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 cartographers, 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 parts 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 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 something 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
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
believe 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 friendship. 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 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, however 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 something 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 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 English, 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 English "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 something 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 have been a pure child of books, for as
soon as he got beyond the pale of his own grim surroundings, 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 All 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 though it were
but the Will to Live of Schopenhauer, the one philosopher he
sometimes read. I myself used to think that it was perhaps his
native sensuousness which kept him alive in spite of all his misery.
No man ever lived who enjoyed things that were even remotely
enjoyable more acutely than himself, though I think his general
attitude towards life was like his attitude towards people and the
world. For so many good men Jehovah would have spared the Cities of
the Plains. So in a certain sense the few good folk that he
perceived in any given class made him endure the others that he
hated, while he painted those he loved against their dingy and
dreadful background. The motto on the original title-page of "The
Under World" was a quotation from a speech by Renan delivered at the
Académie Française in 1889: "La peinture d'un fumier peut être
justifiée pourvu qu'il y pousse une belle fleur; sans cela, le fumier
n'est que repoussant." The few beautiful flowers of the world for
Henry Maitland were those who hated their surroundings and desired
vainly to grow out of them. Such he pitied, hopeless as he believed
their position, and vain as he knew to be their aspirations. In a
way all this was nothing but translated self-pity. Had he been more
fortunate in his youth I do not believe he would have ever turned his
attention in any way towards social affairs, in which he took no
native interest. His natural sympathy was only for those whom he
could imagine to be his mental fellows. Almost every sympathetic
character in all his best books was for him like the starling in the
cage of Sterne--the starling that cried, "I can't get out! I can't
get out!" Among the subjects that he refused to speak of or to
discuss was one which for a long time greatly interested me, and
interests me still--I refer to Socialism. But then Socialism, after
all, is nothing but a more or less definitive view of a definite
organisation with perfectly recognised ends, and he saw no
possibility of any organisation doing away with the things he
loathed. That is to say, he was truly hopeless, most truly
pessimistic. He was a sensuous and not a scientific thinker, and to
get on with him for any length of time it was necessary for me to
suppress three-quarters of the things I wished to speak about. He
was a strange egoist, though truly the hateful world was not his own.
It appeared to me that he prayed, or strove, for the power to ignore
it. It is for this reason that it seems to me now that all his
so-called social work and analysis were in the nature of an alien
_tour de force_. He bent his intellect in that direction, and
succeeded even against his nature. He who desired to be a Bentley or
a Porson wrote bitterly about the slums of Tottenham Court Road.
With Porson he damned the nature of things, and wrote beautifully
about them. I remember on one occasion telling him of a piece of
script in the handwriting of the great surgeon, John Hunter, which
ran: "Damn civilisation! It makes cats eat their kittens, sows eat
their young, and women send their children out to nurse." I think
that gave him more appreciation of science than anything he had ever
heard. For it looked back into the past, and for Henry Maitland the
past was the age of gold. In life, as he had to live it, it was
impossible to ignore the horrors of the present time. He found it
easier to ignore the horrors of the past, and out of ancient history
he made his great romance, which, truly, he never wrote.
It is a curious thing that a man who was thus so essentially romantic
should have been mistaken, not without great reason, for a realist.
In one sense he was a realist, but this was the fatal result of his
nature and his circumstances. Had he lived in happier surroundings,
still writing fiction, I am assured it would have been romance. And
yet, curiously enough, I doubt if any of his ideas concerning women
were at all romantic. His disaster with his first wife was due to
early and unhappily awakened sex feeling, but I think he believed
that his marrying her was due to his desire to save somebody whom he
considered to be naturally a beautiful character from the dunghill in
which he found her. This poor girl was his 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 wholly
convinced, was a thing he never did, though I possess one poem which
implies the possible occurrence of such a passing liaison. There
was, however, another incident in his life which occurred not long
before I went to America. He was then living in one room in the
house of a journeyman bookbinder. On several occasions when I
visited him there I saw his landlady, a young and not unpleasing
woman, who seemed to take great interest in him, and did her very
best to make him comfortable in narrow, almost impossible,
surroundings. Her husband, a man a great deal older than herself,
drank, and not infrequently ill-treated her. This was not wholly
Maitland's story, for I saw the man myself, as well as his wife. It
appears she went for sympathy to her lodger, and he told her
something of his own troubles. Their common griefs threw them
together. She was obviously of more than the usual intelligence of
her class. It appeared that she desired to learn French, or made
Maitland believe so; my own view being that she desired his company.
