In the last chapter I quoted from Boswell, always a favourite of
Maitland's, as he is of all true men of letters. But there is yet
another quotation from the same work which might stand as a motto for
this book, as it might for the final and authoritative biography of
Maitland which perhaps will some day be done: "He asked me whether he
had mentioned, in any of the papers of the 'Rambler,' the description
in Virgil of the entrance into Hell, with an application to the
Press; 'for,' said he, 'I do not much remember them.' I told him,
'No.' Upon which he repeated it:
_'Vestlbulum ante ipsum primisque in faucibus Orci,
Lucius et ultrices posuere cubilia Curæ;
Pallentesque habitant Morbi, tristisque Senectus,
Et Metus, et malesuada Fames, ac turpis Egestas;
Terribiles vis formæ: Letumque, Labosque.'_
'Now,' said he, 'almost all these apply exactly to an author; all
these are the concomitants of a printing-house.'" Nevertheless,
although cares, and sometimes sullen sorrows, want and fear, still
dwelt with Maitland, a little time now began for him in which he had
some peace of mind, if not happiness. That was a plant he never
cultivated. One of his favourite passages from Charlotte Brontë,
whose work was in many ways a passion to him, is that in which she
exclaims: "Cultivate happiness! Happiness is not a potato," and
indeed he never grew it. Still there were two periods in his life in
which he had some peace, and the first period now began. I speak of
the time after the death of his first wife. The drain of ten
shillings a week--which must seem so absurdly little to many--had
been far more than he could stand, and many times he had gone without
the merest necessities of life so that the poor alien in the New Cut
should have money, even though he knew that she spent it at once upon
drink and forgetfulness. Ten shillings a week was very much to him.
For one thing it might mean a little more food and better food. It
meant following up his one great hobby of buying books. Those who
know "The Meditations," know what he thought of books, for in that
respect this record is a true guide, even if it should be read with
caution in most things. Nevertheless although he was happier and
easier, it is curious that his most unhappy and despairing books were
written during this particular period. "In the Morning," it is true,
was done before his wife died, and some people who do not know the
inner history of the book may not regard it as a tragedy. In one
sense, however, it was one of the greatest literary tragedies of
Henry Maitland's life, according to his own statement to me.
At that time he was publishing books with the firm of Miller and
Company, and, of course, he knew John Glass, who read for them, very
well indeed. It seems that Glass, who had naturally enough,
considering his period, certain old-fashioned ideas on the subject of
books and their endings, absolutely and flatly declined to recommend
his firm to publish "In the Morning," unless Maitland re-wrote the
natural tragic end of the book and made it turn out happily. I think
nothing on earth, or in some hell for men of letters, could have made
Maitland more angry and wretched. If there was one thing that he
clung to during the whole of his working time, it was sincerity, and
sincerity in literary work implies an absolute freedom from alien and
extrinsic influence. I can well remember what he said to me about
Glass' suggestion. He abused him and the publishers; the public,
England, the world, and the very universe. He almost burst into
tears as he explained to me what he had been obliged to do for the
sake of the great fifty pounds he was to get for the book. For at
this time he only got fifty pounds for a long three-volume novel. He
always wrote with the greatest pain and labour, but I do not suppose
he ever put anything on paper in his life which cost him such acute
mental suffering as the last three chapters of this book which were
written to John Glass' barbaric order.
After his wife's death he wrote "The Under-World," "Bond and Free,"
"Paternoster Row," and "The Exile." It is a curious fact, although
it was not always obvious even to himself, and is not now obvious to
anybody but me, that I stood as a model to him in many of these
books, especially, if I remember rightly, for one particular
character in "Bond and Free." Some of these sketches are fairly
complimentary, and many are much the reverse. The reason of this use
of me was that till much later he knew very few men intimately but
myself; and when he wanted anybody in his books of a more or less
robust character, and sometimes more or less of a kind that he did
not like, I, perforce, had to stand for him. On one occasion he
acknowledged this to me, and once he was not at all sure how I should
take it. As a matter of fact the most life-like portrait of me ends
as a villain, and, as he had touched me off to the very life in the
first volume, it did make me a little sorer than I acknowledged. I
leave the curious to discover this particular scoundrel. Of course
it was only natural that my wild habits and customs, the relics of
Australia and America, afforded him a great deal of amusement and
study. On one occasion they cost him, temporarily, the very large
sum of three pounds. As he said, he used to look upon me as a kind
of hybrid, a very ridiculous wild man with strong literary leanings,
with an enormous amount of general and unrelated knowledge; and at
the same time as a totally unregulated or ill-regulated ruffian.
