until I 
 was shortly afterwards invited down to Marl- 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 95 
 
 borough Street Police Court, where Mr. De Rutzen, 
 now Sir Albert De Rutzen, was sitting. As I had 
 anticipated the likelihood of my being fined, and 
 as I had no more than a few shillings with me, 
 I had written a letter to Maitland, and procuring 
 a messenger through the police, had sent it up to 
 him. He came down promptly and sat in the 
 court while I was being tried for this assault. 
 After hearing the case Mr. De Rutzen decided to 
 fine me three pounds, which Maitland paid, with 
 great chuckles at the incident, even though he 
 considered his prospect of getting the money back 
 for some months was exceedingly vague. It was 
 by no means the first time that he had gone to 
 the police court for copy which " is very pretty 
 to observe," as Pepys said, when after the Fire 
 of London it was discovered that as many churches 
 as public houses were left standing in the city. 
 That such a man should have had to pursue his 
 studies of actual life in the police courts and the 
 slums was really an outrage, another example of 
 the native malignity of matter. For, as I have 
 insisted, and must insist ^&in, he was a scholar 
 and a dreamer. But his pressing anxieties for 
 ever forbade him to dream, or to pursue scholarship 
 without interruption. He desired time to perfect 
 his control of the English tongue, and he wanted 
 much that no man can ever get. It is my firm 
 
96 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 conviction that if he had possessed the smallest 
 means he would never have thought himself 
 completely master of the medium in which he 
 worked. He often spoke of poor Flaubert saying : 
 " What an accursed language is French ! " He 
 was for ever dissatisfied with his work, as an 
 artist should be, and I think he attained seldom, 
 if ever, the rare and infrequent joy that an 
 artist has in accomplishment. It was not only 
 his desire of infinite perfection as a writer pure and 
 simple, which affected and afflicted him. It was 
 the fact that he should never have written fiction 
 at all. He often destroyed the first third of a 
 book. I knew liim to do so with one three times 
 over. This, of course, was not always out of 
 the cool persuasion that what he had done was 
 not good, for it often was good in its way, but 
 frequently he began, in a hurry, in despair, and 
 with the prospects of starvation, something that 
 he knew not to be his own true work, or something 
 which he forced without adequate preparation. 
 Then I used to get a dark note saying, " I have 
 destroyed the whole of the first volume and am, 
 I hope, beginning to see my way." It was no 
 pleasant thing to be a helpless spectator of these 
 struggles, in which he found no rest, when I knew 
 his destiny was to have been a scholar at a great 
 university. 
 
OP HENRY MAITLAND 97 
 
 When one understands his character, or even 
 begins to understand it, it is easy enough to 
 comprehend that the temporary ease with regard to 
 money which came after his wife's death did not 
 last so very long. The pressure of her immediate 
 needs and incessant demands being at last relaxed 
 he himself relaxed his efforts in certain directions 
 and presently was again in difficulties. I know 
 that it will sound very extraordinary to all but 
 those who know the inside of literary life that this 
 should have been so. A certain amount of publi- 
 city is almost always associated in the minds of 
 the public with monetary success of a kind. Yet 
 one very well-known acquaintance of mine, an 
 eminent if erratic journalist, one day had a column 
 of favourable criticism in a big daily, and after 
 reading it went out and bought a red herring with 
 his last penny and cooked it over the fire in his 
 solitary room. It was the same with myself. 
 It was almost the same with Maitland even at 
 this time. No doubt the worst of his fmancial 
 difficulties were before I returned from America, 
 and even before his wife died, but never, till the 
 end of his life, was he at ease with regard to money. 
 He never attained the art of the pot-boiler by 
 which most of us survive, even when he tried short 
 stories, which he did finally after I had pressed 
 him to attempt them for some years. 
 
 G 
 
98 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 In many ways writing to him was a kind of 
 sacred mission. It was not that he had any 
 faith in great results to come from it, but the 
 profession of a writer was itself sacred, and even 
 the poorest sincere writer was a sacer vates. He 
 once absolutely came down all the way to me in 
 Chelsea to show me a well-known article in which 
 Robert Louis Stevenson denied, to my mind not 
 so unjustly, that a writer could claim payment at 
 all, seeing that he left the world's work to do what 
 he chose to do for his own pleasure. Stevenson 
 went on to compare such a writer to a fille de joie. 
 This enraged Maitland furiously. I should have 
 been grieved if he and Stevenson had met upon 
 that occasion. I really think something desperate 
 might have happened, little as one might expect 
 violence from such a curious apostle of personal 
 peace as Maitland. Many years afterwards I 
 related this little incident to Robert Louis Steven- 
 son in Samoa, but I think by that time Maitland 
 himself was half inclined to agree with his eminent 
 brother author. And yet, as I say, writing was a 
 mission, even if it was with him an acquired 
 passion ; but his critical faculties, which were 
 so keenly developed, almost destroyed him. There 
 can be no stronger proof that he was not one of 
 those happy beings who take to the telling of stories 
 because they must, and because it is in them. 
 
OP HENRY MAITLAND 99 
 
 There was no time that he was not obhged to do 
 his best, though every writer knows to his grief 
 that there are times when the second best must 
 do. And thus it was that John Glass so enraged 
 him. All those things which are the care of the 
 true writer were of most infinite importance to him. 
 A misprint, a mere "literal," gave him lasting 
 pain. He desired classic perfection, both of work 
 and the mere methods of production. He would 
 have taken years over a book if fear and hunger 
 and poverty had permitted him to do so. And 
 yet he wrote " Isabel," " The Mob," and " In the 
 Morning," all in seven months, even while he read 
 through the whole of Dante's " Divina Commedia," 
 for recreation, and while he toiled at the alien 
 labour of teaching. Yet this was he who wrote 
 to one friend : " Would it not be delightful to 
 give up a year or so to the study of some old period 
 of English history ? " When he was thirty-six 
 he said : " The four years from now to forty I 
 should like to devote to a vigorous apprenticeship 
 in English." But this was the man who year 
 after year was compelled to write books which 
 the very essence of his being told him would work 
 no good. Sometimes I am tempted to think 
 that the only rehef he got for many, many years 
 came out of the hours we spent in company, 
 either in his room or mine. We read very much 
 
100 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 together, and it was our delight, as I have said, to 
 exchange quotations, or read each other passages 
 which we had discovered during the week. He 
 recited poetry with very great feeling and skill, 
 and was especially fond of much of Coleridge. 
 I can hear him now reading those lines of Coleridge 
 to his son which end : 
 
 " Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee 
 Whether the summer clothe the general earth 
 With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing 
 Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch 
 Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch 
 Smokes in the sun-thaw ; whether the eave-drops 
 
 fall 
 Heard only in the trances of the blast. 
 Or if the secret ministry of frost 
 Shall hang them up in silent icicles. 
 Quietly shining to the quiet Moon." 
 
 And to hear him chant the mighty verse of the 
 great Greeks who were dead, and yet were most 
 alive to him, was always inspiring. The time 
 was to come, though not yet, when he was to see 
 Greece, and when he had entered Piraeus and seen 
 the peopled mountains of that country Homer 
 became something more to him than he had been, 
 and the language of iEschylus and Sophocles took 
 on new glories and clothed itself in still more 
 wondrous emotions. He knew a hundred choruses 
 of the Greek tragedies by heart, and declaimed 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 101 
 
 them with his wild hair flung back and his eyes 
 gleaming as if the old tragedians, standing in the 
 glowing sun of the Grecian summer, were there 
 to hear him, an alien yet not an alien, using the 
 tongue that gave its chiefest glories to them 
 for ever. But he had been born in exile, and had 
 made himself an outcast. 
 
 Those who have read so far, and are interested 
 in him, will see that I am much more concerned 
 to say what I felt about him than to relate mere 
 facts and dates. I care little or nothing that in 
 some ways others know more or less of him, or 
 know it differently. I try to build up my little 
 model of him, try to paint my picture touch by 
 touch ; often, it may be, by repetition, for so a 
 man builds himself for his friends in his life, I 
 must paint him as a whole, and put him down, 
 here and there perhaps with the grain of the 
 canvas showing through the paint, or perhaps 
 with what the worthy critics call a rich impasto, 
 which may be compiled of words. Others may 
 criticise, and will criticise what I write. No 
 doubt they will find much of it wrong, or wrong- 
 headed, and will attribute to me other motives 
 than those which move me, but if it leads them 
 to bring out more of his character than I know or 
 remember, I shall be content. For the more 
 that is known of him, the more he will be loved. 
 
102 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 It was somewhere about this time that I under- 
 took to write one of two or three articles which 
 I have done about him for periodicals, and the 
 remembrance of that particular piece of work 
 reminds me very strongly of his own ideas of his 
 own humour in writing. There have been many 
 discussions, wise and otherwise, as to whether 
 he possessed any at all, and I think the general 
 feeling that he was very greatly lacking in this 
 essential part of the equipment of a writer, to be 
 on the whole true. Among my lost letters there 
 was one which I most especially regret not to be 
 able to quote, for it was very long, perhaps con- 
 taining two thousand words, which he sent to 
 me when he knew I had been asked to do this 
 article. Now the purport of Maitland's letter 
 was to prove to me that every one was wrong 
 who said he had no humour. In one sense there 
 can be no greater proof that anybody who said 
 so was right. He enumerated carefully all the 
 characters in all the books he had hitherto written 
 in whom he thought there was real humour. He 
 gave me a preposterous list of these individuals, 
 with his comments, and appealed to me in all 
 deadly seriousness to know whether I did not agree 
 with him that they were humorous. But the 
 truth is that, save as a talker, he had very little 
 humour, and even then it was frequently verbal. 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 103 
 
 It was, however, occasionally very grim, and its 
 strength, oddly enough, was of the American 
 kind, since it consisted of managed exaggeration. 
 He had a certain joy in constructing more or less 
 humorous nicknames for people. Sometimes these 
 were good, and sometimes bad, but when he 
 christened them once he kept to it always. I 
 believe the only man of his acquaintance who 
 had no nickname at all was George Meredith, but 
 theq he loved and admired Meredith in no common 
 fashion. 
 
 In some of his books he speaks, apparently not 
 without some learning, of music, but there are, I 
 fancy, signs that his knowledge of it was more 
 careful construction than actual knowledge or 
 deep feeling. Nevertheless he did at times discover 
 a real comprehension of the greater musicians, 
 especially of Chopin. Seeing that this was so, it 
 is very curious, and more than curious in a writer, 
 that he had a measureless adoration of barrel 
 organs. He delighted in them strangely, and 
 when any Italian musician came into his dingy 
 street or neighbourhood, he would set the window 
 open and listen with ardour. Being so poor, he 
 could rarely afford to give away money even in 
 the smallest sum. Pennies were indeed pennies 
 to him. But he did sometimes bestow pence on 
 wandering Italians who ground out Verdi in thf 
 
104 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 crowded streets. Among the many languages 
 which he knew was, of course, Italian ; for, as 
 I have said, he read the " Divina Commedia " 
 easily, reading it for relaxation as he did Aristo- 
 phanes. It was a great pleasure to him, even 
 before he went to Italy, to speak a few words 
 in their own tongue to these Italians of the English 
 streets. He remembered that this music came 
 from the south, the south that was always his 
 Mecca, the Kibleh of the universe. Years after- 
 wards, when he had been in the south, and knew 
 Naples and the joyous crowds of the Chaiaja — 
 long before I had been there and had listened to 
 its uproar from the Belvidere of San Martino — 
 he found Naples chiefly a city of this joyous 
 popular music. Naples, he said, was the most 
 interesting modern city in Europe ; and yet I 
 believe the chief joy he had there was hearing its 
 music, and the singing of the lazzaroni down by 
 Santa Lucia. " Funiculi, Funicula," he loved 
 as much as if it were the work of a classic, and 
 " Santa Lucia " appealed to him like a Greek 
 chorus. I remember that, years later, he wrote 
 to me a letter of absurd and exaggrated anger, 
 which was yet perfectly serious, about the action 
 of the Neapolitan municipality in forbidding street 
 organs to play in the city. Sometimes, though 
 rarely, seeing that he could not often afford a 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 105 
 
 shilling, he went to great concerts in London^ 
 Certainly he spoke as one not without instruction 
 in musical subjects in " The Vortex," but I fancy 
 that musical experts might find flaws in his 
 nomenclature. Nevertheless he did love music 
 with a certain ardent passion. 
 
 He was a man not without a certain sensuality, 
 but it was his sensuousness which was in many 
 ways the most salient point in his character. 
 As I often told him, he was a kind of incomplete 
 Rabelaisian. That was suggested to me by his 
 delighted use of Gargantuan epithets with regard 
 to the great recurrent subject of food. He loved 
 all things which were redolent of oil and grease and 
 fatness. The joy of great abundance appealed 
 to him, and I verily believe that to him the great 
 outstanding characteristic of the past in England 
 was its abundant table. Indeed, in all things but 
 rowdy indecency, he was a Rabelaisian, and being 
 such, he yet had to put up with poor and simple 
 food. However, provided it was at hand in large 
 quantities, he was ready to feed joyously. He 
 would exclaim : " Now for our squalid meal ! 
 I wonder what Harold Edgeworth, or good old 
 Edmund Roden would say to this ? " When I 
 think of the meagre preface that Harold Edge- 
 worth wrote in later years for " Basil," when that 
 done by G. H. Rivers — afterwards published 
 
106 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 separately— did not meet with the approval of 
 Maitland's relatives and executors, I feel that 
 Edgeworth somewhat deserved the implied scorn 
 of Maitland's words. As for Edmund Roden, he 
 often spoke of him affectionately. In later years 
 he sometimes went down to Felixstowe to visit 
 him. He liked his house amazingly, and was very 
 much at home in it. It was there that he met 
 Grant Allen, and Sir Luke Redburn, whom he 
 declared to be the most interesting people that he 
 saw in Felixstowe at that time. 
 
 I am not sure whether it was on this particular 
 occasion, perhaps in 1895, that he went down to 
 Essex with a great prejudice against Grant Allen. 
 The reason of this was curious. He was always 
 most vicious when any writer who obviously lived 
 in comfort, complained loudly and bitterly of the 
 pittance of support given him by the public, and 
 the public's faithful servants, the publishers. 
 When Allen growled furiously on this subject in a 
 newspaper interview Maitland recalled to me with 
 angry amusement a certain previous article in 
 which, if I remember rightly. Grant Allen pro- 
 claimed his absolute inability to write if he were 
 not in a comfortable room with rose-coloured 
 curtains. " Rose-coloured curtains ! " said Mait- 
 land contemptuously, and looking round his own 
 rpojn one certainly found nothing of that kind. 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 107 
 
 It was perhaps an extraordinary thing, one of 
 the many odd things in his character, that the 
 man who loved the south so, who always dreamed 
 of it, seemed to see everything at that period of 
 his life in the merest black and white. There 
 was not a spark or speck of colour in his rooms. 
 Now in my one poor room in Chelsea I had hung 
 up all sorts of water-colours acquired by various 
 means from artists who were friends of mine. 
 By hook or by crook I got hold of curtains with 
 colour in them, and carpets, too, and Japanese 
 fans. My room was red and yellow and scarlet, 
 while his were a dingy monochrome, as if they 
 sympathised with the outlook at the back of his 
 flat, which stared down upon the inferno of the 
 Metropolitan Railway. But to return to Grant 
 Allen. Maitland now wrote : " However, I like 
 him very much. He is quite a simple, and very 
 gentle fellow, crammed with multifarious know- 
 ledge, enthusiastic in scientific pursuits. With 
 fiction and that kind of thing he ought never to 
 have meddled; it is the merest pot-boiling. He 
 reads nothing whatever but books of scientific 
 interest." 
 
 It was at Felixstowe, too, that he met Carew 
 Latter who induced him to write twenty papers 
 in one of the journals Latter conducted. They 
 were to be of pore or less disreputable London life. 
 
108 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 Some of them at least have been reprinted in his 
 volumes of short stories. There is certainly no 
 colour in them ; in some ways they resemble 
 sketches with the dry-point. Of course after he 
 had once been on the continent, and had got 
 south to Marseilles and the Cannebi^re, he learnt 
 to know what colour was, and wrote of it in a way 
 he had never done before, as I notice particularly 
 in one paragraph about Capri seen at sunset from 
 Naples. In this sudden discovery of colour he 
 reminded me, oddly enough, of my old acquaintance 
 Wynne, the now justly celebrated painter, who, up 
 to a certain time in his life, had painted almost in 
 monochrome, and certainly in a perpetual grey 
 chord. Then he met Marvell, the painter, who 
 was, if anything, a colourist. I do not think Marvell 
 influenced Wynne in anything but colour, but from 
 that day Wynne was a colourist, and so remains, 
 although to it he has added a great and real 
 power of design and decoration. It is true that 
 Maitland never became a colourist in writing, 
 but those who have read his work with attention 
 will observe that after a certain date he was much 
 more conscious of the world's colour. 
 