The result of this was only natural, and soon afterwards Maitland was
obliged to leave the house owing to the jealousy of her husband, who
for many years had already been suspicious of her without any cause.
But this affair was only passing. He took other rooms, and so far as
I know never saw her again.
While I was in America he was living at 7K, and in that gloomy flat
there was an affair of another order, an incident not without many
parallels in the lives of poor artists and writers. It seems that a
certain lady not without importance in society, the wife of a rich
husband, wrote to him about one of his books, and having got into
correspondence with him allowed her curiosity to overcome her
discretion. She visited him very often in his chambers, and though
he told me but little I gathered what the result was. Oddly enough,
by a curious chain of reasoning and coincidence, I afterwards
discovered this woman's name, which I shall, of course, suppress. So
far as I am aware these were the only two romantic or quasi-romantic
incidents in Maitland's life until towards the end of it. When I
came back from America he certainly had no mistress, and beyond an
occasional visit from the sons of Harold Edgeworth, he practically
received no one but myself. His poverty forbade him entertaining any
but one of his fellows who was as poor as he was, and the few
acquaintances he had once met in better surroundings than his own
gradually drifted away from him, or died as Cotter Morison died.
Although he spoke so very little about these matters of personal
loneliness and deprivation I was yet conscious from the general tenor
of his writing and an occasional dropped word, how bitterly he felt
it personally. It had rejoiced my unregenerate heart in America to
learn that he was not entirely without feminine companionship at a
time when the horror of his life was only partially mitigated by the
preference of his mad and wretched wife for the dens and slums of the
New Cut. This woman of the upper classes had come to him like a
star, and had been a lamp in his darkness. I wonder if she still
retains within her heart some memories of those hours.
I have not been able to discover whether it is true, as has been
said, that some of Maitland's ancestors were originally German. He
himself thought this was so, without having anything definite that I
remember to go upon. If it were true I wonder whether it was his
Teutonic ancestry which made him turn with a certain joy to the
German ideal of woman, that of the haus-frau. If little or nothing
were known about him, or only so much as those know who have already
written of him, it might, in some ways, be possible to reconstruct
him by a process of deductive analysis, by what the school logicians
call the _regressus a principiatis ad principia_. This is always a
fascinating mental exercise, and indeed I think, with a very little
light on Maitland's life, it should not have been difficult for some
to build up a picture not unlike the man. For instance, no one with
a gleam of intelligence, whether a critic or not, could read some
portions of the chapter in "Victorian Novelists" on "Women and
Dickens" without coming to the inevitable conclusion that Maitland's
fortune with regard to the women with whom he had been thrown in
contact must have been most lamentably unfortunate. Although Dickens
drew certain offensive women with almost unequalled power, he treats
them so that one becomes oblivious of their very offensiveness, as
Maitland points out. Maitland's own commentary on such women is ten
thousand times more bitter, and it is _felt_, not observed, as in
Dickens' books. He calls them "these remarkable creatures," and
declares they belong mostly to one rank of life, the lower middle
class. "In general their circumstances are comfortable .... nothing
is asked of them but a quiet and amiable discharge of their household
duties; they are treated by their male kindred with great, often with
extraordinary consideration. Yet their characteristic is acidity of
temper and boundless licence of querulous or insulting talk. The
real business of their lives is to make all about them as
uncomfortable as they can. Invariably, they are unintelligent and
untaught; very often they are fragrantly imbecile. Their very
virtues (if such persons can be said to have any) become a scourge.
In the highways and byways of life, by the fireside, and in the
bed-chamber, their voices shrill upon the terrified ear." He adds
that no historical investigation is needed to ascertain the
truthfulness of these presentments. Indeed Maitland required no
historical investigation, he had his personal experience to go upon;
but this, indeed, is obvious. Nevertheless one cannot help feeling
in reading this appalling indictment, that something might be said
upon the other side, and that Maitland's attitude was so essentially
male as to vitiate many of his conclusions.
A few pages further on in this book he says: "Another man, obtaining
his release from these depths, would have turned away in loathing;
Dickens found therein matter for his mirth, material for his art."
But Maitland knew that Dickens had not suffered in the way he himself
had done. Thus it was that he rejoiced in the punishment which Mrs.
Joe Gargery received. Maitland writes: "Mrs. Joe Gargery shall be
brought to quietness; but how? By a half-murderous blow on the back
of her head, from which she will never recover. Dickens understood
by this time that there is no other efficacious way with these
ornaments of their sex."