This was a favourite epithet of his, for which I daresay there was
something to be said. Now one Sunday it happened that I was going up
to see him at 7K, and came from Chelsea with two or three books in my
hand, and, as it happened, a pair of spectacles on my nose. At that
time I sometimes carried an umbrella, and no doubt looked exceedingly
peaceful. As a result of this a young man, who turned out afterwards
to be a professional cricketer, thought I was a very easy person to
deal with, and to insult. As I came to York Place, which was then
almost empty of passers by, I was walking close to the railings and
this individual came up and pushing rudely past me, stepped right in
front of me. Now this was a most outrageous proceeding, because he
had fifteen free feet of pavement, and I naturally resented it. I
made a little longer step than I should otherwise have done and
"galled his kibe." He turned round upon me and, using very bad
language, asked me where I was going to, who I thought I was, and
what I proposed to do about it. I did not propose to do anything,
but did it. I smote him very hard with the umbrella, knocking him
down. He remained on the pavement for a considerable time, and then
only got up at the third endeavour, and promptly gave me into
custody. The policeman, who had happened to see the whole affair,
explained to me, with that civility common among the custodians of
order to those classes whose dress suggests they are their masters,
that he was compelled to take the charge. I was removed to Lower
Seymour Street and put in a cell for male prisoners only, where I
remained fully half an hour.
While I was in this cell a small boy of about nine was introduced and
left there. I went over to him and said, "Hullo, my son, what's
brought you here?" Naturally enough he imagined that I was not a
prisoner but a powerful official, and bursting into tears he said,
"Oh, please, sir, it warn't me as nicked the steak!" I consoled him
to the best of my ability until I was shortly afterwards invited down
to Marlborough Street Police Court, where Mr. De Rutzen, now Sir
Albert De Rutzen, was sitting. As I had anticipated the likelihood
of my being fined, and as I had no more than a few shillings with me,
I had written a letter to Maitland, and procuring a messenger through
the police, had sent it up to him. He came down promptly and sat in
the court while I was being tried for this assault. After hearing
the case Mr. De Rutzen decided to fine me three pounds, which
Maitland paid, with great chuckles at the incident, even though he
considered his prospect of getting the money back for some months was
exceedingly vague. It was by no means the first time that he had
gone to the police court for copy which "is very pretty to observe,"
as Pepys said, when after the Fire of London it was discovered that
as many churches as public houses were left standing in the city.
That such a man should have had to pursue his studies of actual life
in the police courts and the slums was really an outrage, another
example of the native malignity of matter. For, as I have insisted,
and must insist again, he was a scholar and a dreamer. But his
pressing anxieties for ever forbade him to dream, or to pursue
scholarship without interruption. He desired time to perfect his
control of the English tongue, and he wanted much that no man can
ever get. It is my firm conviction that if he had possessed the
smallest means he would never have thought himself completely master
of the medium in which he worked. He often spoke of poor Flaubert
saying: "What an accursed language is French!" He was for ever
dissatisfied with his work, as an artist should be, and I think he
attained seldom, if ever, the rare and infrequent joy that an artist
has in accomplishment. It was not only his desire of infinite
perfection as a writer pure and simple, which affected and afflicted
him. It was the fact that he should never have written fiction at
all. He often destroyed the first third of a book. I knew him to do
so with one three times over. This, of course, was not always out of
the cool persuasion that what he had done was not good, for it often
was good in its way, but frequently he began, in a hurry, in despair,
and with the prospects of starvation, something that he knew not to
be his own true work, or something which he forced without adequate
preparation. Then I used to get a dark note saying, "I have
destroyed the whole of the first volume and am, I hope, beginning to
see my way." It was no pleasant thing to be a helpless spectator of
these struggles, in which he found no rest, when I knew his destiny
was to have been a scholar at a great university.
When one understands his character, or even begins to understand it,
it is easy enough to comprehend that the temporary ease with regard
to money which came after his wife's death did not last so very long.