 In those days our poverty and our ambition 
 made great subjects for our talks. I myself had 
 been writing for some years with no more than a 
 succes d'estime, and I sometimes thought that I 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 109 
 
 would throw up the profession and go back to 
 Australia or America, or to the sea, or would 
 try Africa at last. But Maitland had no such 
 possibilities within him. He maintained grimly, 
 though not without humour, that his only possible 
 refuge when war, or some other final disaster 
 made it impossible for writers to earn their difficult 
 living, was a certain block of buildings opposite 
 7 K. This, however, was not Madame Tussaud's 
 as the careless might imagine, it was the Maryle- 
 bone workhouse, which he said he regarded with a 
 proprietary eye. It always afforded him a subject 
 for conversation when his prospects seemed rathei 
 poorer than usual. It was, at any rate, he de- 
 clared, very handy for him when he became unable 
 to do more work. No doubt this was his humour, 
 but there was something in this talk which was 
 more than half serious. He always liked to speak 
 of the gloomy side of things, and I possess many 
 letters of his which end with references to the 
 workhouse, or to some impending, black disaster. 
 In one he said : " I wish I could come up, but am 
 too low in health and spirits to move at present. 
 A cold clings about me, and the future looks 
 dark." Again he said : " No, I shall never speak 
 of my work. It has become a weariness and toil — 
 nothing more." And again : " It is a bad, bad 
 business, that of life at present." And yet once 
 
110 HENRY MAITLAND 
 
 more : " It is idle to talk about occupation — by 
 now I have entered on the last stage of life's 
 journey." This was by no means when he had 
 come towards the end of his life. However, 
 the workhouse does come up, even at the end, 
 in a letter written about two months before his 
 death. He wrote to me : "I have been turning 
 the pages with great pleasure, to keep my thoughts 
 from the workhouse." Those who did not know 
 him would not credit him with the courage of 
 desperation which he really possessed, if they saw 
 his letters and knew nothing more of the man. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 The art of portraiture, whether in words or paint, 
 is very difl&cult, and appears less easy as I attempt 
 to draw Maitland. Nevertheless the time comes 
 when the artist seems to see his man standing on 
 his feet before him, put down in his main planes, 
 though not yet, perhaps, with any subtlety. The 
 anatomy is suggested at any rate, if there are 
 bones in the subject or in the painter. As it 
 seems to me, Maitland should now stand before 
 those who have read so far with sympathy and 
 understanding. I have not finished my drawing, 
 but it might even now suffice as a sketch, and 
 seem from some points of view to be not wholly 
 inadequate. It is by no means easy to put him 
 down in a few words, but patience and the addition 
 of detail reach their end, it may be not without 
 satisfaction — ^for " with bread and steel one gets 
 to China." It is not possible to etch Maitland 
 in a few lines, for as it seems to me it is the little 
 details of his character with which I am most 
 concerned that give him his greatest value. It 
 is not so much the detail of his actual life, but the 
 
 m 
 
112 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 little things that he said, and the way he seemed 
 to think, or even the way that he avoided thinking, 
 which I desire to put down. And when I say 
 those things he wished not to think of, I am 
 referring more especially to his views of the 
 universe, and of the world itself, those views 
 which are a man's philosophy, and not less his 
 philosophy when of set purpose he declines to 
 think of them at all, for this Maitland did without 
 any doubt. Goethe said, when he spoke, if I 
 remember rightly, about all forms of religious 
 and metaphysical speculation, " Much contem- 
 plation, or brooding over these things is disturbing 
 to the spirit." Unfortunately I do not know 
 German so I cannot find the reference to this, but 
 Maitland, who knew the language very thoroughly 
 and had read nearly everything of great importance 
 in it, often quoted this passage, having naturally a 
 great admiration for Goethe. I do not mean that 
 he admired him merely for his position in the 
 world of letters. What he did admire in Goethe 
 was what he himself liked and desired so greatly. 
 He wished for peace, for calmness of spirit. He 
 did not like to be disturbed in any way whatso- 
 ever. He would not disturb himself. He wished 
 people to be reasonable, and thought this was a 
 reasonable request to make of them. I remember 
 on one occasion when I had been listening to him 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND ll3 
 
 declaiming about some one's peculiar lack of 
 reasonableness, which seemed to him the one 
 great human quality, that I said : " Maitland, 
 what would you do if you were having trouble 
 with a woman who was in a very great rage with 
 you ? " He replied, with an air of surprise, 
 "Why, of course, I should reason with her." 
 I said shortly, " Don't ever get married again ! " 
 Nevertheless he was a wonderfully patient and 
 reasonable man himself, and truly lacked every- 
 thing characteristic of the combatant. He would 
 discuss, he would never really argue. I do not 
 suppose that he was physically a coward, but his 
 dread of scenes and physical violence lay very 
 deep in his organisation. Although he used me 
 as a model I never really drew him at length in 
 any of my own books, but naturally he was a 
 subject of great psychological interest to me. 
 Pursuing my studies in him I said, one day, 
 " Maitland, what would you do if a man dis- 
 agreed with you, got outrageously and unreason- 
 ably angry, and slapped you in the face ? " He 
 replied, in his characteristically low and concen- 
 trated voice, " Do ? I should look at him with 
 the most infinite disgust, and turn away." 
 
 His horror of militarism was something almost 
 comic, for it showed his entire incapacity for 
 grasping the world's situation as it shows itself 
 
 H 
 
114 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 to any real and ruthless student of political 
 sociology who is not bogged in the mud flats of 
 some Utopian island. Once we were together on 
 the Horse Guards' Parade and a company of the 
 Guards came marching up. We stood to watch 
 them pass, and when they had gone by he turned 
 to me and said, " Mark you, my dear man, this, 
 this is the nineteenth century ! " In one of his 
 letters written to me after his second marriage 
 he said of his eldest son : " I hope to send him 
 abroad, to some country where there is no possi- 
 bility of his having to butcher or be butchered." 
 This, of course, was his pure reason pushed to the 
 point where reason becomes mere folly, for such 
 is the practical antinomy of pure reason in life. 
 
 It was in this that he showed his futile idealism, 
 which was in conflict with what may be called 
 truly his real pessimism. That he did good work 
 in many of his books dealing with the lower 
 classes is quite obvious, and cannot be denied. 
 He showed us the things that exist. It is per- 
 fectly possible, and even certainly true, that 
 many of the most pessimistic writers are in reality 
 optimists. They show us the grey in order that 
 we may presently make it rose. But Maitland 
 Avrote absolutely without hope. He took his 
 subjects as mere subjects, and putting them on 
 the table, lectured in pathology. He made books 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 115 
 
 of his dead-house experiences, and sold them, but 
 never believed that he, or any other man, could 
 really do good by speaking of what he had seen 
 and dilated upon. The people as a body were vile 
 and hopleless. He did not even inquire how they 
 became so. He thought nothing could be done, 
 and did not desire to do it. His future was in the 
 past. The world's great age would never renew 
 itself, and only he and a few others really under- 
 stood the desperate state into which things had 
 drifted. Since his death there has been some 
 talk about his religion. I shall speak of this 
 later, on a more fitting occasion ; but, truly 
 speaking, he had no religion. When he gave up 
 his temporary Positivist pose, which was entirely 
 due to his gratitude to Harold Edgeworth for 
 helping him, he refused to think of these things 
 again. They disturbed the spirit. If I ever 
 endeavoured to inveigle him into a discussion or 
 an argument upon any metaphysical subject he 
 grew visibly uneasy. He declined to argue, or 
 even to discuss, and though I know that in later 
 life he admitted that even immortality was possible 
 I defy any one to bring a tittle of evidence to show 
 that he ever went further. This attitude to all 
 forms of religious and metaphysical thought was 
 very curious to me. It was, indeed, almost 
 inexplicable, as I have an extreme pleasure in 
 
116 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 speculative inquiry of all kinds. The truth is 
 that on this side of his nature he was absolutely 
 wanting. Such things interested him no more 
 than music interests a tone-deaf man who cannot 
 distinguish the shriek of a tom-cat from the sound 
 of a violin. If I did try to speak of such things 
 he listened with an air of outraged and sublime 
 patience which must have been obvious to any 
 one but a bore. Whether his philosophy was sad 
 or not, he would not have it disturbed. 
 
 His real interest in religion seemed to lie in his 
 notion that it was a curious form of delusion 
 almost ineradicable from the human mind. There 
 is a theory, very popular among votaries of the 
 creeds, which takes the form of denying that any 
 one can really be an atheist. This is certainly 
 not true, but it helps one to understand the 
 theologic mind, which has an imperative desire 
 to lay hold of something like an inclusive hypothesis 
 to rest on. So far as Maitland was concerned there 
 was no more necessity to have a hypothesis about 
 God than there was to have one about quaternions, 
 and quaternions certainly did not interest him. 
 He shrugged his shoulders and put these matters 
 aside, for in many things he had none of the 
 weaknesses of humanity, though in others he had 
 more than his share. In his letters to G. H. 
 liivers, which I have had the privilege of reading, 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 117 
 
 there are a few references to Rivers' habits and 
 powers of speculation. I think it was somewhere 
 in 1900 or 1901 that he read " Forecasts." By this 
 time he had a strong feehng of affection for Rivers, 
 and a very great admiration for him. His references 
 to him in the " Meditations " are sufficiently near 
 the truth to corroborate this. Nevertheless his chief 
 feeling towards Rivers and his work, beyond the 
 mere fact that it was a joy to him that a man 
 could make money by doing good stuff, was one 
 of amazement and surprise that any one could be 
 deeply interested in the future, and could give 
 himself almost wholly or even with partial energy, 
 to civic purposes. And so he wrote to Rivers : 
 " I must not pretend to care very much about 
 the future of the human race. Come what may, 
 folly and misery are sure to be the prevalent 
 features of life, but your ingenuity in speculation, 
 the breadth of your views, and the vigour of your 
 writing, make this book vastly enjoyable. The 
 critical part of it satisfies, and often delights me- 
 Stupidity should have a sore back for some time 
 to come, and many a wind-bag will be uneasily 
 aware of collapse." 
 
 It is interesting to note, now that I am speaking 
 of his friendship for Rivers, and apropos of what 
 I shall have to say later about his religious views, 
 that he wrote to Rivers : "By the bye, you 
 
118 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 speak of God. Well, I understand what you 
 mean, but the word makes me stumble rather. 
 I have grown to shrink utterly from the use of 
 such terms, and though I admit, perforce, a 
 universal law, I am so estranged by its unintelli- 
 gibility that not even a desire to be reverent can 
 make those old names in any way real to me." 
 So later he said that he was at a loss to grasp 
 what Rivers meant when he wrote : " There stirs 
 something within us now that can never die 
 again." I think Maitland totally misinterpreted 
 the passage, which was rather apropos of the 
 awakening of the civic spirit in mankind than of 
 anything else, but he went on to say that he put 
 aside the vulgar interpretation of such words. 
 However, was it Rivers' opinion that the material 
 doom of the earth did not involve the doom of 
 earthly life ? He added that Rivers' declared 
 belief in the coherency and purpose of things was 
 pleasant to him, for he himself could not doubt 
 for a moment that there was some purpose. This 
 is as far as he ever went. On the other hand, he 
 did doubt whether we, in any sense of the pronoun, 
 should ever be granted understanding of that 
 purpose. Of course all this shows that he possessed 
 no metaphysical endowments or apparatus. He 
 loved knowledge pure and simple, but when it 
 came to the exercises of the metaphysical mind 
 
OF HENRY MAITLA^D 119 
 
 he was pained and puzzled. He lacked any real 
 education in philosophy, and did not even under- 
 stand its peculiar vocabulary. However vain 
 those of us who have gone through the meta- 
 physical mill may think it in actual products, 
 we are all yet aware that it helps greatly to 
 formulate our own philosophy, or even our own 
 want of it. For it clears the air. It cuts away 
 all kinds of undergrowth. It at any rate shows 
 us that there is no metaphysical way out, for the 
 simple reason that there has never existed one 
 metaphysician who did not destroy another. They 
 are all mutually destructive. But Maitland had no 
 joy in construction or destruction ; and, as I have 
 said, he barely understood the technical terms of 
 metaphysics. There was a great difference with 
 regard to these inquiries between him and Rivers. 
 The difference was that Rivers enjoyed meta- 
 physical thinking and speculation where Maitland 
 hated it. But all the same Rivers took it up 
 much too late in life, and about the year 1900 
 made wonderful discoveries which had been 
 commonplaces to Aristotle. A thing like this 
 would not have mattered much if he had regarded 
 it as education. However, he regarded it as 
 discovery, and wrote books about it which inspired 
 debates, and apparently filled the metaphysicians 
 with great joy. It is always a pleasure to the 
 
120 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 evil spirit that for ever lives in man to see the 
 ablest people of the time showing that they are 
 not equally able in some other direction than that 
 in which they have gained distinction. 
 
 It is curious how this native dislike of Maitland 
 to being disturbed by speculative thought comes 
 out in a criticism he made of Thomas Hardj^ 
 He had always been one of this writer's greatest 
 admirers, and I know he especially loved " The 
 Woodlanders," but he wrote in a letter to Dr, 
 Lake something very odd about " Jude the 
 Obscure." He calls it: "a sad book! Poor 
 Thomas is utterly on the wrong tack, and I fear 
 he will never get back into the right one. At his 
 age, a habit of railing at the universe is not over- 
 come." Of course this criticism is wholly without 
 any value as regards Hardy's work, but it is no 
 little side light on Maitland's own peculiar habits 
 of thought, or of persistent want of thought, on 
 the great matters of speculation. His objection 
 was not to anything that Hardy said, but to the 
 fact that the latter 's work, filled with what 
 Maitland calls " railing at the universe," per- 
 sonally disturbed him. Anything which broke up 
 his little semi-classic universe, the literary hut 
 which he had built for himself as a shelter from 
 the pitiless storm of cosmic influences, made him 
 angry and uneasy for days and weeks. He never 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 121 
 
 lived to read Hardy's " Dynasts," a book which 
 stands almost alone in literature, and is to my 
 mind a greater book than Goethe's " Faust," 
 but if he had read it I doubt if he would have 
 forgiven Thomas Hardy for disturbing him. He 
 always wanted to be left alone. He had con- 
 structed his pattern of the universe, and any one 
 who shook it he denounced with, " Confound the 
 fellow ! He makes me unhappy." The one book 
 that he did read, which is in itself essentially a 
 disturbing book to many people, and apparently 
 read with some pleasure, was the earliest volume 
 of Dr. Frazer's " Golden Bough " ; but it is a 
 curious thing that what interested him, and 
 indeed actually pleased him, was Frazer's side 
 attacks upon the dogmas of Christianity. He 
 said : " The curious thing about Frazer's book is, 
 that in illustrating the old religious usages con- 
 nected with tree-worship and so on, he throws 
 light upon every dogma of Christianity. This by 
 implication ; he never does it expressly. Edmund 
 Roden has just pointed this out to the Folk-lore 
 Society, with the odd result that Gladstone wrote 
 at once resigning membership." This was written 
 after Gladstone died, but it reads as if Maitland 
 was not aware that he was dead. Odd as it may 
 seem, it is perfectly possible that he did not 
 know it. He cared very little for the newspapers, 
 
122 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 and sometimes did not read any for long periods. 
 It is rather curious that when I proved to him 
 in later years that he had once dated his letters 
 according to the Positivist Calendar, he seemed 
 a little disturbed and shocked. Still, it was very 
 natural that when exposed to Positivist influences 
 he should have become a Positivist, for among the 
 people of that odd faith, if faith it can be called, 
 he found both kindness and intellectual recognition. 
 But when his mind became clearer and calmer, 
 and something of the storm and stress had passed 
 by, he was aware that his attitude had been 
 somewhat pathologic, and did not like to recall it. 
 This became very much clearer to him, and 
 indeed to me, when another friend of ours, a learned 
 and very odd German who lived and starved in 
 London, went completely under in the same 
 curious religious way. His name was Schmidt. 
 He remained to the day of Maitland's death a 
 very great friend of his, and I believe he possesses 
 more letters from Henry Maitland than any man 
 living — greatly owing to his own vast Teutonic 
 energy and industry in writing to his friends. 
 