Having spoken of Dickens it may be as well to dispose of him, with
regard to Maitland, in this particular chapter. It seems to be
commonly thought that Maitland wrote his book about the Victorian
novelists not only with the sympathy which he expressed, but with
considerable joy in the actual work. This is not true, for he
regarded it essentially as a pot-boiler, and did it purely for the
money. By some strange kink in his mind he chose to do it in Italy,
far from any reference library. He wrote: "My little novelist book
has to be written before Christmas, and to do this I must get settled
at the earliest possible date in a quiet north Italian town. I think
I shall choose Siena." On what principle he decided to choose a
quiet north Italian town to write a book about Victorian novelists I
have never been able to determine. It was certainly a very curious
proceeding, especially as he had no overwhelming love of North Italy,
which was for him the Italy of the Renaissance. As I have said, he
actually disliked the work, and had no desire to do it, well as it
was done. It is, however, curious, to me, in considering this book,
to find that neither he nor any other critic of Dickens that I have
ever read seems to give a satisfactory explanation of the great, and
at times overwhelming, attraction that Dickens has for many. And yet
on more than one occasion I discussed Dickens with him, and in a
great measure he agreed with a theory I put forth with some
confidence. I think it still worth considering. For me the great
charm of Dickens lies not wholly in his humour or even greatly in his
humour. It is not found in his characterisation, nor in his
underlying philosophy of revolt, although almost every writer of
consequence is a revolutionist. It results purely and simply from
what the critics of the allied art of painting describe as "quality."
This is a word exceedingly difficult to define. It implies more or
less the characteristic way in which paint is put upon the canvas. A
picture may be practically worthless from the point of view of
subject or composition, it may even be comparatively poor in
colouring, and yet it may have an extreme interest of surface. One
finds, I think, the same thing in Dickens' writings. His page is
full. It is fuller than the page of any other English writer. There
are, so to speak, on any given page by any man a certain number of
intellectual and emotional stimuli. Dickens' page is full of these
stimuli to a most extreme degree. It is like a small mosaic, and yet
clear. It has cross meanings, cross lights, reflections,
suggestions. Compare a page of Dickens with a page, say, of
Thackeray. Take a pencil and write down the number of mental
suggestions given by a sentence of Thackeray. Take, again, a
sentence of Dickens, and see how many more there are to be found. It
is this tremendous and overflowing fulness which really constitutes
Dickens' great and peculiar power.
But all this is anticipation. Not yet was he to write of Dickens,
Thackeray, and the Brontës, for much was to befall him before he went
to Italy again. He was once more alone, and I think I knew that this
loneliness would not last for long. I have often regretted that I
did not foresee what I might have foreseen if I had considered the
man and his circumstances with the same fulness which comes to one in
later years after Fate has wrought itself out. Had I known all that
I might have known, or done all that I might have done, I could
perhaps have saved him from something even worse than his first
marriage. Yet, after all, I was a poor and busy man, and while
living in Chelsea had many companions, some of them men who have now
made a great name in the world of Art. The very nature of Maitland
and his work, the dreadful concentration he required to do something
which was, as I insist again, alien from his true nature, forbade my
seeing him very often, or even often enough to gather from his
reticence what was really in his mind. Had I gone to see him without
any warning, it would, I knew, have utterly destroyed his whole day's
work. But this solitude, this enforced and appalling loneliness,
which seemed to him necessary for work if he was to live, ate into
him deeply. It destroyed his nerve and what judgment he ever had
which, heaven knows, was little enough. What it means to some men to
live in such solitude only those who know can tell, and they never
tell. To Maitland, with his sensual and sensuous nature, it was most
utter damnation.
By now he had come out of the pit of his first marriage, and
gradually the horrors he had passed through became dim to his eyes.
They were like a badly toned photograph, and faded. I did foresee
that something would happen sooner or later to alter the way in which
he lived, but I know I did not foresee, and could not have foreseen
or imagined what was actually coming, for no one could have
prophesied it. It was absurd, impossible, monstrous, and almost
bathos. And yet it fits in with the character of the man as it had
been distorted by circumstance. One Sunday when I visited him he
told me, with a strange mixture of abruptness and hesitation, that he
had made the acquaintance of a girl in the Marylebone road.
