THE PRIVATE LIFE OF
HENRY MAITLAND
_A RECORD DICTATED BY J. H._
REVISED AND EDITED BY
MORLEY ROBERTS
HODDER & STOUGHTON
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
Copyright, 1912,
By George H. Doran Company
INSCRIBED
TO THE MEMORY OF
MY WIFE
PREFACE
This book was dictated by J.H. mostly in my presence, and I consider
it well worth publishing. 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
because 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 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 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.
THE PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY MAITLAND
CHAPTER I
It is never an easy thing to write the life, 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 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
knew and loved Henry Maitland.
There is no doubt many people will accuse me of desiring to use his
memory for my own advantage. "My withers are unwrung." Those who
speak in this way must have little knowledge 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 life 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 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 pragmatic 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 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 unimportant 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 extraordinary 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 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 like 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 that most
of his disasters sprang from the premature 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; Shakespeare, 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 bitterness,
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 his book about the
Victorian novelist: "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 Mirefield'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 recognized 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 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
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 father 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
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
interpretation. 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 endured 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 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 like 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 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 Moorhampton. 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 admiration 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 afterwards 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."
One day he showed me a photograph. It was that of a young girl, aged
perhaps seventeen--he at the time being very little 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 deliberately 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 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 to 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 to marry her. Dr. Lake,
of course, being an older man, and knowing something of life through
his own profession, did not approve of this and strongly objected.
Afterwards 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 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 was absolutely
enraged at the notion and used every possible means to prevent him
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 Moorhampton 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 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
extraordinary 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 who are 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 together 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 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.