 But in London Schmidt came to absolute 
 destitution. I myself got to know him through 
 Maitland. It appeared that he owned a collie 
 dog, which he found at last impossible to feed, 
 even though he starved himself to do so. Mait- 
 land told me of this, and introduced me to Schmidt. 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 12^ 
 
 On hearing his story, and seeing the dog, I went 
 to my own people, who were then living in 
 Clapham, and asked them if they would take the 
 animal from Schmidt and keep it. When I saw 
 the Gterman again I was given the dog, togethet 
 with a paper on which were written all Don's 
 peculiar tricks, most of which had been taught 
 to him by his master and needed the Gterman 
 language for their words of command. Soon 
 after this Schmidt fell into even grimmer poverty, 
 and was rescued from the deepest gulf by some 
 religious body analogous in those days to the 
 Salvation Army of the present time. Of this 
 Maitland knew nothing, until one day going down 
 the Strand he found his friend giving away 
 religious pamphlets at the door of Exeter Hall. 
 When he told me this he said he went next day 
 to see the man in his single room lodging 
 and found him sitting at the table with several 
 open Bibles spread out before him. He explained 
 that he was making a commentary on the Bible 
 at the instigation of one of his new friends, and 
 he added : " Here, here is henceforth my life's 
 work." Shortly after this, I believe through 
 Harold Edgeworth or some one else to whom 
 Maitland appealed, the poor German was given 
 work in some quasi-public institution, and with 
 better fare and more ease his brain recovered. 
 He never mentioned religion again. It was thus 
 
124 HENRY MAITLAND 
 
 that Maitland Iiimself recovered from similar 
 but less serious influences in somewhat similar 
 conditions. For some weeks in 1885 I was myself 
 exposed to such influences in Chicago, in even 
 bitterer conditions than those from which Schmidt 
 and Maitland had suffered, but not for one moment 
 did I alter my opinions. As a kind of final com- 
 mentary on this chapter and this side of Maitland's 
 mind, one might quote from a letter to Rivers : 
 " Seeing that mankind cannot have done al- 
 together with the miserable mystery of life, un- 
 doubtedly it behoves us before all else to enlighten 
 as we best can the lot of those for whose being 
 we are responsible. This for the vast majority 
 of men — a few there are, I think, who are justified 
 in quite neglecting that view of life, and, by the 
 bye, Marcus Aurelius was one of them. Nothing 
 he could have done would have made Commodus 
 other than he was — I use, of course, the everyday 
 phrases, regardless of determinism — and then one 
 feels pretty sure that Commodus was not his 
 son at all. For him, life was the individual, 
 and whether he has had any true influence or not, 
 I hold him absolutely justified in thinking as he 
 did." There again comes out Maitland's view, 
 his anti-social view, the native egoism of the man, 
 his peculiar solitude of thought. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 To have seen " Shelley plain " once only is to put 
 down a single point on clear paper. To have seen 
 him twice gives his biographer the right to draw 
 a line. Out of three points may come a triangle. 
 Out of the many times in many years that I saw 
 Maitland comes the intricate pattern of him. I 
 would rather do a little book like " Manon 
 Lescaut " than many biographical quartos lying 
 as heavy on the dead as Vanbrugh's mansions. 
 If there are warts on Maitland so there were on 
 Cromwell, I do not invent like the old carto- 
 graphers, who adorned their maps with legends 
 saying, " Here is much gold," or " Here are found 
 diamonds." Nor have I put any imaginary 
 " Mountains of the Moon " into his map, or 
 adorned vacant p4rts of ocean with whales or 
 wonderful monsters. I put down nothing unseen, 
 or most reasonably inferred. In spite of my 
 desire, which is sincere, to say as little as possible 
 about myself, I find I have to speak sometimes 
 of things primarily my own. There is no doubt 
 it did Maitland a great deal of good to have 
 
 125 
 
126 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 somebody to interest himself in, even if it were 
 no one of more importance than myself. Although 
 he was so singularly a lonely man, he could not 
 always bury himself in the classics, or even in his 
 work, done laboriously in eight prodigious hours. 
 We for ever talked about what we were going to do, 
 and there was very little that I wrote, up to the 
 time of his leaving London permanently, which 
 I did not discuss with him. Yet I was aware 
 that with much I wrote he was wholly dissatisfied. 
 I remember when I was still living in Chelsea, 
 not in Danvers Street but in Redburn Street, 
 where I at last attained the glory of two rooms, 
 he came to me one Sunday in a very uneasy state 
 of mind. He looked obviously worried and 
 troubled, and was for a long time silent as he 
 sat over the fire. I asked him again and again 
 what was the matter, because, as can be easily 
 imagined, I always had the notion that some- 
 thing must be the matter with him, or soon would 
 be. In answer to my repeated importunities he 
 said, at last : " Well, the fact of the matter is, 
 I want to speak to you about your work." It 
 appeared that I and my affairs were at the bottom 
 of his discomfort. He told me that he had been 
 thinking of my want of success, and that he had 
 made up his mind to tell me the cause of it. He 
 was nervous and miserable, though I begged him 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 127 
 
 to speak freely, but at last got out the truth. He 
 told me that he did not think I possessed the 
 qualities to succeed at the business I had so rashly 
 commenced. He declared that it was not that 
 he had not the very highest opinion of such a 
 book as " The Western Trail," but as regards 
 fiction he felt I was bound to be a failure. Those 
 who knew him can imagine what it cost him to 
 say as much as this. I beheve he would have 
 preferred to destroy half a book and begin it 
 again. Naturally enough what he said I found 
 very disturbing, but I am pleased to say that 
 I took it in very good part, and told him that 
 I would think it over seriously. As may be 
 imagined, I did a great deal of thinking on the 
 subject, but the result of my cogitations amounted 
 to this : I had started a thing and meant to go 
 through with it at all costs. I wrote this to him 
 later, and the little incident never made any 
 difference whatever to our affectionate friend- 
 ship. I reminded him many years after of what 
 he had said, and he owned then that I had done 
 something to make him revise his former opinion. 
 When I come to speak of some of his letters to 
 me about my later books it will be seen how 
 generous he could be to a friend who, for some 
 time then, had not been very enthusiastic about 
 his own work. I have said before, and I always 
 
128 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 believed, that it was he and not myself who was 
 at the wrong kind of task. Fiction, even as he 
 understood it, was not for a man of his nature 
 and faculties. He would have been in his true 
 element as a don of a college, and much of his love 
 of the classics was a mystery to me, as it would 
 have been to most active men of the world, how- 
 ever well educated. I did understand his passion 
 for the Greek tragedies, but he had almost more 
 delight in the Romans ; and, with the exception 
 of Catullus and Lucretius, the Latin classics are 
 to me without any savour. There is no doubt 
 that in many ways I was but a barbarian to 
 him. For one thing, at that time I was some- 
 thing of a fanatical imperialist. He took no 
 more interest in the Empire, except as literary 
 material, than he did in Nonconformist theology. 
 Then I was certainly highly patriotic as regards 
 England, but he was very cosmopolitan. It was 
 no doubt a very strange thing that he should 
 have spoken to me about my having little faculty 
 for writing fiction when I had so often come 
 to the same silent conclusion about himself. 
 Naturally enough I did not dare to tell him so, 
 for if such a pronouncement had distressed me a 
 little it would distress him very much more. Yet 
 I think he did sometimes understand his real 
 limitations, especially in later years, when he 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 129 
 
 wrote more criticism. The man who could say 
 that he was prepared to spend the years from 
 thirty-six to forty in a vigorous apprenticeship to 
 Enghsh, was perfectly capable of continuing that 
 apprenticeship until he died. 
 
 He took a critical and wonderful interest in the 
 methods of all men of letters, and that particular 
 interest with regard to Balzac, which was known 
 to many, has sometimes been mistaken. Folks 
 have said, and even written, that he meant to 
 write an Enghsh " Comedie Humaine." There is, 
 no doubt, a touch of truth in this notion, but no 
 more than a touch. He would have liked to 
 follow in Balzac's mighty footsteps, and do some- 
 thing for England which would possibly be 
 inclusive of all social grades. At any rate he 
 began at the bottom and worked upwards. It 
 is quite obvious to me that what prevented him 
 from going further in any such scheme was not 
 actually a want of power or any failure of industry, 
 it was a real failure of knowledge and of close 
 contact with the classes composing the whole nation. 
 Beyond the lower middle class his knowledge was not 
 very deep. He was mentally an alien, and a satiric 
 if interested intruder. He had been exiled for the 
 unpardonable sins of his youth. It is impossible 
 for any man of intellect not to suspect his own 
 limitations, and I am sure he knew that he should 
 
 I 
 
130 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 have been a pure child of books, for as soon as 
 he got beyond the pale of his own grim sur- 
 roundings, those surroundings which had been 
 burnt, and were still being burnt into his soul, 
 he apparently lost interest. Though two or three 
 of these later books have indeed much merit, such 
 novels as " The Vortex " and " The Best of AJl 
 Things " are really failures. I believe he felt it. 
 Anthony Hope Hawkins once wrote to me apropos 
 of something, that there were very few men writing 
 who really knew that all real knowledge had to be 
 "bought." Maitland had bought his knowledge 
 of sorrow and suffering and certain surroundings 
 at a personal price that few can pay and not be 
 bankrupt. But while I was associating with 
 almost every class in the world he lived truly 
 alone. There were, indeed, long months when he 
 actually saw no one, and there were other periods 
 when his only friend besides myself was that 
 philosophic German whose philosophy put its lofty 
 tail between its legs on a prolonged starvation diet. 
 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 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 131 
 
 though it were but the Will to Live of Schopen- 
 hauer, 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 Academic 
 Frangaise in 1889 : " La peinture d'un fumier 
 pent gtre justifi6e 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. Li 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 
 
132 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 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 char- 
 acter 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 alien tour de force. He bent his 
 intellect in that direction, and succeeded even 
 against his nature. He who desired to be a 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 188 
 
 Bentley or a Person wrote bitterly about the 
 slums of Tottenham Court Road. With Person 
 he damned the nature of things, and wrote beauti- 
 fully 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 mis- 
 taken, 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 
 
134 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 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 dung- 
 hill in which he found her. This poor girl was his 
 first belle 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 
 
eF HENRY MAITLAND 135 
 
 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 
 
136 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 rooms, and so far as I know never saw her 
 again. 
 
 While I was in America he was Hving at 7 K, 
 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 
 imtil 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 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 137 
 
 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 the regressus a 
 principiatis ad principia. This is always a fasci. 
 nating mental exercise, and indeed I think, with 
 
138 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 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 offensive- 
 ness, as Maitland points out, Maitland's own 
 commentary on such women is ten thousand times 
 more bitter, and it is felt, not observed, as in 
 Dickens' books. He calls them " these remark- 
 able 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 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 139 
 
 are unintelligent and untaught ; very often they 
 are fj^grantly 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 investiga- 
 tion, 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 con- 
 clusions. 
 
 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 
 
140 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 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 
 
OP HENRY MAITLAND 141 
 
 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 con- 
 sequence 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 
 
142 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 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 Brontes, 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 some- 
 thing 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 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 143 
 
 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, im- 
 possible, 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 
 
144 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 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 in a prolonged drama of pain and 
 misery. It took me some time and many ques- 
 tions 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 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 145 
 
 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 irre- 
 vocable 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, pre- 
 posterous, 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 
 
 K 
 
146 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 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 Moor- 
 hampton, 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 char- 
 acters 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 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 147 
 
 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 hght 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 
 
148 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 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 one 
 Hanging 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 7 K. 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 
 pught to have acted, and should not have allowed 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 149 
 
 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 Totten- 
 ham 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 
 
150 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 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 Moor- 
 hampton. 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 hap- 
 pened. 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 
 
01* HENRY MAITLAND ISI 
 
 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 un- 
 expectedly 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 domi- 
 nated 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 thait 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,'' 
 
152 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 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 impossi- 
 bihty 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 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 153 
 
 in which he sometimes found himself. Neverthe- 
 less it seemed to me, as I explained to them, that 
 it 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 accus- 
 tomed to books, and appreciated his work. 
 
 No doubt my proposal sounded absurd, un- 
 conventional, 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. Ou 
 
154 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 conversation ended at last in both of them under- 
 taking 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 situa- 
 tion 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 acquaint- 
 ance, 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 possi- 
 bility 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 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 155 
 
 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. Cer- 
 tainly 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 
 
156 HENRY MAITLAND 
 
 financial slave of him. We three met in the 
 gloomy sitting-room at 7 K. 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. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 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 Mait- 
 land remained Maitland, and his character did 
 not alter now. So I may return for a little 
 
 157 
 
158 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 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 photo- 
 graph 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 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 159 
 
 at 7 K 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 other- 
 wise 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 per- 
 ceiving 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 weak- 
 ness 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 
 
160 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 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 re- 
 reading " The Meditations," I find some kind of 
 an explanation, or what he considered an explana- 
 tion, 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 
 
OF HENRY MAITLANB 161 
 
 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 misunder- 
 stood 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 k rh6pital," or " brulait 
 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 fmancial 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 
 
 L 
 
162 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 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 task- 
 masters. In such an event he gloomily antici- 
 pated, 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 : 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 163 
 
 THE HUMBLE ASPIRATION OF 
 H.M., NOVELIST 
 
 "Hoc erat in votis." 
 
 Oh could I encounter a Gillman, 
 
 Who would hoard me and lodge me for aye. 
 With what intellectual skill, man, 
 
 My life should be frittered away ! 
 
 What visions of study methodic 
 
 My leisurely hours would beguile ! — 
 
 / would potter with details prosodic, 
 I would ponder perfections of style. 
 
 I would joke in a vein pessimistic 
 
 At all the disasters of earth ; 
 I would trifle with schemes socialistic. 
 
 And turn over matters for mirth. 
 
 From the quiddities quaint of Quintilian 
 I would flit to the latest critiques ; — 
 
 / would visit the London Pavilion, 
 And magnify lion-comiques. 
 
 With the grim ghastly gaze of a Gorgon 
 
 I would cut Hendersonian bores — 
 / would follow the ambulant organ 
 
 That jingles at publicans' doors. 
 
164 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 In the odorous alleys of Wapping 
 
 I would saunter on evenings serene ; 
 When the dews of the Sabbath were dropping 
 
 You would find me on Clerkenwell Green. 
 
 At the Hall Scientific of Bradlaugh 
 
 I would revel in atheist rant. 
 Or enjoy an attack on some bad law 
 
 By the notable Mrs. Besant. 
 
 I would never omit an oration 
 
 Of Cunninghame Graham or Burns ; 
 And the Army miscalled of Salvation 
 
 Should 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 journalistic 
 
 I 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 Oh where is the Gillman, 
 
 Who ivill lodge me and board me for aye ? 
 
 Now as to his actual earnings. His first book 
 " Children of the Da-mi," 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 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 165 
 
 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 dedi- 
 cated 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 acquain- 
 tance 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 ideahsed 
 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 ro- 
 mantic 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 
 
166 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 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 par- 
 ticular passage. He said in the peculiar way so 
 characteristic of him, " My dear sir, I beg you to 
 believe, it made me shiver ! " That passage is 
 missing in the published book. 
 
 " Outside the Pale " had a kind of succes d'estime. 
 Certain people read it, and certain people liked it. 
 It was something almost fresh in English. Never- 
 theless 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 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 167 
 
 owing to Maitland's recommendation and in- 
 sistence 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 con- 
 cerned 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 modem Russian school and 
 Maitland's work, and that hkeness is perhaps 
 founded on something deeper than mere com- 
 mimity of subject which shows itself here and 
 there. Perhaps there is something essentially 
 
168 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 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 fu*st two volumes, there occurred 
 the Trafalgar Square Riots, in which John Bums, 
 Hyndman, and Henry Hyde Champion, were 
 concerned. Fool as Maitland was about his own 
 affairs, he yet saw that it was a wonderful coin- 
 cidence 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 attri- 
 buted 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, spealdng from memory, that this book 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 169 
 
 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 
 
170 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 many might think a mere coincidence may pre- 
 judice a fair man's mind. 
 
 As I have said, he had been in the habit of 
 selhng 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 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 171 
 
 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 beheve, 
 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 o 
 
172 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 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 some- 
 what too bitterly of his earlier publishing ex- 
 periences, and was never tired of quoting Mrs. 
 Gaskell to show how Charlotte Bronte 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 
 Bronte 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 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 173 
 
 ■iifty 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 rephed : " 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 charac- 
 teristic 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 
 
174 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 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 despairing 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 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 175 
 
 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 ; butcher- 
 ing, 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 
 
176 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 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 ol 
 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 cheer- 
 fully 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 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 177 
 
 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 essen- 
 tially 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 be had never 
 written anything before with regard to his own 
 powers and capabilities. One is reminded forcibly 
 
 M 
 
178 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 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 re- 
 sponsible. 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 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 179 
 
 he did not possess this faculty. When one goes 
 through his shorter work one discovers few indeed 
 which are stories ox properly related to the conte. 
 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 
 
180 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 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 astound- 
 ing indignation at one incident. Somehow or 
 another he had become acquainted with an East 
 End clergyman named Henderson. This Hender- 
 son 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 
 7 K, 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 dis- 
 cussed 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 in- 
 decent words. I suppose he thought it was a 
 mere outspoken literary habit. As a matter 
 of fact this enraged Maitlapd so furiously that 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 181 
 
 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 1 
 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. 
 
182 HENRY MAITLAND 
 
 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 Gifiord — 
 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 under- 
 stand 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. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 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. Un- 
 fair 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 Mire- 
 fields and Moorhampton, that rainy and gloomy 
 
 183 
 
184 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 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 over- 
 whelmed 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 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 185 
 
 remember we went out 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 character- 
 istic 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 cathe- 
 dral builders will know, that all honest work had 
 been done of old, that all old builders were honour- 
 able 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 
 
im THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 him by documentary evidence that a great portion 
 of the work in Peterborough Cathedral was of the 
 most shocking and scandalous description. Never- 
 theless 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 Therese. 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 with- 
 out 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 
 
OF HENRY MAITEAND 187 
 
 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 com- 
 mend 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 be- 
 came so bad that he found it necessary to speak 
 to me on the subject, as it was soon nearly impos- 
 
188 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 sible 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 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 189 
 
 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 offen- 
 sive ; 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 im- 
 possible 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. 
 