Naturally enough I thought at first that his resolution and his
habits had broken down and that he had picked up some prostitute of
the neighbourhood. But it turned out that the girl was
"respectable." He said to me: "I could stand it no longer, so I
rushed out and spoke to the very first woman I came across." It was
an unhappy inspiration of the desperate, and was the first act of a
prolonged drama of pain and misery. It took me some time and many
questions to find out what this meant, and what it was to lead to,
but presently he replied sullenly that he proposed to marry the girl
if she would marry him. On hearing this, I fell into silence and we
sat for a long time without speaking. Knowing him as I did, it was
yet a great shock to me. For I would rather have seen him in the
physical clutches of the biggest harpy in the Strand--knowing that
such now could not long hold him. I had done my best, as a mere boy,
to prevent him marrying his first wife, and had failed with the most
disastrous results. I now determined to stop this marriage if I
could. I ventured to remind him of the past, and the part I had
played in it when I implored him to have no more to do with Marian
Hilton long before he married her. I told him once more, trying to
renew it in him, of the relief it had been when his first wife died,
but nothing that I could say seemed to move, or even to offend him.
His mind recognised the truth of everything, but his body meant to
have its way. He was quiet, sullen, set--even when I told him that
he would repent it most bitterly. The only thing I could at last get
him to agree to was that he would take no irrevocable step for a week.
I asked him questions about the girl. He admitted that he did not
love her in any sense of the word love. He admitted that she had no
great powers of attraction, that she seemed to possess no
particularly obvious intellect. She had received his advances in the
street in the way that such girls, whose courtship is traditionally
carried on in the open thoroughfare, do receive them. But when he
asked her to visit him in his chambers she replied to that invitation
with all the obvious suspicion of a lower-class girl from whom no sex
secrets were hidden. From the very start the whole affair seemed
hopeless, preposterous, intolerable, and I went away from him in
despair. It was a strange thing that Maitland did not seem to know
what love was. If I have not before this said something about his
essential lack of real passion in his dealings with women it must be
said now. Of course, it is quite obvious that he had a boyish kind
of passion for Marian Hilton, but it was certainly not that kind of
passion which mostly keeps boys innocent. Indeed those calf loves
which afflict youths are at the same time a great help to them, for a
boy is really as naturally coy as any maiden. If by any chance
Maitland, instead of coming into the hands of a poor girl of the
streets of Moorhampton, had fallen in love with some young girl of
decent character and upbringing, his passions would not have been so
fatally roused. I think it was probably the whole root of his
disaster that this should have occurred at all. Possibly it was the
horror and rage and anger connected with this first affair, combined
with the fact that it became actually sensual, which prevented him
having afterwards what one might without priggishness describe as a
pure passion. At any rate I never saw any signs of his being capable
of the overwhelming passion which might under other circumstances
drive a man down to hell, or raise him to heaven. To my mind all his
books betray an extreme lack of this. His characters in all their
love-affairs are essentially too reasonable. A man wishes to marry a
girl, not because he desires her simply and overwhelmingly, but
because she is a fitting person, or the kind of woman of whom he has
been able to build up certain ideas which suit his mind. In fact the
love of George Hardy for Isabel in "The Exile" is somewhat typical of
the whole attitude he had towards affairs of passion. Then again in
"Paternoster Row" there is the suicide of Gifford which throws a very
curious light on Maitland's nature. Apparently Gifford did not
commit suicide because of his failure, or because he was half
starving, it was because he was weakly desirous of a woman like
Anne--not necessarily Anne herself. In Maitland's phrase, he desired
her to complete his manhood, to my mind the most ridiculous way of
putting the affair. It is in this, I think, that Maitland showed his
essential lack of knowledge of the other sex. A man does not
captivate women by going to them and explaining, with more or less
periphrasis, that they are required to complete his manhood, that he
feels a rather frustrate male individual without them. And if he has
these ideas at the back of his head and goes courting, the result is
hardly likely to be successful. Maitland never understood the
passion in the man that sweeps a woman off her feet. One finds this
lack in all his men who live celibate lives. They suffer physically,
or they suffer to a certain degree from loneliness, but one never
feels that only one woman could cure their pain, or alleviate their
desolation. At times Maitland seemed, as it were, to be in love with
the sex but not with the woman. Of course he had a bitter hatred of
the general prejudices of morality, a thing which was only natural to
any one who had lived his life and thought what he thought. It is a
curious thing to note that his favourite poem in the whole English
language was perhaps the least likely one that could be picked out.