The pressure of her immediate needs and incessant demands being at
last relaxed he himself relaxed his efforts in certain directions and
presently was again in difficulties. I know that it will sound very
extraordinary to all but those who know the inside of literary life
that this should have been so. A certain amount of publicity is
almost always associated in the minds of the public with monetary
success of a kind. Yet one very well-known acquaintance of mine, an
eminent if erratic journalist, one day had a column of favourable
criticism in a big daily, and after reading it went out and bought a
red herring with his last penny and cooked it over the fire in his
solitary room. It was the same with myself. It was almost the same
with Maitland even at this time. No doubt the worst of his financial
difficulties were before I returned from America, and even before his
wife died, but never, till the end of his life, was he at ease with
regard to money. He never attained the art of the pot-boiler by
which most of us survive, even when he tried short stories, which he
did finally after I had pressed him to attempt them for some years.
In many ways writing to him was a kind of sacred mission. It was not
that he had any faith in great results to come from it, but the
profession of a writer was itself sacred, and even the poorest
sincere writer was 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 Stevenson in Samoa,
but I think by that time Maitland himself was half inclined to agree
with his eminent brother author. And yet, as I say, writing was a
mission, even if it was with him an acquired passion; but his
critical faculties, which were so keenly developed, almost destroyed
him. There can be no stronger proof that he was not one of those
happy beings who take to the telling of stories because they must,
and because it is in them. There was no time that he was not obliged
to do his best, though every writer knows to his grief that there are
times when the second best must do. And thus it was that John Glass
so enraged him. All those things which are the care of the true
writer were of most infinite importance to him. A misprint, a mere
"literal," gave him lasting pain. He desired classic perfection,
both of work and the mere methods of production. He would have taken
years over a book if fear and hunger and poverty had permitted him to
do so. And yet he wrote "Isabel," "The Mob," and "In the Morning,"
all in seven months, even while he read through the whole of Dante's
"Divina Commedia," for recreation, and while he toiled at the alien
labour of teaching. Yet this was he who wrote to one friend: "Would
it not be delightful to give up a year or so to the study of some old
period of English history?" When he was thirty-six he said: "The
four years from now to forty I should like to devote to a vigorous
apprenticeship in English." But this was the man who year after year
was compelled to write books which the very essence of his being told
him would work no good. Sometimes I am tempted to think that the
only relief he got for many, many years came out of the hours we
spent in company, either in his room or mine. We read very much
together, and it was our delight, as I have said, to exchange
quotations, or read each other passages which we had discovered
during the week. He recited poetry with very great feeling and
skill, and was especially fond of much of Coleridge. I can hear him
now reading those lines of Coleridge to his son which end:
"Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to 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 Piræus and seen the peopled mountains of that country
Homer became something more to him than he had been, and the language
of Æschylus and Sophocles took on new glories and clothed itself in
still more wondrous emotions. He knew a hundred choruses of the
Greek tragedies by heart, and declaimed them with his wild hair flung
back and his eyes gleaming as if the old tragedians, standing in the
glowing sun of the Grecian summer, were there to hear him, an alien
yet not an alien, using the tongue that gave its chiefest glories to
them for ever. But he had been born in exile, and had made himself
an outcast.
Those who have read so far, and are interested in him, will see that
I am much more concerned to say what I felt about him than to relate
mere facts and dates. I care little or nothing that in some ways
others know more or less of him, or know it differently. I try to
build up my little model of him, try to paint my picture touch by
touch; often, it may be, by repetition, for so a man builds himself
for his friends in his life. I must paint him as a whole, and put
him down, here and there perhaps with the grain of the canvas showing
through the paint, or perhaps with what the worthy critics call a
rich impasto, which may be compiled of words. Others may criticise,
and will criticise, what I write. No doubt they will find much of it
wrong, or wrong-headed, and will attribute to me other motives than
those which move me, but if it leads them to bring out more of his
character than I know or remember, I shall be content. For the more
that is known of him, the more he will be loved.