190 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 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 con- 
 fessions 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 under- 
 stand 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 brin^ up the boy, and the strain, I can 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 191 
 
 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 cease- 
 less 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 diffi- 
 culties doubled." 
 
 I do not think that this letter requires much 
 comment or illustration. Although it is written 
 soberly enough, and without actual accusation, its 
 meaning is as plain as daylight. His wife was 
 alternately too familiar, or at open hostility with 
 the servant ; none could endure her temper. She 
 complained to him, or the servant complained to 
 him, and he had to make peace, or to try to make 
 
192 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 it — mostly in vain. And then the quarrel broke 
 out anew, and the servant left. The result was 
 that Maitland himself often did the household work 
 when he should have been writing . He was dragged 
 away from his ordinary tasks by an uproar in the 
 kitchen ; or perhaps one or both of the angry 
 women came to him for arbitration about some 
 point of common decency. There is a phrase of 
 his in " The Meditations " which speaks .of poor 
 Hooker, whose prose he so much admired, being 
 " vixen-haunted." This epithet of his is a reason- 
 able and admirable one, but how bitter it was few 
 know so well as myself. 
 
 In this place it does not seem to me unnatural or 
 out of place to comment a little on Raymond, the 
 chief character in " The Vortex." He was un- 
 doubtedly in a measure the later Maitland. His 
 idea was to present a man whose character de- 
 veloped with somewhat undue slowness. He said 
 that Raymond would probably never have 
 developed at all after a certain stage but for the 
 curious changes wrought in his views and senti- 
 ments by the fact of his becoming a father. Of 
 course it must be obvious to any one, from what I 
 have said, that Maitland himself would never have 
 remained so long with his second wife after the first 
 few months if it had not been that she was about 
 to become a mother. The earlier passages in 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 193 
 
 " The Vortex " where he speaks about children, or 
 where Raymond himself speaks about them, are 
 meant to contrast strongly with his way of thinking 
 in the later part of the book when this particular 
 character had children of his own. The author 
 declared that Raymond, as a bachelor, was largely 
 an egoist. Of course the truth of the matter is 
 that Maitland himself was essentially an egoist. I 
 once suggested to him that he came near being a 
 solipsist, a word he probably had never heard 
 of till then, as he never studied psychology, modern 
 or otherwise. However, when Raymond grew 
 riper in the experience which killed his crude 
 egoism, he became another man. Maitland, in 
 writing about this particular book, said : " That 
 Raymond does nothing is natural to the man. The 
 influences of the whirlpool — ^that is London — ^and 
 its draught on the man's vitality embarrass any 
 efficiency there might have been in him. " Through 
 the whole story of Maitland one feels that every- 
 thing that was in any way hostile to his own views 
 of life did essentially embarrass, and almost make 
 impossible, anything that was in him. He had 
 no strength to draw nutriment by main force 
 from everything around him, as a strong man 
 does. He was not so fierce a fire as to burn every 
 kind of fuel. 
 I remember in this connection a very interesting 
 
 N 
 
194 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 passage in Hamley's " Operations of War " : 
 " When a general surveying the map of the theatre 
 finds direct obstacles in the path he must advance 
 by, he sees in them, if he be confident of his skill 
 in manoeuvring, increased opportunities for obtain- 
 ing strategical successes ... in fact, like any other 
 complications in a game, they offer on both 
 sides additional opportunities to skill and talent, 
 and additional embarrassments to incapacity." 
 But then Maitland loathed and hated and feared 
 obstacles of every kind. He was apt to sit down 
 before them wringing his hands, and only despera- 
 tion moved him, not to attack, but to elude them. 
 It is an odd thing in this respect to note that he 
 played no games, and despised them with peculiar 
 vigour. There is a passage in one of his letters 
 to Rivers about a certain Evans, mentioned with 
 a note of exclamation, and thus kindly embalmed : 
 " Evans, strange being I Yet, if his soul is 
 satisfied with golf and bridge, why should he not 
 go on golfing and bridging ? At all events he is 
 working his way to sincerity." 
 
 The long letter I quoted from above was written, 
 I believe, in 1895, when the boy was nearly three 
 years old. I have not attempted, and shall not 
 attempt, to give any detailed account month by 
 month, or even year by year, of his domestic 
 surroundings. It was a wonder to me that the 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 195 
 
 marriage lasted, but still it did last, and all one 
 knew was that some day it must come to an end. 
 The record of his life in these days would be 
 appalling if I remembered it sufficiently, or had 
 kept a diary — as no doubt I ought to have done — 
 or had all the documents which may be in existence 
 dealing with that time. That he endured so many 
 years was incredible, and still he did endure, and 
 the time went on, and he worked ; mostly, as he 
 said to me, against time, and a good deal on 
 commission. He wrote : " The old fervours do 
 not return to me, and I have got into the very 
 foolish habit of perpetually writing against time 
 and to order. The end of this is destruction." 
 But still I think he knew within him that it could 
 not last. Had it not been for the boy, and, alas, 
 for the birtli of yet another son, he would now 
 have left her. He acknowledged it to me — ^if he 
 could not fight he would have to fly. 
 
 This extraordinary lack of power to deal with 
 any obstacle must seem strange to most men, 
 though no doubt many are weak. Yet few are so 
 weak as Maitland. Oddly enough I have heard 
 the idea expressed that there was more power of 
 fight in Maitland than he ever possessed, and on 
 inquiry I have learned that this notion was 
 founded on a partial, or perhaps complete mis- 
 understanding of certain things he expressed iq 
 
196 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 the latter part of "The Vortex." Towards the 
 end of the book it seems to be suggested that 
 Maitland, or Raymond, tended really towards 
 what he calls in one of his letters a " barrack- 
 room " view of life. Some people seem to think 
 that the man who was capable of writing what 
 he did in that book really meant it, and must have 
 had a little touch of that native and natural 
 brutality which makes Englishmen what they are. 
 But Maitland himself, in commenting on this 
 particular attitude of Raymond, declared that 
 this quasi or semi-ironic imperialism of the man 
 was nothing but his hopeless recognition of facts 
 which filled him with disgust. The world was 
 going in a certain way. There was no refusing to 
 see it. It stared every one in the eyes. Then he 
 adds : " But what a course for things to take ! " 
 
 Raymond in fact talks with a httle throwing 
 up of the arm, and in a voice of quiet sarcasm, 
 " Go ahead — I sit by and watch, and wonder what 
 will be the end of it all." This was his own habit 
 of mind in later years. He had come at last 
 and at long last, to recognise a course of things 
 which formerly he could not, or would not, per- 
 ceive ; and he recognised it with just that tossing 
 of arm or head, involuntary of course. I do not 
 think that at this time he would have seen a 
 battalion of Guards go by and have turned to me 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 197 
 
 saying : " And this, <Ais is the nineteenth century! " 
 He once wrote to Rivers, what he had said a 
 hundred times to me : " I have a conviction that 
 all I love and believe in is going to the devil. At 
 the same time I try to watch with interest this 
 process of destruction, admiring any bit of sapper 
 work that is well done." It is rather amusing to 
 note that in the letter, written in the country, 
 which puts these things most dolefully, he adds : 
 " The life here shows little trace of vortical in- 
 fluence." Of course this is a reference to the 
 whirlpool of London. 
 
 In 1896 I was myself married, and went to live 
 in a little house in Fulham. I understood what 
 peace was, and he had none. As Maitland had 
 not met my wife for some years I asked him to 
 come and dine with us. It was not the least heavy 
 portion of his burden that he always left his own 
 house with anxiety and returned to it with fear 
 and trembling. This woman of his home was given 
 to violence, even with her own young children. 
 It was possible, as he knew, for he often said so 
 to me, that he might return and find even the baby 
 badly injured. And yet at last he made up his 
 naind to accept my invitation. Whether it was 
 the fact that he had accepted one from me — ^and 
 I often fancy that his wife had a grudge against 
 me because I would not go to her house any more — 
 
198 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 I do not know, but when I met him in the hall of 
 my own house I found him in the most extra- 
 ordinary state of nervous and physical agitation. 
 Though usually of a remarkable, if healthy, pallor, 
 he was now almost crimson, and his eyes sparkled 
 ■with furious indignation. He was hot, just as if 
 he had come out of an actual physical struggle. 
 What he must have looked like when he left 
 Ewell I do not know, for he had had all the time 
 necessary to travel from there to Fulham to cool 
 down in. After we shook hands he asked me, 
 almost breathlessly, to allow him to wash his face, 
 so I took him into the bathroom. He removed his 
 coat, and producing his elastic band from his 
 waistcoat pocket, put it about his hair like a fillet, 
 and began to wash his face in cold water. As 
 he was drying himself he broke out suddenly : 
 " I can't stand it any more. I have left her for 
 ever." I said: "Thank heaven that you have. 
 I am very glad of it — and for every one's sake 
 don't go back on it." 
 
 Whatever the immediate cause of this outburst 
 was, it seems that that afternoon the whole trouble 
 came to a culmination. The wife behaved like a 
 maniac ; she shrieked, and struck him. She 
 abused him in the vilest terms, such as he could 
 not or would not repeat to me. It was with the 
 greatest difficulty that I at last got him calm 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 199 
 
 enough to meet any one else. When he did calm 
 down after he had had something to eat and a 
 little to drink, the prospect of his freedom, which 
 he believed had come to him once more, inspired 
 him with pathetic and peculiar exhilaration. 
 In one sense I think he was happy that night. 
 He slept in London. 
 
 I should have given a wholly false impression 
 of Maitland if any one now imagined that I believed 
 that the actual end had come to his marriage. 
 No man knew his weakness better than I did, 
 and I moved heaven and earth in my endeavours 
 to keep him to his resolution, to prevent him 
 going back to Epsom on any pretext, and all my 
 efforts were vain. In three days I learned that 
 his resolution had broken down. By the help 
 of some busybody who had more kindness than 
 intelligence, they patched up a miserable peace, 
 and he went back to Ewell. And yet that peace 
 was no peace. Maitland, perhaps the most sensi- 
 tive man alive, had to endure the people in the 
 neighbouring houses coming out upon the doorstep, 
 eager to inquire what disaster was occurring in 
 the next house. There were indeed legends in the 
 Epsom Road that the mild looking writer beat and 
 brutalised his wife, though most knew, by means 
 of servants' chatter, what the actual facts were. 
 
 It was in this year that he did at last take an 
 
200 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 important step which cost him much anxiety 
 before putting it through. His fears for his eldest 
 child were so extreme that he induced his people 
 in the north to give the child a home — ^the influence 
 and example of the mother he could no longer 
 endure for the boy. His wife parted with the 
 child without any great difficulty, though of course 
 she made it an occasion for abusing her husband 
 in every conceivable way. He wrote to me in 
 the late summer of that year : " I much want to 
 see you, but just now it is impossible for me to get 
 to town, and the present discomfort of everything 
 here forbids me to ask you to come. I am straining 
 every nerve to get some work done, for really it 
 begins to be a question whether I shall ever again 
 finish a book. Interruptions are so frequent and 
 so serious. The so-called holiday has been no 
 use to me ; a mere waste of time — but I was 
 obliged to go, for only in that way could I have a 
 few weeks with the boy who, as I have told you, 
 lives now at Mirefields and will continue to live 
 there. I shall never let him come back to my own 
 dwelling. Have patience with me, old friend, for 
 I am hard beset." He ends this letter with : 
 " If the boy grows up in clean circumstances, that 
 will be my one satisfaction." 
 
 Whether he had peace or not he still worked 
 prodigiously, though not perhaps for so many 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 201 
 
 hours as was his earlier custom. But his health 
 about this time began to fail. Much of this came 
 from his habits of work, which were entirely in- 
 compatible with continued health of brain and 
 body. He once said to Rivers : "Visitors — I fall 
 sick with terror in thinking of them. If by rare 
 chance any one comes here it means to me the 
 loss of a whole day, a most serious matter." And 
 his whole day was, of course, a long day. No man 
 of letters can possibly sit for ever at the desk 
 during eight hours, as jwas frequently " his brave 
 custom " as he phrased it somewhere. If he had 
 worked in a more reasonable manner, and had been 
 satisfied with doing perhaps a thousand words a 
 day, which is not at all an unreasonably small 
 amount for a man who works steadily through 
 most of the year, his health might never have 
 broken down in the way it did. He had been 
 moved in a way towards these hours, partly 
 by actual desperation ; partly by the great 
 loneliness which had been thrust upon him ; very 
 largely by the want of money which prevented 
 him from amusing himself in the manner of 
 the average man, but chiefly by his sense of 
 devotion to what he was doing. One of his 
 favourite stories was that of Heyne, the great 
 classical scholar, who was reported to work sixteen 
 hours a day. This he did, according to the literary 
 
202 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 tradition, for the whole of his working Hfe, except 
 upon the day when he was married. He made, 
 for that occasion only, a compact with the bride 
 that he was to be allowed to work half his usual 
 stint. And half Heyne's usual amount was 
 Maitland's whole day, which I maintain was at 
 least five hours too much. This manner of working, 
 combined with his quintessential and habitual 
 loneliness made it very hard, not only upon him, 
 but also on his friends. It was quite impossible 
 to see him, even about matters of comparative 
 urgency, unless a meeting had been arranged 
 beforehand. For even after his work was done, 
 it was never done. He started preparing for the 
 next day, turning over phrases in his mind, and 
 considering the next chapter. I believe that in 
 one point I was very useful to liim in this matter, 
 for I suggested to him, as I have done to others, 
 that my own practice of finishing a chapter and 
 then writing some two or three lines of the next 
 one while my mind was warm upon the subject, 
 was a vast help for the next day's labour. 
 
 Now the way he worked was this. After break- 
 fast, at nine o'clock, he sat down and worked till 
 one. Then he had his midday meal, and took 
 a little walk. In the afternoon, about half- 
 past three, he sat down again and wrote till six 
 o'clock or a little after. Then he worked again 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 203 
 
 from half-past seven to ten. I very much doubt 
 
 whether there is any modern writer who has ever 
 
 tried to keep up work at this rate who did not end 
 
 in a hospital or a lunatic asylum, or die young. 
 
 To my mind it shows, in a way that nothing else 
 
 can, that he had no earthly business to be writing 
 
 novels and spinning things largely out of his 
 
 subjective mind, when he ought to have been 
 
 dealing with the objective world, or with books. 
 
 I myself write with a certain amount of ease. It 
 
 may, indeed, be difficult to start, but when a thing 
 
 is begun I go straight ahead, writing steadily for 
 
 an hour, or perhaps an hour and a half — ^rarely any 
 
 more. I have then done my day's work, which is 
 
 now very seldom more than two thousand words. 
 
 although on one memorable occasion I actually 
 
 wrote thirteen thousand words with the pen in ten 
 
 hours. Maitland used to write three or four of his 
 
 slips, as he called them, which were small quarto 
 
 pages of very fine paper, and on each slip there were 
 
 twelve hundred words. Whether he wrote one, or 
 
 two, or three slips in the day he took an equal 
 
 length of time. 
 
 Among my notes I find one about a letter of his 
 written in June 1895 to Mrs. Lake, declining an 
 invitation to visit Dr. Lake's house which, no 
 doubt, would have done him a great deal of good. 
 He says : " Let me put before you an appalling 
 
204 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 list of things that have to be done. (1) Serial 
 story (only begun) of about eighty thousand words. 
 
 (2) Short novel for Cassell's to be sent in by 
 end of October. Neither begun nor thought of. 
 
 (3) Six short stories for the English Illustrated — 
 neither begun nor thought of. (4) Twenty papers 
 for The Sketch of a thousand words each. Dimly 
 foreseen." Now to a man who had the natural gift 
 of writing fiction and some reasonable time to 
 do it in, this woidd seem no such enormous amount 
 of work. For Maitland it was appalling, not so 
 much, perhaps, on account of the actual amount of 
 labour — if it had been one book — but for its various- 
 ness. He moved from one thing to another in 
 fiction with great slowness. 
 
 As I have said, his health was not satisfactory. 
 I shall have something to say about this in detail 
 a little later. It was his own opinion, and that 
 of certain doctors, that his lung was really affected 
 by tuberculosis. Of this I had then very serious 
 doubts. But he wrote in January 1897 : " The 
 weather and my lung are keeping me indoors at 
 present, but I should much like to come to you. 
 Waterpipes freezing — a five-pound note every 
 winter to the plumber. Of course this is distinctly 
 contrived by the building fraternity." 
 