This was Browning's "Statue and the Bust," which is certainly of a
teaching not Puritan in its essence. The Puritan ideal Maitland
loathed with a fervour which produced the nearest I have ever seen in
him to actual rage and madness. He roared against it if he did not
scoff. He sometimes quoted the well-known lines from the unknown
Brathwait:
"Where I saw a Puritane 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 7K. He read a great portion of "The Statue and the
Bust" out aloud, and we discussed it afterwards, of course pointing
out to each other with emphasis its actual teaching, its loathing of
futility. It teaches that the two people who loved each other but
never achieved love were two weaklings, who ought to have acted, and
should not have allowed themselves to be conquered by the lordly
husband. Maitland said: "Those people who buy Browning and think
they understand it--oh, if they really knew what he meant they would
pick him up with a pair of tongs, and take him out, and burn him in
their back yards--in their back yards!" It strikes one that
Maitland, in his haste, seemed to imagine that the kind of bourgeois
or bourgeoise whom he imagined thus destroying poor Browning with the
aid of tongs, possessed such things as back yards, and, perhaps,
frequented them on Sunday afternoons. But he had lived for so many
years in houses which had not a garden, or anything but a small, damp
yard behind, that he began to think, possibly, that all houses were
alike. I roared with laughter at his notion of what these prosperous
Puritans would do. I had a picture in my mind of some well-dressed
woman of the upper middle-class bringing out "The Statue and the
Bust" with a pair of tongs, and burning it in some small and horrible
back yard belonging to a house in the slums between Tottenham Court
Road and Fitzroy Square. And yet, although he understood Browning's
sermon against the passive futility of these weak and unfortunate
lovers he could not, I think, have understood wholly, or in anything
but a literary sense the enormous power of passion which Browning
possessed. This lack in him is one of the keys to his character, and
it unlocks much. When I left him after he told me about this new
affair, I went back to my own rooms and sat thinking it over,
wondering if it were possible even now to do anything to save him
from his own nature, and the catastrophe his nature was preparing.
Without having seen the girl I felt sure that it would be a
catastrophe, for I knew him too well. Nevertheless on reflecting
over the matter it did seem to me that there was one possible chance
of saving him from himself. It was a very unlikely thing that I
should succeed, but at any rate I could try.
I have said that we rarely spoke of his early life, and never of what
had happened in Moorhampton. Nevertheless I was, of course, aware
that it dominated the whole of his outlook and all of his thoughts in
any way connected with ordinary social life, especially with regard
to intercourse with those who might know something about his early
career. At this time I do not think that he actually blamed himself
much for what had happened. Men die many times in life and are born
again, and by this time he must have looked on the errant youth who
had been himself as little more than an ancestor. He himself had
died and risen again, and if he was not the man he might have been,
he was certainly not the man he had been. Nevertheless he was
perpetually alive to what other people might possibly think of him.
I believe that the real reason for his almost rigid seclusion from
society was that very natural fear that some brute, and he knew only
too well that there are such brutes, might suddenly and unexpectedly
expose his ancient history. It is true that even in our society in
England, which is not famous all the world over for tact, it was not
very likely to happen. Nevertheless the bare possibility that it
might occur absolutely dominated him. It requires very little
sympathy or understanding of his character to see that this must have
been so. No doubt it was mainly from this cause that he considered
he had no right to approach women of his own class, seeing that he
had declassed himself, without telling the whole truth. But this was
quite impossible for him to do, and I knew it. In some cases it
would have been wise, in some unwise, but Henry Maitland was unable
to do such a thing. The result was this sudden revolt, and the
madness which led him to speak to this girl of the Marylebone Road,
whom I had not yet met but whom I pictured, not inadequately, in my
mind. At the first glance it seemed that nothing could possibly be
done, that the man must be left to "dree his weird," to work out his
fate and accomplish his destiny. And yet I lay awake for a very long
time that night thinking of the whole situation, and I at last
determined to take a step on his behalf which, at any rate, had the
merit of some originality and courage.
Years ago in Moorhampton, when he was a boy, before the great
disaster came, Maitland had visited my uncle's house, and had
obviously pleased every one he met there. He was bright, not bad
looking, very cheerful and enthusiastic, and few that met him did not
like him. Among those whose acquaintance he made at that house were
two of my own cousins. In later years they often spoke of him to me,
even although they had not seen him since he was a boy of seventeen.