It was somewhere about this time that I undertook to write one of two
or three articles which I have done about him for periodicals, and
the remembrance of that particular piece of work reminds me very
strongly of his own ideas of his own humour in writing. There have
been many discussions, wise and otherwise, as to whether he possessed
any at all, and I think the general feeling that he was very greatly
lacking in this essential part of the equipment of a writer, to be on
the whole true. Among my lost letters there was one which I most
especially regret not to be able to quote, for it was very long,
perhaps containing two thousand words, which he sent to me when he
knew I had been asked to do this article. Now the purport of
Maitland's letter was to prove to me that every one was wrong who
said he had no humour. In one sense there can be no greater proof
that anybody who said so was right. He enumerated carefully all the
characters in all the books he had hitherto written in whom he
thought there was real humour. He gave me a preposterous list of
these individuals, with his comments, and appealed to me in all
deadly seriousness to know whether I did not agree with him that they
were humorous. But the truth is that, save as a talker, he had very
little humour, and even then it was frequently verbal. It was,
however, occasionally very grim, and its strength, oddly enough, was
of the American kind, since it consisted of managed exaggeration. He
had a certain joy in constructing more or less humorous nicknames for
people. Sometimes these were good, and sometimes bad, but when he
christened them once he kept to it always. I believe the only man of
his acquaintance who had no nickname at all was George Meredith, but
then he loved and admired Meredith in no common fashion.
In some of his books he speaks, apparently not without some learning,
of music, but there are, I fancy, signs that his knowledge of it was
more careful construction than actual knowledge or deep feeling.
Nevertheless he did at times discover a real comprehension of the
greater musicians, especially of Chopin. Seeing that this was so, it
is very curious, and more than curious in a writer, that he had a
measureless adoration of barrel organs. He delighted in them
strangely, and when any Italian musician came into his dingy street
or neighbourhood, he would set the window open and listen with
ardour. Being so poor, he could rarely afford to give away money
even in the smallest sum. Pennies were indeed pennies to him. But
he did sometimes bestow pence on wandering Italians who ground out
Verdi in the crowded streets. Among the many languages which he knew
was, of course, Italian; for, as I have said, he read the "Divina
Commedia" easily, reading it for relaxation as he did Aristophanes.
It was a great pleasure to him, even before he went to Italy, to
speak a few words in their own tongue to these Italians of the
English streets. He remembered that this music came from the south,
the south that was always his Mecca, the Kibleh of the universe.
Years afterwards, when he had been in the south, and knew Naples and
the joyous crowds of the Chaiaja--long before I had been there and
had listened to its uproar from the Belvidere of San Martino--he
found Naples chiefly a city of this joyous popular music. Naples, he
said, was the most interesting modern city in Europe; and yet I
believe the chief joy he had there was hearing its music, and the
singing of the lazzaroni down by Santa Lucia. "Funiculi, Funicula,"
he loved as much as if it were the work of a classic, and "Santa
Lucia" appealed to him like a Greek chorus. I remember that, years
later, he wrote to me a letter of absurd and exaggerated anger, which
was yet perfectly serious, about the action of the Neapolitan
municipality in forbidding street organs to play in the city.
Sometimes, though rarely, seeing that he could not often afford a
shilling, he went to great concerts in London. Certainly he spoke as
one not without instruction in musical subjects in "The Vortex," but
I fancy that musical experts might find flaws in his nomenclature.
Nevertheless he did love music with a certain ardent passion.
He was a man not without a certain sensuality, but it was his
sensuousness which was in many ways the most salient point in his
character. As I often told him, he was a kind of incomplete
Rabelaisian. That was suggested to me by his delighted use of
Gargantuan epithets with regard to the great recurrent subject of
food. He loved all things which were redolent of oil and grease and
fatness. The joy of great abundance appealed to him, and I verily
believe that to him the great outstanding characteristic of the past
in England was its abundant table. Indeed, in all things but rowdy
indecency, he was a Rabelaisian, and being such, he yet had to put up
with poor and simple food. However, provided it was at hand in large
quantities, he was ready to feed joyously. He would exclaim: "Now
for our squalid meal! I wonder what Harold Edgeworth, or good old
Edmund Roden would say to this?" When I think of the meagre preface
that Harold Edgeworth wrote in later years for "Basil," when that
done by G.H. Rivers--afterwards published separately--did not meet
with the approval of Maitland's relatives and executors, I feel that
Edgeworth somewhat deserved the implied scorn of Maitland's words.
As for Edmund Roden, he often spoke of him affectionately. In later
years he sometimes went down to Felixstowe to visit him. He liked
his house amazingly, and was very much at home in it. It was there
that he met Grant Allen, and Sir Luke Redburn, whom he declared to be
the most interesting people that he saw in Felixstowe at that time.