 But things were not always as bad as may be 
 gathered from a casual consideration of what I 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 205 
 
 have said. In writing a life events come too 
 thickly. For instance in 1897 he wrote to me : 
 " Happily things are far from being as bad as last 
 year." It appears that a certain lady, a Miss 
 Greathead, about whom I really know nothing 
 but what he told me, interested herself with the 
 utmost kindness in his domestic affairs. He wrote 
 to me : " Miss Greathead has been of very great 
 use, and will continue to be so, I think. This 
 house is to be given up in any case at Michaelmas, 
 and another will not be taken till I see my way 
 more clearly. Where I myself shall live during 
 the autumn is uncertain. We must meet in the 
 autumn. Work on — I have plans for seven 
 books." 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 What dismal catastrophe or prolonged domestic 
 uproar led to the final end of his married life in 
 1897 I do not know. Nor have I cared to inquire 
 very curiously. The fact remains, and it was 
 inevitable. Towards the end of the summer he 
 made up his mind to go to Italy in September. 
 He wrote to me : " All work in England is at an 
 end for me just now. I shall be away till next 
 spring — ^looking forward with immense delight to 
 solitude. Of course I have a great deal to do 
 as soon as I can settle, which I think will be at 
 Siena first." As a matter of fact the very next 
 letter of his which I possess came to me from 
 Siena. He said : " I am so confoundedly hard 
 at work upon the Novelists book that I find it 
 very difficult to write my letters. Thank heaven, 
 more than half is done. I shall go south about 
 the tenth of November. It is dull here, and I 
 should not stay for the pleasure of it. You know 
 that I do not care much for Tuscany. The land- 
 scape is never striking about here, and one does 
 not get the glorious colour of the south." So one 
 
 206 
 
HENRY MAITLAND 207 
 
 sees how Italy had awakened his colour sense. 
 As I have said, it was after his first visit to Italy 
 that I noted, both in his books and his conversation, 
 an acute awakening passion for colour. I think 
 it grew in him to the end of his life. He ended 
 this last letter to me with : " Well, well, let us 
 get as soon as possible into Magna Graecia and 
 the old dead world." 
 
 I said some time ago that I had finished all I 
 had to write about the Victorian novelists, and 
 yet I find there is something still to say of Dickens, 
 and it is not against the plan of such a rambling 
 book as this to put it down here and now. When 
 he went to Siena to write his book of criticism 
 it seemed to me a very odd choice of a place for 
 such a piece of work, and indeed I wondered at his 
 undertaking it at any price. It is quite obvious 
 to all those who really understand his attitude 
 towards criticism of modern things that great as 
 his interest was in Dickens it would never have 
 impelled him to write a strong, rough, critical book 
 mostly about him had it not been for the necessity 
 of making money. Indeed he expressed so much 
 to me, and I find again in a letter that he wrote 
 to Mrs. Rivers, with whom he was now on 
 very friendly terms, " I have made a good begin- 
 ning with my critical book, and long to have done 
 with it, for of course it is an aHen subject." No 
 
208 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 doubt there are at least two classes of Maitland's 
 readers, those who understand the man and love 
 his really characteristic work, and those who have 
 no understanding of him at all, or any deep 
 appreciation, but probably profess a great admira- 
 tion for this book which they judge by the part 
 on Dickens. I think that Andrew Lang was one 
 of these, judging from a criticism that he once 
 wrote on Maitland. I know that I have often 
 heard people of intelligence express so high an 
 opinion of the " Victorian Novehsts " as to imply a 
 lack of appreciation of his other work. The study 
 is no doubt written with much skill, and with a 
 good writer's command of his subject, and com- 
 mand of himself. That is to say, he manages by 
 skill to make people believe he was sufficiently 
 interested in his subject to write about it. To 
 speak plainly he thought it a pure waste of time, 
 except from the mere financial point of view, just 
 as he did his cutting down of Mayhew's " Life 
 of Dickens " — which, indeed, he considered a 
 gross outrage, but professed his inability to refuse 
 the " debauched temptation " of the hundred 
 and fifty pounds offered him for the work. 
 
 It would be untrue if I seemed to suggest that 
 he was not enthusiastic about Dickens, even more 
 so than I am myself save at certain times and 
 seasons^ For me Dickens is a man for times 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 209 
 
 and periods. I cannot read him for years, and 
 then I read him all. What I do mean is that 
 Maitland's love of this author, or of Thackeray say, 
 would never have impelled him to write. Yet 
 there is much in the book which is of great interest, 
 if it were only as matter of comment on Maitland's 
 own self. The other day I came across one 
 sentence which struck me curiously. It was 
 where Maitland asked the reader to imagine 
 Charles Dickens occupied in the blacking ware- 
 house for ten years. He said : " Picture him 
 striving vainly to find utterance for the thoughts 
 that were in him, refused the society of any 
 but boors and rascals, making perhaps futile 
 attempts to succeed as an actor, and in full man- 
 hood measuring the abyss which sundered him 
 from all he had hoped." When I came to the 
 passage I put the book down and pondered for 
 a while, knowing well that as Maitland wrote 
 these words he was thinking even more of himself 
 than of Dickens, and knowing that what was not 
 true of his subject was most bitterly true of the 
 writer. There is another passage somewhere in 
 the book in which he says that Dickens could not 
 have struggled for long years against lack of 
 appreciation. This he rightly puts down to 
 Dickens' essentially dramatic leanings. The man 
 needed immediate applause. But again Maitland 
 
 o 
 
210 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 was thinking of himself, for he had indeed struggled 
 many years without any appreciation save that 
 of one or two friends and some rare birds among 
 the public. I sometimes think that one of Mait- 
 land's great attractions to Dickens lay in the fact, 
 which he himself mentions and enlarges on, that 
 Dickens treated of the lower middle class and the 
 class immediately beneath it. This is where 
 the great novelist was at his best, and in the same 
 way these were the only classes that Maitland 
 really knew well. There is in several things a 
 curious likeness between Dickens and Maitland, 
 though it lies not on the surface. He says that 
 Dickens never had any command of a situation 
 although he was so very strong in incident. This 
 was also a great weakness of Henry Maitland. 
 It rarely happens that he works out a powerful 
 and dramatic situation to its final limits, though 
 sometimes he does succeed in doing so. This 
 failure in dealing with great situations is peculiarly 
 characteristic of most English novelists. I have 
 frequently noticed in otherwise admirable books 
 by men of very considerable abilities and attain- 
 ments, with tolerable command of their own 
 language, that they have on every occasion 
 shirked the great dramatic scene just when it 
 was expected and needed. Perhaps this is due 
 to the peculiar mauvaise honte of the English mind. 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 211 
 
 To write, and yet not to give oneself away, seems 
 to be the aim of too many writers, though the 
 great aim of all great writing is to do, or to try to 
 do, what they avoid. The final analysis of dreadful 
 passion and pain comes, perhaps, too close to 
 them. They feel the glow but also a sensation of 
 shame in the great emotions. There are times that 
 Maitland felt this, though perhaps unconsciously. 
 It is at any rate certain that, like so many people, 
 he never actually depicted with blood and tears 
 the frightful situations in which his life was so 
 extraordinarily full. 
 
 It is an interesting passage in this book in 
 which Maitland declares that great popularity 
 was never yet attained by any one deliberately 
 writing down to a low ideal. Above all men he 
 knew that the artist was necessarily sincere, 
 however poor an artist he might be. So Rousseau 
 in his " Confessions " asserts that nothing really 
 great can come from an entirely venal pen. I 
 remember Maitland greatly enjoyed a story I told 
 him about myself. While I was still a poverty- 
 stricken and struggling writer my father, who 
 had no knowledge whatever of the artistic tem- 
 perament, although he had a very great apprecia- 
 tion of the best literature of the past, came to me 
 and said seriously : " My boy, if you want money, 
 and I know you do, why do you not write ' Bow 
 
212 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 Bells Novelettes ' ? They will give you fifteen 
 pounds for each of them." I replied to him, not I 
 think without a tinge of bitterness at being so 
 misunderstood : " My dear sir, it is as much a 
 matter of natural endowment to be a damned fool 
 as to be a great genius, and I am neither." 
 
 I have said that Maitland was most essentially 
 a conservative, indeed in many ways a reactionary, 
 if one so passive can be called that. I think 
 the only actual revolutionary utterance of his 
 mind which stands on record is in the " Victorian 
 Novelists." It is when he is speaking of Mr. 
 Casby of the shorn locks. He wrote : " This 
 question of landlordism should have been treated 
 by Dickens on a larger scale. It remains one of 
 the curses of English life, and is likely to do so till 
 the victims of house-owners see their way to cutting, 
 not the hair, but the throats, of a few selected 
 specimens." 
 
 It may seem a hard thing to say, but it is a fact, 
 that any revolutionary sentiment there was in 
 Maitland was excited, not by any native liberalism 
 of his mind, or even by his sympathy for the 
 suffering of others, but came directly out of his 
 own personal miseries and trials. He had had to 
 do with landlords who refused to repair their 
 houses, and with houses which he looked upon as 
 the result of direct and wicked conspiracy between 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 213 
 
 builders and plumbers. But his words are capable- 
 of a wider interpretation than he might have given 
 them. 
 
 If I had indeed been satisfied that this departure 
 of Maitland's to Italy had meant the end of all the 
 personal troubles of his marriage, I should have 
 been highly satisfied, and not displeased with any 
 part I might have taken in bringing about so 
 desirable a result. But I must say that, knowing 
 him as I did, I had very serious doubts. I was 
 well aware of what a little pleading might do with 
 him. It was in fact possible that one plaintive 
 letter from his wife might have brought him back 
 again. Fortunately it was never written. The 
 woman was even then practically mad, and though 
 immensely diflicult to manage by those friends, 
 such as Miss Greathead and Miss Kingdon, who 
 interested themselves in his affairs and did much 
 more for him at critical times than I had been 
 able to do, she never, I think, appealed to her 
 husband. But it was extraordinary, before he 
 went to Italy, to observe the waverings of his 
 mind. When he was keeping his eldest boy at 
 Mirefields, supplying his wife with money for the 
 house and living in lodgings at Salcombe, he wrote 
 giving a rough account of what he might do, or 
 might have to do, and ended up by saying : 
 "Already, lodgings are telling on my nerves, I 
 
214 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 almost think I suffer less even from yells and 
 insults in a house of my own." He even began to 
 forget " the fifth-rate dabblers in the British 
 gravy," for which fine phrase T. E. Brown is 
 responsible. Maitland ought to have known it 
 and did not. It was this perpetual wavering and 
 weakness in him which perplexed his friends, and 
 would indeed have alienated at last very many of 
 them had it not been for the enduring charm in all 
 his weakness. Nevertheless he was now out of 
 England, and those who knew him were glad 
 to think it was so. He was, perhaps, to have a 
 better time. Nevertheless, even so, he wrote to 
 his friend Lake : " Yes, it is true that I am going 
 to glorious scenes, but do not forget that I go with 
 much anxiety in my mind — anxiety about the 
 little children, the chances of life and death, &c., 
 &c. It is not like my Italian travel eight years 
 ago, when — save for cash^I was independent. 
 I have to make a good two hundred a year apart 
 from my own living and casual expenses. If I 
 live I think I shall do it — but there's no occasion 
 tor merriment." Yet if it was no occasion for 
 mere merriment it was an occasion for joy. He 
 knew it well, and so did those know who under- 
 stand the description that Maitland gave in 
 " Paternoster Row," of the sunset at Athens. 
 It is very wonderfully painted, and as he describes 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 215 
 
 it he makes Gifford say : " Stop, or I shall clutch 
 you by the throat. I warned you before that I 
 cannot stand these reminiscences." And this 
 reminds me that when I wrote to him once from 
 Naples, he replied : " You fill me with envious 
 gloom." But now, when he had finished his 
 pot-boiler of Siena, he was going south to Naples, 
 his " most interesting city of the modern world." 
 and afterwards farther south to the Calabrian 
 Hills, and the old dead world of Magna Graecia. 
 
 As a result of that journey he gave us " Magna 
 Graecia." This book of itself is a sufficient proof 
 that he was by nature a scholar, an inhabitant 
 of the very old world, a discoverer of the time 
 of the Renaissance, a Humanist, a pure man of 
 letters, and not by nature a writer of novels or 
 romances. Although Maitland's scholarship was 
 rather wide than deep save in one or two lines of 
 investigation, yet his feeling for all those matters 
 with which a sympathetic scholarship can deal 
 was amazingly deep and true. Once in Calabria 
 and the south he made and would make great 
 discoveries. In spite of his poverty, which comes 
 put so often in the description of his conditions 
 upon this journey, he loved everything he found 
 there with a strange and wonderful and almost 
 pathetic passion. I remember on his return how 
 he talked to me of the far south, and of his studies 
 
216 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 in Cassiodorus. One incident in " Magna Graecia," 
 which is related somewhat differently from what 
 he himself told me at the time, pleased him most 
 especially. It was when he met two men and 
 mentioned the name of Cassiodorus, whereupon 
 they burst out with amazement, " Cassiodorio, 
 why we know Cassiodorio ! " That the name 
 should be yet familiar to these live men of the 
 south gratified his historic sense amazingly, and 
 I can well remember how he threw his head back 
 and shook his long hair with joy, and burst into 
 one of his most characteristic roars of laughter. 
 It was a simple incident, but it brought back 
 the past to him. 
 
 Of all his books I think I love best " Magna 
 Graecia." I always liked it much better than 
 "The Meditations of Mark Sumner," and for a 
 thousand reasons. For one thing it is a wholly 
 true book. In " The Meditations," he falsified, 
 in the literary sense, very much that he wrote. 
 As I have said, it needs to be read with a com- 
 mentary or guide. But " Magna Graecia " is pure 
 Maitland ; it is absolutely himself. It is, indeed, 
 very nearly the Maitland who might have been 
 if ill luck had not pursued him from his boyhood. 
 Had he been a successful man on the lines that 
 fate pointed out to him ; had he succeeded greatly 
 — or nobly, as he would have said— at the Uni- 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 217 
 
 versity ; had be become a tutor, a don, a notable 
 man among men of letters, still would he have 
 travelled in southern Italy, and made his great 
 pilgrimage to the Fonte di Cassiodorio. Till he 
 knew south Italy his greatest joy had been in 
 books. That he loved books we all know. There, 
 of a certainty, " The Meditations " is a true 
 witness. But how much more he loved the past 
 and the remains of Greece and old, old Italy, 
 " Magna Graecia " proves to us almost with tears. 
 I have said that Maitland was perhaps not a deep 
 scholar, for scholarship nowadays must needs be 
 specialised if it is to be deep. He had his odd 
 prejudices, and hugged them. The hypothesis of 
 Wolf concerning Homer visibly annoyed him. 
 He preferred to think of the Iliad and the Odyssey 
 as having been written by one man. This came 
 out of his love of personality — ^the great ones of 
 the past were as gods to him. All works of art, 
 or books, or great events were wholly theirs, for 
 they made even the world, and the world made 
 them not. Though I know that he would have 
 loved, in many ways, a book such as Gilbert 
 Murray's "Rise of the Greek Epic," yet Murray's 
 fatally decisive analysis of the Homeric legend 
 would have pained him deeply. On one occasion 
 I remember sending to him, partly as some reason- 
 able ground for my own scepticism, but more, I 
 
218 HENRY MAITLAND 
 
 think, out of some mischievous desire to plague 
 him, a cleverly written pamphlet by a barrister 
 which threw doubts upon the Shakespearean 
 legend. He wrote to me : "I have read it with 
 great indignation. Confound the fellow ! — he dis- 
 turbs me." But then he was essentially a con- 
 servative, and he lived in an alien time. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 What he suffered, endured, and enjoyed in Magna 
 Graecia and his old dead world, those know who 
 have read with sympathy and understanding. It 
 was truly as if the man, born in exile, had gone 
 home at last — so much he loved it, so well he 
 understood the old days. And now once more he 
 came back to England to a happier life, even though 
 great anxieties still weighed him down. Yet with 
 some of these anxieties there was joy, for he loved 
 his children and thought very much of them, 
 hoping and fearing. One of the very first letters 
 I received from him on his return from Italy is 
 dated May 7, 1898, and was written from Henley 
 in Arden : " You have it in your power to do me 
 a most important service. Will you on every 
 opportunity industriously circulate the news that 
 I am going to live henceforth in Warwickshire ? 
 It is not strictly true, but a very great deal depends 
 on my real abode being protected from invasion. 
 If you could inspire a newspaper paragraph. . . . 
 I should think it impudent to suppose that news- 
 papers cared about the matter but that they have 
 
 219 
 
220 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 so often chronicled my movements, and if by any 
 chance the truth got abroad it would mean endless 
 inconvenience and misery to me. You shall hear 
 more in detail when I am less be-devilled. " All 
 this requires little comment. Every one can under- 
 stand how it was with him. 
 