I now went to both of them and told them the whole affair in
confidence, speaking quite openly of his character, and the
impossibility he discovered within himself of living in the
desolation which fate had brought upon him. They understood his
character, and were acquainted with his reputation. He was a man of
genius, if not a man of great genius, and occupied a certain position
in literature which would one day, we all felt assured, be still a
greater position. They were obviously exceedingly sorry for him, and
not the less sorry when I told them of the straits in which he
sometimes found himself. Nevertheless it seemed to me, as I
explained to them, that if he had been lucky enough to marry some one
in sympathy with him and his work, some one able to help in a little
way to push him forward on the lines on which he might have attained
success, there was yet great hope for him even in finance, or so I
believed. Then I asked them whether it would not be possible to stop
this proposed outrageous marriage, a thing which seemed to me utterly
unnatural. They were, however, unable to make any suggestion, and
certainly did not follow what was in my mind. Then I opened what I
had to say, and asked them abruptly if it were not possible for one
of them to consider whether she would marry him if the present affair
could be brought decently to an end. They were both educated women,
and knew at least two foreign languages. They were accustomed to
books, and appreciated his work.
No doubt my proposal sounded absurd, unconventional, and perhaps not
a little horrifying. Nevertheless when I have had anything to do in
life I have not been accustomed to let convention stand in my way.
Such marriages have been arranged and have not been unsuccessful.
There was, I thought, a real possibility of such a marriage as I
proposed being anything but a failure. Our conversation ended at
last in both of them undertaking to consider the matter if, after
meeting Maitland again, they still remained of the same mind, and if
he found that such a step was possible. I have often wondered since
whether any situation exactly like this ever occurred before. I own
that I found it somewhat interesting, and when at last I went back to
Maitland I felt entitled to tell him that he could do much better
than marrying an unknown girl of the lower classes whom he had
accosted in the streets in desperation. But he received what I had
to say in a very curious manner. It seemed to depress him
profoundly. Naturally enough, I did not tell him the names of those
who were prepared to make his acquaintance, but I did tell him that I
had been to a lady who had once met him and greatly admired his work,
who would be ready to consider the possibility of her becoming his
wife if on meeting once again they proved sympathetic. He shook his
head grimly, and, after a long silence, he told me that he had not
kept his word, and that he had asked Ada Brent to marry him. He had,
he said, gone too far to withdraw.
There is such a thing in life as the tyranny of honour, and
personally I cared very little for this point of honour when I
thought of his future. It was not as if this girl's affections were
in any way engaged. If they had been I would have kept silence,
bitterly as I regretted the whole affair. She was curious about him,
and that was all. It would do her no harm to lose him, and, indeed,
as the event proved, it would have been better if she had not married
at all. Therefore I begged him to shut up the flat and leave London
at once. I even offered to try and find the money for him to do so.
But, like all weak people, he was peculiarly obstinate, and nothing
that I could urge had the least effect upon him. I have often
thought it was his one great failure in rectitude which occurred at
Moorhampton that made him infinitely more tenacious of doing nothing
which might seem in any way dishonourable, however remotely. I did
not succeed in moving him, with whatever arguments I plied him, and
the only satisfaction I got out of it was the sense that he knew I
was most deeply interested in him, and had done everything, even much
more than might have been expected, to save him from what I thought
must lead to irreparable misery. Certainly the whole incident was
remarkable. There was, perhaps, a little air of curiously polite
comedy about it, and yet it was the prelude to a tragedy.
It was soon after this, in fact it was on the following Sunday, that
I made the acquaintance of the young woman who was to be his second
wife, to bear his children, to torture him for years, to drive him
almost mad, and once more make a financial slave of him. We three
met in the gloomy sitting-room at 7K. My first impression of this
girl was more unfavourable than I had expected. She was the daughter
of a small tradesman but little removed from an artisan, and she
looked it. In the marriage certificate her father is described as a
carver, for what reason I am unable to determine, for I have a very
distinct recollection that Maitland told me he was a bootmaker,
probably even a cobbler. I disliked the young woman at first sight,
and never got over my early impression. From the very beginning it
seemed impossible that she could ever become in any remote degree
what he might justifiably have asked for in a wife. Yet she was not
wholly disagreeable in appearance. She was of medium height and
somewhat dark. She had not, however, the least pretence to such
beauty as one might hope to find even in a slave of the kitchen. She
possessed neither face nor figure, nor a sweet voice, nor any
charm--she was just a female. And this was she that the most
fastidious man in many ways, that I knew, was about to marry. I went
away with a sick heart, for it was nothing less than a frightful
catastrophe, and I had to stand by and see it happen. He married her
on March 20, 1891, and went to live near Exeter.