I am not sure whether it was on this particular occasion, perhaps in
1895, that he went down to Essex with a great prejudice against Grant
Allen. The reason of this was curious. He was always most vicious
when any writer who obviously lived in comfort, complained loudly and
bitterly of the pittance of support given him by the public, and the
public's faithful servants, the publishers. When Allen growled
furiously on this subject in a newspaper interview Maitland recalled
to me with angry amusement a certain previous article in which, if I
remember rightly, Grant Allen proclaimed his absolute inability to
write if he were not in a comfortable room with rose-coloured
curtains. "Rose-coloured curtains!" said Maitland contemptuously,
and looking round his own room one certainly found nothing of that
kind. It was perhaps an extraordinary thing, one of the many odd
things in his character, that the man who loved the south so, who
always dreamed of it, seemed to see everything at that period of his
life in the merest black and white. There was not a spark or speck
of colour in his rooms. Now in my one poor room in Chelsea I had
hung up all sorts of water-colours acquired by various means from
artists who were friends of mine. By hook or by crook I got hold of
curtains with colour in them, and carpets, too, and Japanese fans.
My room was red and yellow and scarlet, while his were a dingy
monochrome, as if they sympathised with the outlook at the back of
his flat, which stared down upon the inferno of the Metropolitan
Railway. But to return to Grant Allen. Maitland now wrote:
"However, I like him very much. He is quite a simple, and very
gentle fellow, crammed with multifarious knowledge, enthusiastic in
scientific pursuits. With fiction and that kind of thing he ought
never to have meddled; it is the merest pot-boiling. He reads
nothing whatever but books of scientific interest."
It was at Felixstowe, too, that he met Carew Latter who induced him
to write twenty papers in one of the journals Latter conducted. They
were to be of more or less disreputable London life. Some of them at
least have been reprinted in his volumes of short stories. There is
certainly no colour in them; in some ways they resemble sketches with
the dry-point. Of course after he had once been on the continent,
and had got south to Marseilles and the Cannebiere, he learnt to know
what colour was, and wrote of it in a way he had never done before,
as I noticed particularly in one paragraph about Capri seen at sunset
from Naples. In this sudden discovery of colour he reminded me,
oddly enough, of my old acquaintance Wynne, the now justly celebrated
painter, who, up to a certain time in his life, had painted almost in
monochrome, and certainly in a perpetual grey chord. Then he met
Marvell, the painter, who was, if anything, a colourist. I do not
think Marvell influenced Wynne in anything but colour, but from that
day Wynne was a colourist, and so remains, although to it he has
added a great and real power of design and decoration. It is true
that Maitland never became a colourist in writing, but those who have
read his work with attention will observe that after a certain date
he was much more conscious of the world's colour.
In those days our poverty and our ambition made great subjects for
our talks. I myself had been writing for some years with no more
than a _succès d'estime_, and I sometimes thought that I would throw
up the profession and go back to Australia or America, or to the sea,
or would try Africa at last. But Maitland had no such possibilities
within him. He maintained grimly, though not without humour, that
his only possible refuge when war, or some other final disaster made
it impossible for writers to earn their difficult living, was a
certain block of buildings opposite 7K. This, however, was not
Madame Tussaud's as the careless might imagine, it was the Marylebone
workhouse, which he said he regarded with a proprietary eye. It
always afforded him a subject for conversation when his prospects
seemed rather poorer than usual. It was, at any rate, he declared,
very handy for him when he became unable to do more work. No doubt
this was his humour, but there was something in this talk which was
more than half serious. He always liked to speak of the gloomy side
of things, and I possess many letters of his which end with
references to the workhouse, or to some impending, black disaster.
In one he said: "I wish I could come up, but am too low in health and
spirits to move at present. A cold clings about me, and the future
looks dark." Again he said: "No, I shall never speak of my work. It
has become a weariness and toil--nothing more." And again: "It is a
bad, bad business, that of life at present." And yet once more: "It
is idle to talk about occupation--by now I have entered on the last
stage of life's journey." This was by no means when he had come
towards the end of his life. However, the workhouse does come up,
even at the end, in a letter written about two months before his
death. He wrote to me: "I have been turning the pages with great
pleasure, to keep my thoughts from the workhouse." Those who did not
know him would not credit him with the courage of desperation which
he really possessed, if they saw his letters and knew nothing more of
the man.