 Later in the year he wrote to me : " My beha- 
 viour is bestial, but I am so hard driven that it is 
 perhaps excusable. All work impossible owing to 
 ceaseless reports of mad behaviour in London. 
 That woman was all but given in charge the other 
 day for assaulting her landlady with a stick. My 
 solicitor is endeavouring to get the child out of her 
 hands. I fear its life is endangered, but of course 
 the difficulty of coming to any sort of arrangement 
 with such a person is very great. . . . Indeed I 
 wish we could have met before your departure for 
 South Africa. My only consolation is the thought 
 that something or other decisive is bound to have 
 happened before you come back, and then we will 
 meet as in the old days, please heaven. As for me, 
 my literary career is at an end, and the workhouse 
 looms larger day by day. I should not care, of 
 course, but for the boys. A bad job, a bad job." 
 But better times were perhaps coming for him. 
 The child that he refers to as still in the hands of 
 his mother was his youngest boy. Much of his 
 life at this time is lost to me because much happened 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 221 
 
 while I was absent in South Africa, where I spent 
 some months in travel. I remember it pleased him 
 to get letters from me from far-off places such as 
 Buluwayo. He always had the notion that I was 
 an extraordinarily capable person, an idea which 
 only had some real truth if my practical capacities 
 were compared with his strange want of them. 
 By now he was not living in Warwickshire ; indeed, 
 if I renaember rightly, on my return from Africa 
 I found him at Gk)dalming. 
 
 When I left Cape Town I was very seriously ill, 
 and I remained ill for some months after my return 
 home. Therefore it was some time till we met 
 again. But when we did meet it was at Leather- 
 head, where he was in lodgings, pleased to be not 
 very far from George Meredith, who indeed, I 
 think, loved him. It was, of course, as I have said, 
 through Maitland that I first met Meredith. For 
 some reason which I do not know, Maitland gave 
 him a volume of mine, " The Western Trail," 
 which the old writer was much pleased with. 
 Indeed it was in consequence of his liking for that 
 book that he asked me to dine with him just 
 before I went to Africa. Maitland was not present 
 at this dinner, he was then still in Warwickshire ; 
 but Meredith spoke very affectionately of him, 
 and said many things not unpleasing about his 
 work. But probably Meredith, like myself, thought 
 
222 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 more of the man than he did of his books, which 
 is indeed from my point of view a considerable 
 and proper tribute to any writer. Sometimes the 
 work of a man is greater than himself, and it 
 seems a pity when one meets him ; but if a man 
 is greater than what he does one may always 
 expect more, and some day may get it. It was 
 apropos of Maitland, in some way which I cannot 
 exactly recall, that Meredith, who was in great 
 form that night, and wonderful in monologue — ^as 
 he always was, more especially after he became 
 so deaf that it was hard to make him hear — told 
 us an admirably characteristic story about two 
 poor schoolboys. It appeared, said Meredith, that 
 these two boys, who came of a clever but poverty- 
 stricken house, did very badly at their school 
 because they were underfed. As Meredith explained 
 this want of food led to a poor circulation. What 
 blood these poor boys had was required for the 
 animal processes of living, and did not enable 
 them to carry on the work of the brain in the way 
 that it should have done. However, it one day 
 happened that during play one of these boys was 
 induced to stand upon his head, with the result 
 that the blood naturally gravitated to that unaccus- 
 tomed quarter. His ideas instantly became bril- 
 liant — so brilliant, indeed, that a great idea struck 
 him. He resumed his feet, rushed home, and 
 
OP HENRY MAITLAND 223 
 
 communicated his discovery to his brother, and 
 henceforward they conducted their studies standing 
 upon their heads, and became briUiant and visibly 
 successful men. Of course it was a curious thing, 
 though not so curious when one reflects on the 
 nature of men who are really men of letters, that 
 Meredith and Henry Maitland had one thing 
 tremendously in common, their love of words. 
 In my conversation with Meredith that day I 
 mentioned the fact that I had read a certain 
 interview with him. I asked him whether it 
 conveyed his sentiments with any accuracy. He 
 replied mournfully : " Yes, yes, — no doubt the poor 
 fellow got down more or less what I meant, but 
 he used none of my beautiful words, none of my 
 beautiful words ! " 
 
 It does not seem unnatural to me to say some- 
 thing of George Meredith, since h6 had in many 
 ways an influence on Maitland. Certainly when 
 it came to the question of beautiful words they 
 were on the same ground, if not on the same level. 
 I myself have met during my literary life, and in 
 some parts of the world where literature is little 
 considered, many men who were reputed great, 
 and indeed were great, it may be, hi some special 
 line, yet Meredith was the only man I ever knew 
 to whom I would have allowed freely the word 
 "great "the moment I met him, without anyreser- 
 
224 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 vation. This I said to Maitland and he smiled, 
 feeling that it was true, I remember he wrote to 
 Lake about Meredith, saying : " You ought to 
 read ' Richard Feverel, ' Evan Harrington,' ' The 
 Egoist,' and 'Diana of the Crossways.' These, in 
 my opinion, are decidedly his best books, but you 
 won't take up anything of his without finding 
 strong work." And " strong work " with Maitland 
 was very high praise indeed. 
 
 By now, when he was once more in Surrey, we 
 did not meet so infrequently as had been the case 
 after his second marriage and before the separation. 
 It is true that his living out of London made a 
 difference. Still I now went down sometimes and 
 stayed a day with him. We talked once more in 
 something of our old manner about books and 
 words, the life of men of letters, and literary 
 origins or pedigrees, always a strong point in him. 
 It was ever a great joy to Maitland when he dis- 
 covered the influence of one writer upon another. 
 For instance, it was he who pointed out to me 
 first that Balzac was the literary parent of Murger, 
 as none indeed can deny who have read the chapter 
 in " Illusions Perdues " where Lucien Rubempr6 
 writes and sings the drinking song with tears in 
 his eyes as he sits by the bedside of Coralie, his 
 dead mistress. This he did, as will be remembered, 
 to obtain by the sale of the song sufficient money 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 225 
 
 to bury her. From that chapter undoubtedly 
 sprang the whole of the " Vie de Boh^me," though 
 to it Murger added much, and not least his livelier 
 sense of humour. Again, I well remember how 
 Maitland took down Tennyson — ever a joy to him, 
 because Tennyson was a master of words though 
 he had little enough to say — ^and showed me the 
 influence that the " Wisdom of Solomon," in the 
 Apocrypha, had upon some of the last verses of 
 " The Palace of Art." No doubt some will not see 
 in a mere epithet or two that Solomon's words 
 had any connection with the work of the Poet- 
 Laureate, whom I nicknamed, somewhat to Mait- 
 land's irritation, "the bourgeois Chrysostom." 
 Yet I myself have no doubt that Maitland was 
 right; but even if he were not he would still have 
 taken wonderful joy in finding out the words of 
 the two verses which run : " Whether it were a 
 whistling wind, or a melodious noise of birds 
 among the spreading branches, or a pleasant fall 
 of water running violently, or a terrible sound of 
 stones cast down, or a running that could not be 
 seen of skipping beasts, or a roaring voice of most 
 savage wild beasts, or a rebounding echo from the 
 hollow mountains ; these things made them swoon 
 for fear." Of course he loved all rhythm, and 
 found it sometimes in unexpected places, even in 
 unconsidered writers. There was one passage he 
 
226 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 used to quote from Mrs. Ewing, who, indeed, was 
 no small writer, which he declared to be wonderful, 
 and in its way quite perfect : " He sat, patient of 
 each succeeding sunset, until this aged world 
 should crumble to its close." Then, again, he 
 rejoiced when I discovered, though no doubt it 
 had been discovered many times before, that his 
 musical Keats owed so much to Fletcher's 
 "Faithful Shepherdess." 
 
 It would be a very diflficult question to ask, in 
 some examination concerning English literature, 
 what book in English by its very nature and style 
 appealed most of all to Henry Maitland. I think 
 I am not wrong when I say that it was undoubtedly 
 Walter Savage Landor's " Imaginary Conversa- 
 tions." That book possesses to the full the two 
 great qualities which most delighted him. It is 
 redolent of the past, and those classic conversa- 
 tions were his chief joy ; but above and beyond 
 this true and great feeling of Landor's for the past 
 classic times there was the most eminent quality 
 of Landor's rhythm. I have many times heard 
 Maitland read aloud from " .^sop and Rhodope," 
 and I have even more often heard him quote with- 
 out the book the passage which runs : " There are 
 no fields of amaranth on this side of the grave ; 
 there are no voices, O Rhodope, that are not soon 
 mute, however tuneful ; there is no name, with 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 227 
 
 whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, 
 of which the echo is not faint at last." Maitland 
 knew, and none knew better, that in a triumphant 
 passage there is triumphant rhythm, and in a 
 passage full of mourning or melancholy the accom- 
 panying and native rhythm is both melancholy 
 and mournful. How many times, too, I have heard 
 him quote, again from Landor, " Many flowers 
 must perish ere a grain of corn be ripened." 
 
 All this time the wife was I know not where, 
 nor did I trouble much to inquire. Miss Kingdon 
 and Miss Greathead looked after her very patiently, 
 and did good work for their friend Maitland, as 
 he well knew. But although he was rejoiced to be 
 alone for a time, or at any rate relieved from the 
 violent misery of her presence, I came once more 
 to discern, both from things he said and from things 
 he wrote to me, that a celibate life began again 
 to oppress him gravely. Yet it was many months 
 before he at last confided in me fully, and then I 
 think he only did it because he was certain that 
 I was the one friend he possessed with whom he 
 could discuss any question without danger of 
 moral theories or prepossessions interfering with 
 the rightful solution. Over and beyond this quali- 
 fication for his confidence there was the fact that 
 I knew him, whereas no one else did. To advise 
 any man it is necessary to know the man who is 
 
228 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 to be advised, for wisdom in vacuo or in vitro may- 
 be nothing but foolishness. Others would have said 
 to him, " Look back on your experience and reflect. 
 Have no more to do with women in any way." 
 No doubt it would have been good advice, but it 
 would have been impossible for him to act on it. 
 Therefore when he at last opened his mind to me 
 and told me of certain new prospects which were 
 disclosing themselves to him, I was not only 
 sympathetic but encouraging. It seems that in 
 the year 1898 he fu'st met a young French lady 
 of Spanish origin with whom he had previously 
 corresponded for some little time. Her name was 
 Th6rese Espinel. She belonged to a very good 
 family, perhaps somewhat above the haute bour- 
 geoisie, and was a woman of high education and 
 extreme Gallic intelligence. As I cr.me to know 
 her afterwards I may also say that she was a very 
 beautiful woman, and possessed, what I know to 
 have been a very great charm to Maitland, as it 
 always was to me, a A^ery sweet and harmonious 
 voice — ^it was perhaps the most beautiful human 
 voice for speaking that I have ever heard. Years 
 afterwards I took her to see George Meredith. He 
 kissed her hand and told her she had beautiful 
 eyes. As she was partly Spanish she knew Spanish 
 well. Her German was excellent, her English that 
 of an educated Englishwoman. It appears that 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 229 
 
 she came across Maitland's "Paternoster Row," 
 and it occurred to her that it should be translated 
 into French. She got into correspondence with 
 him about this book, and in 1898 came over to 
 England and made his acquaintance. It is curious 
 to remember that on one other occasion Maitland 
 got into correspondence with another French lady, 
 who insisted emphatically that he was the one 
 person whom she could trust to direct her aright 
 in life — a notion at the time not a little comical 
 to me, and also to the man who was to be this 
 soul's director. 
 
 When these two people met and proved mutually 
 sympathetic it was not unnatural that he should 
 tell her something of his own life, especially when 
 one knows that so much of their earlier talks dealt 
 with " Paternoster Row " and with its chief cha- 
 racter, so essentially Henry Maitland. He gave 
 her, indeed, very much of his story, yet not all of 
 it, not, indeed, the chief part of it, since the greatest 
 event in his life was the early disaster which had 
 maimed and distorted his natural career and 
 development. Yet even so much as he told her of 
 his first and second marriage — for he by no means 
 concealed from the beginning that he was yet 
 married — very naturally engaged her womanly 
 compassion. Adding this to her real and fervent 
 admiration of his literary powers, his personality 
 
230 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 and story seem to have inclined her to take an 
 even tenderer interest in him. She was certainly 
 a bright and wonderful creature, although not 
 without a certain native melancholy, and possessed 
 none of those conventional ideas which wreck 
 some lives and save others from disaster. There- 
 fore I was not much surprised, although I had not 
 been told everything that had happened, when 
 Maitland wrote to me that he contemplated taking 
 a very serious step. It was indeed a very serious 
 one, but so natural in the circumstances, as I came 
 to hear of them, that I myself made no strictures 
 on his scheme. It was no other than the proposal 
 that he and this new acquaintance of his should 
 cast in their lot together and make the world and 
 her relatives believe that they were married. No 
 doubt when I was consulted I found it in some 
 ways difficult to give a decision. What might be 
 advisable for the man might not be so advisable 
 for his proposed partner. He was making no 
 sacrifice, and she was making many. Nevertheless, 
 I hold the view that these matters are matters for 
 the people concerned and are nobody else's busi- 
 ness. The thing to be considered from my point 
 of view was whether Maitland would be able to 
 support her, and whether she Avas the kind of 
 woman who would retain her hold upon him and 
 give him some peace and happiness towards the 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 231 
 
 end of his life. In thinking over these things I 
 remembered that the other two women had not 
 been ladies. They had not been educated. They 
 understood nothing of the world which was Mait- 
 land's world, and, as I knew, a disaster was bound 
 to come in both cases. But now it appeared to me 
 that there was a possible hope for the man, and a 
 hope that such a step might almost certainly end 
 in happiness, or at any rate in peace. That some- 
 thing of the kind would occur I knew, and even 
 if this present affair went no farther, yet some 
 other woman would have to be dealt with even 
 if she did not come into his life for a long while. 
 Th^r^se Espinel was at any rate, as I have said, 
 beautiful and accomplished, essentially of the 
 upper classes, and, what was no small thing from 
 Maitland's point of view, a capable and feeling 
 musician. Of such a woman Maitland had had only 
 a few weeks' experience many years before. I 
 thought the situation promised much, and raised 
 no moral objection to the step he proposed to 
 take as soon as I saw he was strongly bent in one 
 direction. For one thing I was sure of, and it 
 was that anything whatever which put a definite 
 obstacle in the way of his returning to his wife 
 was a thing to be encouraged. It was, in fact, 
 absolutely a duty ; and I care not what comments 
 may be made upon my attitude or my morals. 
 
232 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 That Maitland would have gone back to his wife 
 eventually I have very little doubt, and of course 
 nothing but disaster and new rage and misery 
 would have come of his doing so. For these reasons 
 I did everything in my power to help and encourage 
 him in a matter which gave him extreme nervous- 
 ness and anxiety. I know he said to me that the 
 step he proposed to take early in 1899 grew more 
 and more serious the more he thought of it. Again, 
 I think there was no overwhelming passion at the 
 back of his mind. Yet it was a true and sincere 
 afiection, of that I am sure. But there were many 
 difficulties. It appears that the girl's father had 
 died a few months before, and as there was some 
 money in the family this fact involved certain 
 serious difficulties about the future signing of 
 names when all the legal questions concerned with 
 the little property that there was came to be 
 settled. Then he asked me what sort of hope was 
 there that this pretended marriage would not 
 become known in England. He said : " I fear it 
 certainly would." When I reflect now upon the 
 innumerable lies and subterfuges that I myself 
 indulged in with the view of preventing anybody 
 knowing of this affair in London, I can see he was 
 perfectly justified in his fears, for when the step 
 was at last taken I was continually being asked 
 about Maitland's wife. Naturally enough, it was 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 233 
 
 said by one set of people that she was with him 
 in France ; while it was said by others, much 
 better informed, that she was still in England. I 
 was sometimes requested to settle this difficult 
 matter, and I did find it so difficult that at times 
 I was compelled to state the actual truth on 
 condition that what I said was regarded as abso- 
 lutely confidential. 
 
 He and Th^rese did, indeed, discuss the possi- 
 bility of braving the world with the simple truth, 
 but that he knew would have been a very tremen- 
 dous step for her. The mother was yet living, and 
 she played a strange part in this little drama — a 
 part not so uncommonly played as many might 
 think. She became at last her daughter's confidante 
 and learned the whole of Maitland's story, and 
 although she opposed their solution of the trouble 
 to the very best of her power, when it became 
 serious she at last gave way and consented to any 
 step that her daughter wished to take, provided 
 that there was no public scandal. 
 
 Of course, many people will regard with horror 
 the part that her mother played in this drama, 
 imputing much moral blame. There are, however, 
 times when current morality has not the value 
 which it is commonly given, and I think Madame 
 Espinel acted with great wisdom, seeing that nothing 
 she could have pleaded would have altered matters. 
 
234 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 Her daughter was no longer a child ; she was a 
 grown-up woman, not without determination, and 
 entirely without religious prejudice, a thing not 
 so uncommon with the intellectual Frenchwoman. 
 Certainly there are some who will say that a public 
 scandal was better than secrecy, and in this I am 
 at one with them. Nevertheless there was much 
 to consider, for there would certainly have been 
 what Henry himself called "a horrific scandal," 
 seeing that the family had many aristocratic 
 relatives. Maitland, in fact, stated that it would 
 be taking an even greater responsibility than he 
 was prepared to shoulder if this were done. He 
 wrote to me asking for my opinion and counsel, 
 especially at the time when there was a vague and 
 probably unfounded suggestion that he might be 
 able to get a divorce from his wife. It appears 
 more than one person wrote to him anonymously 
 about her. I am sure he never believed what they 
 told him, nor do I. No doubt from some points of 
 view I have been very unjust to his wife, though I 
 have tried to hold the balance true, but I never 
 saw, or heard from Maitland, anything to suggest 
 that his wife was not all that she should have been 
 in one wajr, just as she Avas everything she should 
 not have been in another. Seeing that Maitland 
 would have given ten years of his life and every 
 penny he possessed to secure a divorce, it is certain 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 235 
 
 that he absolutely disbelieved what he was told. 
 In fact, if he could have got a divorce by consent 
 or collusion he would have gladly engaged to pay 
 her fifty pounds a year during his life, whatever 
 happened and whatever she did. But of course 
 this could not be said openly, either by myself or 
 by him, and nothing came out of the suggestion, 
 whoever made it first. 
 
 I proposed to him one afternoon when I was 
 with him that he should make some inquiries as 
 to what an American divorce would do for him. 
 Whether it were valid or not, it might perhaps 
 make things technically easier and enable him to 
 marry in France with some show of legality. At 
 the moment he paid no attention to what I Said, 
 or seemed to pay no attention, but it must have 
 sunk into his mind, for a few days afterwards he 
 wrote to me and said : " Is it a possible thing to 
 get a divorce in some other country as things 
 are ? — a divorce which would allow of a lega 
 marriage, say, in that same country. I have 
 vaguely heard such stories, especially of Heligo- 
 land. The German novelist, Sacher Masoch, is said 
 to have done it— said so by his first wife, who now 
 lives in Paris." Upon receiving this letter of his 
 I wrote and reminded him of what I had said 
 about American divorces, and gave him all the 
 information that I had in my mind and could 
 
236 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 collect at the moment, especially mentioning 
 Dakota oi- Nevada as two States of the United 
 States which had the most reasonable and wide- 
 minded views of marriage and divorce. For this 
 letter he wrote and thanked me heartily, but 
 quoted from a letter of Th^r&e which seemed to 
 indicate, not unclearly, that she preferred him 
 to take no steps which might lead to long legal 
 processes. They should join their fortunes together, 
 taking their chance as to the actual state of affairs 
 being discovered afterwards. His great trouble, of 
 course, was the absolute necessity of seeming in 
 Paris to be legally married, out of regard for her 
 relatives. Besides these connections of her famih% 
 she knew a Aery great number of important people 
 in Paris and Madrid, and many of them should 
 receive by custom the lettres de faire part. With 
 some little trouble the financial difficulties with 
 regard to the signing of documents were got over 
 for the moment by a transfer of investments from 
 Ther^se to her mother. On this being done their 
 final determination was soon taken, and they 
 determined, after this " marriage " was completed, 
 to leave Paris and live somewhere in the mountains, 
 perhaps in Savoy ; and he then wrote to me : 
 " You will be the onl)^ man in London who knows 
 this story. Absolute silence — it goes without 
 saying. If ever by a slip of the tongue you let a 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 237 
 
 remark fall that my wife was dead, tant mieux ; 
 only no needless approach of the topic. A grave, 
 grave responsibility mine. She is a woman to go 
 through fire for, as you saw. An incredible woman 
 to one who has spent his life with such creatures, 
 ... I have lately paid a bill of one pound for 
 damage done by ray wife, damage in a London 
 house where she lived till turned out by the help 
 of the police. Incredible stories about her. She 
 attacked the landlord with a stick, and he had 
 seriously to defend himself. Then she tore up 
 shrubs and creepers in the garden. No, I have had 
 my time of misery. It must come to an end." 
 
 In the first part of this letter which I have just 
 quoted he says, " She is a woman to go through 
 fire for, as you saw." This expression does not 
 mean that I had ever met her, but that I had seen 
 sufficient of her letters to recognise the essential 
 fineness of her character. I urged him once more 
 to a rapid decision, and he promised that he would 
 let nothing delay it. Nevertheless it is perfectly 
 characteristic of him that, having now finally 
 decided there should be no attempt at any divorce, 
 he proceeded instantly to play Avith the idea again. 
 No doubt he was being subjected to many influences 
 of different kinds, for I find that he sent me a letter 
 in which he told me that it seemed to be ascertained 
 that an American divorce and remarriage would 
 
238 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 satisfy French law. If that was so, he would move 
 heaven and earth to get all the necessary details 
 of the procedure. He had written to a friend in 
 Baltimore who knew all about such matters, but 
 he implored me to find out if there were not some 
 book which gave all possible information about 
 the marriage and divorce laws of all the separate 
 States of North America. He asked : " Do you 
 really think that I can go and present myself for 
 a divorce without the knowledge of the other 
 person ? The proceedings must be very astound- 
 ing." His knowledge of America was not equal 
 to my own, much as I had spoken to him about 
 that country. The proceedings in divorce courts 
 in some of the United States have long ceased to 
 astonish anybody. He told me, however, that he 
 had actually heard of American lawyers adver- 
 tising for would-be divorcers, and he prayed 
 devoutly that he could get hold of such a man. 
 I did my best to rake up for him every possible 
 piece of information on the subject, and no doubt 
 his friend in Baltimore, of whom I know nothing, 
 on his part sent him information. It seemed, 
 however, that any proceeding would involve some 
 difficulties, and on discovering this he instantly 
 dropped the whole scheme. I find that he wrote 
 to me afterwards, saying : " It is probable that 
 I leave England at the end of April. Not one 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 239 
 
 syllable about me to any one, of course. The step 
 is so bold as to be really impudent, and I often 
 have serious fears, not, of course, on my own 
 account. You shall hear from abroad. ... If 
 some day one could know tranquillity and all 
 meet together decently." 
 
 After many qualms, hot and cold fits, despon- 
 dency, and inspirations of courage, he at last took 
 the decisive step. In May he was in Paris, and I 
 think it was in that month that the " marriage " 
 took place. I am singularly ignorant of the details, 
 for he seemed to be somewhat reluctant to speak 
 of them, and I do not even know whether any 
 actual ceremony took place or not, nor am I much 
 concerned to know. They were at any rate together, 
 and no doubt tolerably happy. He wrote me 
 nothing either about this subject or anything else 
 for some time, and I was content to hear nothing. 
 I do know, however, that they spent the summer 
 together in Switzerland, moving from Trient, near 
 the Col de Balme, to Locarno, on Lago Maggiore. 
 He wrote to me once from the Rhone Valley saying 
 that as a result of his new domestic peace and 
 comfort, even though it were but the comfort of 
 Swiss hotels, and owing also to the air of the 
 mountains, which always suited him very well, he 
 was in much better health than he had been for 
 years past. His lung, the perpetual subject of his 
 
240 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 preoccupation, appears to have given him little 
 trouble, although, knowing that its state was 
 attributable in some measure to emphysema, he 
 wrote to me for detailed explanations of that 
 particular complaint. During the whole of this 
 time, the only honeymoon he had ever had, he 
 was, however, obliged to work very hard, for he 
 was in ceaseless trouble about money. In his own 
 words, he had to " publish furiously " in order 
 to keep pace with his expenses. There was his 
 wife in England, and there were also his cliildren to 
 be partially provided for. But for the time all 
 went well with liim. There were fears of all sorts, 
 he told me, but they were to be forgotten as much 
 as possible. He and Th^rese returned to Paris for 
 the winter. 
 
 During this time, or just about this time, which 
 was when the South African War was raging, I 
 wrote for a weekly journal, which I used to send 
 regularly to Paris with my own contributions 
 marked in it. This temporary aberration into 
 journalism so late in my literary life interested 
 him much. He wrote to me : "In the old garret 
 days who would have imagined the strange present ? 
 I suppose you have now a very solid footing in 
 journalism as well as in fiction. Of course it was 
 wise to get it, as it seems more than probable 
 that the novelists will be starved out very soon. 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 241 
 
 With Europe in a state of war, which may last for 
 a decennium, there will be little chance for story- 
 tellers." Then, in spite of his new happiness, his 
 inherited or acquired pessimism got the worst of 
 him. He adds : " I wish I had died ten years ago. 
 I should have gone away with some hope for civi- 
 lisation, of which I now have none. One's choice 
 seems to be between death in the workhouse, or by 
 some ruffian's bullet. As for those who come after 
 one, it is too black to think about." 
 
 No doubt this was only his fun, or partly such. 
 There is one phrase in Boswell's " Johnson " that 
 he always loved amazingly ; it is where Johnson 
 declares that some poor creature had " no skill in 
 inebriation." Maitland perhaps had no skill in 
 inebriation when he drank at the fountain of 
 literary pessimism, for indeed when he did drink 
 there his views were fantastic and preposterous. 
 As a matter of fact he was doing very well, in spite 
 of the workhouse in Marylebone Road, from which 
 he was now far enough. There might be little chance 
 for story-tellers, yet his financial position, for the 
 first time in his life, was tolerably sound. One 
 publisher even gave him three hundred pounds on 
 account for a book which I think was " The Best 
 of all Things." For this book he also received five 
 hundred dollars from America ; so, for him, or 
 indeed for almost any writer, he was very well 
 
 Q 
 
242 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 paid. Little as the public may believe it, a sum 
 of three hundred pounds on account of royalties 
 is as much as any well-known man gets — ^unless 
 by some chance he happens to be one of the half- 
 dozen amazingly successful writers in the country, 
 and they are by no means the best. It had been 
 at my earnest solicitation that he had at last 
 employed an agent, though, with his peculiar 
 readiness to receive certain impressions, he had 
 not gone to the one I recommended, but to another, 
 suddenly mentioned to him when he was just in 
 the mood to act as I suggested. This agent worked 
 for him very well, and Maitland was now getting 
 five guineas a thousand words for stories, which 
 is also a very good price for a man who does really 
 good work. It is true that very bad work is not 
 often well paid, but the very best work of all is 
 often not to be sold at any price. About this time 
 I obtained for him a very good offer for a book, 
 and he wrote to me : " It is good to know that 
 people care to make offers for my work. What I 
 aim at is to get a couple of thousand pounds safely 
 invested for my two boys. Probably I shall not 
 succeed — and if I get the money, what security 
 have I that it will be safe in a year or two ? As 
 likely as not the Bank of England will lie in ruins." 
 After all, I must confess that he was skilful in the 
 inebriation of his pessimism, for to me these 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 243 
 
 phrases are delightful, in spite of the half-belief 
 with which they were uttered. 
 
 During the later winter of 1900 he wrote 
 to me from Paris that he proposed to be in 
 London for a few days in the spring of 1901, 
 but much depended on the relation, which 
 seemed to him highly speculative, between 
 the money he received and the money he was 
 obliged to spend. Apparently he found Paris 
 anything but cheap. According to his own account, 
 he was therefore in perpetual straits, in spite of the 
 good prices he now obtained for his work. He 
 added in this letter : " I hope to speak with you 
 once more, before we are both shot or starved." 
 This proposal to come across the Channel in the 
 spring ended in smoke. He was not able to afford 
 it, or was reluctant to move, or more likely reluc- 
 tant to expose himself to any of the troubles still 
 waiting for him in England. So long as his good 
 friends who were looking after his wife, and more 
 or less looking after his children, could do their 
 work and save him from anxiety, he was not likely 
 to wish his peace disturbed by any discussions on 
 the subject. When he had decided not to come 
 he sent me a letter in which one of the paragraphs 
 reads : " I am still trying to believe that there is 
 a King of England, and cannot take to the idea, 
 any more than to the moral and material ruin 
 
244 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 which seems to be coming upon the old country. 
 Isn't it astounding that we have the courage to 
 write books ? We shall do so, I suppose, until the 
 day when publishers find their business at an end. 
 I fear it may not be far off." At this moment, 
 being more or less at peace, and working with no 
 peculiar difficulty, he declared himself in tolerable 
 health, although he affirmed he coughed a great 
 deal. It seemed to me that he did not think so 
 much about his health as he had done before and 
 was to do later, and he displayed something like 
 his old real nature with regard to literary enter- 
 prise. It was just about this time that he reminded 
 me of his cherished project for a story of the sixth 
 century a.d. This, of course, was the book pub- 
 lished after his death, " Basil." He had then begun 
 to work upon it, and said he hoped to finish it that 
 gummer. This cheered him up wonderfully, and 
 he ended one letter to me with : " Well, well, let 
 us be glad that again we exchange letters with 
 address other than that of workhouse or hospital. 
 It is a great demand, this, to keep sane and solvent 
 — I dare hope for nothing more." Occasionally 
 in his letters there seemed to me to be slight indi. 
 cations that he was perhaps not quite so happy as 
 he wished to be. 
 
 During that summer my wife and I were in 
 gM'itsKrland, and he wrote to me, while we were 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 245 
 
 on the Lake of Geneva, from Vernet-les-Bains in 
 the Eastern Pyrenees. By this time Therese and 
 I, although we had never met, were accustomed 
 to send messages to each other. It was a comfort 
 to me to feel that he was with some one of whom 
 I could think pleasantly, and whom I much wished 
 to know. We had, indeed, proposed to meet 
 somewhere on the Continent, but that fell through, 
 partly because we were obliged to return to England 
 earlier than we had proposed. Nevertheless, 
 although we did not meet, and though I had some 
 fears for him, I was tolerably happy about him 
 and his affairs, and certainly did not anticipate 
 the new crisis which was approaching, nor the form 
 it would take. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 It was Maitland's custom to rely for advice and 
 assistance on particular people at certain crises. 
 In some cases he now appealed to Rivers ; in very- 
 many he appealed to me ; but when his health was 
 particularly involved it was his custom to relapse 
 desperately on his friend Dr. Lake. He even came 
 to Lake on his return from Magna Graecia when he 
 had taken Potsdam on his way home to England. 
 He had gone there at Schmidt's strong invitation 
 and particular desire that he should taste for once 
 a real Westphalian ham. It is a peculiarly savage 
 and not wholly safe custom of Germans to eat such 
 hams uncooked, and Maitland, having fallen in 
 with this custom, though he escaped trichinosis, 
 procured for himself a peculiarly severe attack 
 of indigestion. He came over from Folkestone to 
 Lake in order to get cured. The ham apparently 
 had not given him the lasting satisfaction which he 
 usually got out of fine fat feeding. As I have said, 
 Lake and Maitland had been friends from the time 
 that Maitland's father bought his chemist's business 
 from the Doctor's father. For they had been school. 
 
 246 
 
HENRY MAlTLAND 247 
 
 fellows together at Hinkson's school in Mirefields. 
 Nevertheless it was only in 1894 that they re- 
 newed their old acquaintance. Dr. Lake saw him 
 once at Ewell, soon after a local practitioner had 
 frightened Maitland very seriously by diagnosing 
 phthisis and giving a gloomy prognosis. On that 
 occasion Lake went ovev Maitland 's chest and found 
 v6ry little wrong. Technically speaking, there was 
 perhaps a slight want of expansion at the apex of 
 each lung, and apparently some emphysema at 
 the base of the left one, but certainly no active 
 tubercular mischief. 
 
 I speak of these things more or less in detail 
 because health played so great a part in the drama 
 of his life ; as, indeed, it does in most lives. It is not 
 the casual thing that novelists mostly make of it. 
 It is a perpetually acting cause. Steady ill-health, 
 even more than actually acute disease, is what helps 
 to bring about most tragedies. When Lake made his 
 diagnosis, with which I agree, though there is some- 
 thing else I must presently add to it, he took him 
 to London, that he might see a notable physician, 
 in order to reassure Maitland's mind thoroughly. 
 They went together to Dr. Prior Smithson. I have 
 never noted that it was Maitland who introduced 
 Dr. Lake to Rivers. When Lake had arranged 
 this London visit Maitland wrote to Rivers saying : 
 " I am coming up to town to see a scoundrel 
 
248 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 specialist in diseases of the lung, who is as likely 
 as not to upset all my plans of life. But don't be 
 afraid of my company ; you shall have no pathology. 
 There will be with me an old schoolfellow of mine, 
 a country surgeon, in whose house I am staying at 
 present. He would think it very delightful to 
 meet you." They did meet upon that occasion, 
 when Dr. Smithson confirmed Lake's diagnosis and 
 temporarily did a great deal to reassure Maitland. 
 From my own medical knowledge and my general 
 study of Maitland, combined with what some of his 
 doctors have told me, I have come to the conclusion 
 that he did sufier from pulmonary tuberculosis, but 
 that it was practically arrested at an early stage. 
 However, even arrested tuberculosis in many cases 
 leaves a very poor state of nutrition. That his joy 
 in food remained with him, though with a few 
 lapses, points strongly to the conclusion that at this 
 time tuberculosis was certainly not very active in 
 him. He always needed much food, and food, 
 especially, which he liked and desired. To want it 
 was a tragedy, as I shall show presently. 
 
 In 1897 when he went down to Salcombe he 
 reported to Lake a great improvement in health, 
 saying that his cough was practically gone, and that 
 of course the wonderful weather accounted for it. 
 He ate heartily, and even walked five nailes a day 
 without fatigue. He added : " The only difficulty 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 249 
 
 is breathing through the nose. The other day a 
 traction engine passed me on the road, and the men 
 upon it looked about them wondering where the 
 strange noises came from. It was my snoring ! 
 All the nasal cavities are excoriated ! But I shall 
 get used to this. I have a suspicion that it is not 
 the lung that accounts for this difficulty, for it has 
 been the same ever since I can remember." By 
 this he probably meant merely that it had lasted 
 a long time. There was a specific reason for it. 
 From Salcombe he reported to Lake that he had 
 recovered a great deal of weight, but that for some 
 time his wheezing had been worse than ever when 
 the weather got very bad. He wrote : " Then 
 again a practical paradox that frenzies one, for 
 sleep came when bad weather prevented me from 
 being so much out of doors ! " All this he did not 
 understand, but it is highly probable that at that 
 time he had a little actual tubercular mischief, and 
 a slight rise of temperature. As frequently happens, 
 enforced rest in the house did for him what nothing 
 else could do. But his health certainly was some- 
 thing of a puzzle. In 1898, when he was in Paris 
 with Thdr^se, he saw a Dr. Piffard, apparently not 
 a lung specialist, but, as I am told, a physician of 
 high standing. This doctor spoke rather gravely 
 to him, and of course told him that he was working 
 much too hard, for he was still keeping up his 
 
250 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 ridiculous habit of writing eight hours a day. He 
 said that there was a moist spot in the right lung, 
 with a little chronic bronchitis, and that the 
 emphysema was very obvious. He had, too, some 
 chronic rheumatism, and also on the right side of 
 his forehead what Maitland described as a patch 
 of psoriasis. Psoriasis, however, is not as a rule 
 unilateral, and it was due to something else. This 
 patch had been there for about a year, and was 
 slowly getting worse. Dr. Piffard prescribed 
 touching him under the right clavicle with the 
 actual cautery, and for the skin gave him some 
 subcutaneous injections of an arsenical prepara- 
 tion. He fed him Avith eggs, milk, and cod-liver 
 oil, ordering much sleep and absolute rest. During 
 this treatment he improved somewhat, and owned 
 that he was really better. The cough had become 
 trifling, his breath was easier and his sleep very 
 good. His strength had much increased. He also 
 declared that he saw a slight amelioration in the 
 patch of so-called psoriasis. The truth is, I think, 
 that nearly all this improvement was due to making 
 him rest and eat. No doubt very much of his ill- 
 health was the result of his abnormal habits, 
 although there was something else at the back of 
 it. For one thing he had rarely taken sufficient 
 exercise, the exercise necessary for his really fine 
 physique. As I have said, he never played a game 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 251 
 
 'n his life after he left Hinkson's school in Mire- 
 fields. Cricket he knew not. Football was a 
 mystery to him, and a brutal mystery at that. It 
 is true that occasionally he rowed in a boat at the 
 seaside, for he did so at Salcombe when his eldest 
 boy was there with him, but any kind of game or 
 sport he actually loathed. It was a surprise to 
 me to find out that Rivers, while he was at Folke- 
 stone, actually persuaded him to take to a bicycle. 
 He even learned to like it. Rivers told Lake that 
 he rode not badly, and with great dignity ; and as 
 Rivers rode beside him he heard him murmur : 
 " Marvellous proceedings ! Was the like ever 
 seen ? " 
 
 However, the time was now coming when he was 
 to appeal to Lake once more. In 1901 he had pro- 
 posed to come over to England and see me, but he 
 said that the doctor in Paris had forbidden him to 
 go north, rather indicating the south for him. He 
 wrote to me : " Now I must go to the centre of 
 France — I don't think the Alps are possible — and 
 vegetate among things which serve only to remind 
 me that here is not England. Then, again, I had 
 thought night and day of an English potato, of a 
 slice of English meat, of tarts and puddings, and of 
 teacakes. Night and day had I looked forward to 
 ravening on these things. Well, well ! " But he 
 did at last come back to England for some time. 
 
252 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 There is no doubt that the feeding in his French 
 home was not fat, or fine, or confused feeding. 
 Probably the notion of a Scotch haggis would give 
 any French cook a fit of apoplexy. Just before he 
 did come over from Paris, Lake had a letter from 
 him which was much like the one he wrote to me : 
 " Best wishes for the merry, merry time, — if 
 merriment can be in the evil England of these days. 
 I wish I could look in upon you at Christmas. I 
 should roar with joy at an honest bit of English 
 roast beef. Could you post a slice in a letter ? — 
 with gravy ? " Lake said to his wife when he received 
 this letter : " Why, this is written by a starving 
 man ! " Naturally enough, although I heard from 
 him comparatively seldom, I had always been 
 aware of these hankerings of his for England and 
 English food. He did not take kindly to exile, or 
 to the culinary methods of a careful French in- 
 terior. Truly as he loved the Latin countries, 
 there was much in their customs which troubled 
 him greatly, and the food was his especial trouble 
 when he was not being fed in Italy with oil and 
 Chianti. I find occasional melancholy letters of 
 his upon the subject, when he indulged in dithy- 
 rambs about the fine abundance of feeding in 
 England — eggs and bacon and beer. There was 
 no doubt he was not living in the way he should 
 have lived. At any rate, it was about this time 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 253 
 
 — although I did not know it, as I was either in the 
 North of England or abroad, I forget which — ^that 
 he came once more to Lake, and was found standing 
 on his doorstep tolerably early in the morning. 
 According to the doctor, on his arrival from Paris 
 he was in the condition of a starved man. The 
 proof of this is very simple. At that time, and for 
 long after, Rivers was living at Folkestone, and as 
 Lake's house was at that time full he was unable 
 to entertain Maitland for long, and it was proposed 
 that he should go over for a time and stay at 
 Folkestone. When Lake examined Maitland he 
 was practically no more than a skeleton, but after 
 one week in Rivers' house he had picked up no less 
 than seven pounds weight. There were then no 
 physical signs of active mischief in the lungs except 
 the remaining and practically incurable patch of 
 emphysema. Although this sudden increase of 
 weight does not entirely exclude tuberculosis, it 
 is yet rather uncommon for so rapid an increase to 
 take place in such cases, and it rather puts tuber- 
 culosis out of court as being in any way the real 
 cause of much of his ill-health. Now of all this 
 I knew very little, or next door to nothing, until 
 afterwards. Although I was aware that he was 
 uneasy about many things, I had not gathered 
 that there was anything seriously wrong with him 
 except his strong and almost irresistible desire to 
 
254 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 return to England. I now know that his reticence 
 in speaking to me was due to his utter inabihty to 
 confess that his third venture had almost come to 
 disaster over the mere matter of the dining-table, 
 I knew so much of the past that he feared to tell me 
 of the present, though I do not think he could have 
 imagined that I should say anything to make him 
 feel that he had once again been a sad fool for not 
 insisting good-humouredly on having the food 
 he wanted. But he was ashamed to speak to me 
 of his difficulties, fearing, perhaps, that I might not 
 understand, or understand too well. 
 
 Now he and Therese 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 liy 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 break- 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 255 
 
 fast, 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 gastro- 
 nomic 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. 
 
256 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 As soon as he was in anything Uke 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. Never- 
 theless 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, 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 257 
 
 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 undersand 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 experi- 
 ences 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 Ther^se took 
 up their abode in St. Pee d'Ascain, under the 
 shadow of the Pyrenees. From there he wrote me 
 
 R 
 
258 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 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. Kiiowing 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. Pee by 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 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 259 
 
 put me up, but went later to his house. It was now 
 that I at last met Th6rfese. 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 im- 
 pressed 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 ^lone 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 comfort- 
 able, 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 g, 
 
260 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 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 Th^r^se 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 neighbour- 
 hood 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. Pie 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 im- 
 possible to get him to go out with me, save now and 
 again for half an hour in the warmest and quietest 
 part of the daj'. He had developed a great fear of 
 death, and life seemed to him extraordinarily 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 261 
 
 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 purposed at that 
 time to write a short life of an imaginary man of 
 letters to whom I meant to attribute what I after- 
 wards 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 for- 
 gotten that it was I who first suggested the idea. 
 Certainly no two books could have been jnore 
 different, although my own plan was originally 
 much more like his. In the same way I now be- 
 lieve that my story "The Purification " owed its 
 
262 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 inception without my being aware of it to the sup- 
 pressed 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 influ- 
 ences are one of the great uses of literary com- 
 panionship 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. P6e 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 
 
OP HENRY MAITLAND 263 
 
 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 telegraph- 
 ing to Henry Maitland those words in the original 
 
264 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 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 con- 
 tent 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 to utter 
 this 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 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 265 
 
 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 in 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 enthu- 
 siastic, 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 
 
266 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 rather than a sketch of him, I should certainly 
 put in the letter, knowing that I should be for- 
 given for inserting it because it was a letter of 
 Maitland's. It was, indeed, a highly character- 
 istic epistle, for when he praised he praised indeed, 
 and his words carried conviction to me, ever some- 
 what 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 Ther^se and Madame Espinel left St. Pee 
 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 
 
OF HENRY MAlTLAND 267 
 
 it is not very far from the Port or Col de Ron* 
 cesvalles, where the legendary Roland was slain 
 fighting in the rearguard to protect Charlemagne's 
 army. He and Ther^se 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 infre- 
 quently 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 fre- 
 quently 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 thiat 
 I knew more than any lawyer in London who was 
 
268 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 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 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 269 
 
 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. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 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, al- 
 though 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. Pee. 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 humour 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 
 
 270 
 
HENRY MAITLAND 271 
 
 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. P6e 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 
 
272 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 from the last half-century of ' progress,' pro- 
 testing 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 Th^r^se had 
 laryngitis and that everything was made worse 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 273 
 
 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 Th^r^se 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 ci sis." 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." 
 
 s 
 
274 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 As I have hinted, those will have gathered very 
 little of Maitland who imagine that I took this 
 au 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 pro- 
 digious 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 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 275 
 
 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 in 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 
 
276 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 little reflection I therefore replied to Rivers that 1 
 was myself very ill, but added that if he could not 
 possibly go I would. At the same time I tele- 
 graphed to Maitland, or rather to Th^r^se, 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 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 277 
 
 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 Th^r^se asking them 
 to telegraph to me at the H6tel 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 
 
278 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 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 after- 
 wards, 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 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 279 
 
 other Englishman. She answered that he had 
 gone back to England the day before, and then 
 took me upstairs and went in to tell Th6r6se 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 ob- 
 viously 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 
 
280 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 actually killed him. There was a very serious 
 complication, according to Maitland's first phy- 
 sician, with whom I afterwards had a long con- 
 versation, 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 com- 
 parative ease when he rested and was quiet, and 
 even spoke a little. In one of these intermissions 
 Ther^se 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. 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 281 
 
 I was taken in to see Thdrfese, who was still in 
 bed, and found her mother with her. They were 
 two desolate and lonely women, and I had some 
 fears that Th^r^se 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, in- 
 evitable 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 re- 
 sembled very strongly another English wiiter 
 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. 
 
282 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 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. 
 
 Th6r^se 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. Pee, about whom I shall 
 have something to say later. With him I con- 
 certed what was to be done, and he obtained the 
 necessary papers from the mairie. 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 car- 
 penter's shop which stood there. When all was 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 283 
 
 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. Pee d'Ascain. 
 in charge of his body. During this journey the 
 young doctor who had attended Maitland ac- 
 companied me part of the way, and for the rest 
 of it his nurse was my companion. At St. Pee 
 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 Ther^se 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 nowhither. 
 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 
 
284 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 they felt that they and he were alike in exile. 
 We buried him in the common cemetery of St. 
 Pee, 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 Th6r6se and Madame Espinel still at St. 
 Christophe, and did not see them again before I 
 started for England. They, I knew, would prob- 
 ably 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 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 285 
 
 comfort and strength of the Cathohc 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 dis- 
 cussion, 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 which 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. Never- 
 theless 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 
 
286 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 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 con- 
 sidered 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 stand- 
 point 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 vindica- 
 tion 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 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 287 
 
 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. P6e, 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 
 
 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. AVhen 
 he asked to know the truth he had been told it. 
 
288 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 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 Ther^se 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 jvist 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 Th^r^se 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 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 289 
 
 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 conversa- 
 tion 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 of Te Deum repeatedly. 
 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 com- 
 plicated matters in no small degree before he 
 retired from the scene, by declaring most disin- 
 
 T 
 
290 HENRY MAITLAND 
 
 genuously 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. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 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 Thdr^se hefself 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 : 
 
 Afiithula vagula, blandula, 
 Hospes comesque corporis, 
 Qucejmnc abibis in loca 
 
 PaUidulai tigida, nudula 
 
 S91 
 
292 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 I believe his library was sold in Paris, for now 
 that Therese 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 lan- 
 guages. His Greek, though not extraordinarily 
 deep, was most familiar. He could read Aristo- 
 phanes lying on the sofa, thoroughly enjoying it, 
 find rarely rising to consult Liddell and Scott, a 
 book which he adored in the most odd fashion, 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 293 
 
 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, under- 
 standing 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 Shake- 
 speare 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 Mait- 
 land worshipped him so, for whatever may be 
 thought of Shakespeare's dramatic ability, or his 
 
'294 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 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 "II 
 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 Mait- 
 land 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 after- 
 wards 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 clever jeux 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 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 2»6 
 
 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 Athensus 
 the Deipnosophist. Occasionally, but very occa- 
 sionally, 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 admira- 
 tion 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 .Eschylus, 
 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, Ealzac, 
 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 no 
 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 
 
296 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 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 adora- 
 tion 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 some- 
 thing 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 con- 
 servative critic. He found it difficult to appre- 
 ciate 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 
 
OP HENRY MAITLAND 297 
 
 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 in- 
 tellect 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 
 characteristiscally 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 civilisa- 
 tion and the foulest life of London. Of course he 
 loved satire, and his own mind was essentially in 
 
298 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 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 
 Bulter'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, " Ere- 
 whon " 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 con- 
 nection 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 
 
01* HENRY MAITLAND 299 
 
 him. One of the girls stood in front of this nude 
 and said, " Oh, mama, 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 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 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 
 
 300 
 
HENRY MAITLAND 801 
 
 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 the Fortnightly 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 
 
302 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 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 stUl 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 appre- 
 ciate, 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 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 803 
 
 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 Moor- 
 hampton 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 bis 
 
304 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 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 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 803 
 
 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 Mait- 
 land." 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 
 the Fortnightly Review Edwin 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 
 
 u 
 
306 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 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 indi- 
 rectly 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 ambi- 
 tions. These Russians indeed were the writers 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 307 
 
 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 archi- 
 tectonic, 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 psycho- 
 logical, 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 
 
308 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 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 current Spectator. 
 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 appea 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 309 
 
 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, weak- 
 
310 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 nesses, &c., peculiar to our day. Now in the first 
 place, this group of people, on its worst side, repre- 
 sents 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 circum- 
 stance was truly too much, as it had been for him. 
 It appears that the critic added that the genera 
 elTect 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. 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 311 
 
 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 
 Parsons 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." 
 
312 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 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, Hill ward, 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 HENRY MAITLAND 313 
 
 of his chosen names ; and so far as he depicted 
 a class hitherto untouched, or practically un- 
 touched, 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 Boheme." 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 thermom^tre va dtre furieusement 
 vexe. " 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 Boheme " 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 bour- 
 geoisie. 
 
 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 circum- 
 
814 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 
 stances. 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 neces- 
 sary 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 implica- 
 tion, of the man's style. In many ways it was 
 notable and even noble. To such a literary intelli- 
 gence, 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 
 
OF HENRY MAITLAND 315 
 
 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. 
 
 When I think of it all, and consider his partly 
 wasted years, I even now wonder how it was he 
 induced himself to deal with the life he knew so 
 well ; but while that commercialism exists which 
 he abhorred as much as he abhorred the society 
 in which it flourishes, there seems no other prac- 
 ticable method for a man of letters to attain speech 
 and yet to live. I often declared that fiction as 
 we wrote it was truly diagnostic of a disordered 
 and unnecessarily degraded form of civilisation ; 
 and he replied with deep feeling that to him the 
 idylls of Theocritus, of Moschus, the simple 
 tragedies, the natural woes and joys of men 
 who ploughed the soil or worked at the wine- 
 press, were the truest and most vivid forms and 
 subjects of Art. Neither before his death nor 
 after did he attain the artist's true and great 
 reward of recognition in the full sense that 
 would have satisfied him even if he had re- 
 mained poor. Nevertheless there were some who 
 
316 HENRY MAITLAND 
 
 knew. There are perhaps a few more who know 
 now that he is gone and cannot hear them. Popu- 
 larity he never hoped for, and never will attain, 
 but he has a secure place in the hierarchy of the 
 literature of England which he loved. But he 
 appeals now, as he appealed while he lived, not 
 to the idle and the foolish, not to the fashionable 
 mob, but to the more august tribunal of those 
 who have the sympathy which comes from under- 
 standing. 
 
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