For many months after he left London I did not see Maitland, although
we continued to correspond, somewhat irregularly. He was exceedingly
reticent as to the results of his marriage, and I did not discover
definitely for some time to what extent it was likely to prove a
failure. Indeed, I had many things to do, and was both financially
and in other matters in a parlous condition. In some ways it was a
relief to me that he should be living in the country, as I always
felt, rightly or wrongly, a certain feeling of responsibility with
regard to him when he was close at hand. Marriage always takes one's
friends away from one, and for a time he was taken from me. But as I
am not anxious to write in great detail about the more sordid facts
of his life, especially when they do not throw light on his
character, I am not disturbed at knowing little of the earlier days
of his second marriage. The results are sufficient, and they will
presently appear. For Maitland remained Maitland, and his character
did not alter now. So I may return for a little while to matters
more connected with his literary life.
I have, I think, before this endeavoured to describe or suggest his
personal appearance, but whenever I think of him I regret deeply that
no painter ever made an adequate portrait of the man. He was
especially interesting-looking, and most obviously lovable and
sympathetic when any of his feelings were roused. His grey eyes were
very bright and intelligent, his features finely cut, and at times he
was almost beautiful; although his skin was not always in such a good
condition as it should have been, and he was always very badly
freckled. For those who have never seen him a photograph published
in a dull literary journal, which is now defunct, is certainly the
most adequate and satisfying presentment of him in existence. On a
close inspection of this photograph it will be observed that he
brushed his hair straight backward from his forehead without any
parting. He had a curious way of dressing his hair, about which he
was very particular. It was very fine hair of a brown colour,
perhaps of a rather mousy tint, and it was never cut except at the
ends at the nape of his neck. Whenever he washed his face he used to
fasten this hair back with an elastic band which he always carried in
his waistcoat pocket. On some occasions, when I have stayed the
night at 7K and seen him at his toilette, this elastic band gave him
a very odd appearance, almost as if he wore, for the time being, a
very odd halo; but as his hair was so long in front it would
otherwise have fallen into the basin of water. He told me that once
in Germany a waiter entered the room while he was washing his face,
and on perceiving this peculiar head-dress betrayed signs of mixed
amusement and alarm. As Maitland said, "I believe he thought I was
mad."
His forehead was high, his head exceedingly well shaped but not
remarkably large. He always wore a moustache. Considering his very
sedentary life his natural physique was extremely good, and he was
capable of walking great distances if he were put to it and was in
condition. Seen nude, he had the figure of a possible athlete. I
used to tell him that he might be an exceedingly strong man if he
cared to take the trouble to become one, but his belief, which is to
be found expressed in one passage of "The Meditations," was that no
one in our times could be at once intellectually and physically at
his best. Indeed, he had in a way a peculiar contempt for mere
strength, and I do not doubt that much of his later bodily weakness
and illness might have been avoided if he had thought more of
exercise and open air.
In no way was he excessive, in spite of his jocular pretence of a
monstrous addiction to "strong waters" as he always called them. He
did love wine, as I have written, but he loved it with discretion,
although not with real knowledge. It was a case of passion and faith
with him. I could imagine that in some previous incarnation--were
there such things as reincarnations--he must have been an Italian
writer of the South he loved so well. A little while ago I spoke of
the strange absence of colour in his rooms. On rereading "The
Meditations," I find some kind of an explanation, or what he
considered an explanation, of this fact, to which I myself drew his
attention. He seemed to imagine that his early acquaintance with his
father's engravings inspired him with a peculiar love of black and
white. More probably the actual truth is that his father's possible
love of colour had never been developed any more than his son's.
His fantastic attempts at times to make one believe that he was a
great drinker, when a bottle of poor and common wine served him and
me for a dinner and made us joyous, were no more true than that he
was a great smoker. He had a prodigious big pot of tobacco in his
rooms in the early days, a pot containing some form of mild returns
which to my barbaric taste suggested nothing so much as hay that had
been stored next some mild tobacco. It was one of my grievances
against him that when I visited his rooms hard up for tobacco, a
thing which frequently occurred in those days, I was almost unable to
use his. But it was always a form of joke with him to pretend that
his habits were monstrously excessive. As I have said, one of his
commonest forms of humour was exaggeration. Many people
misunderstood that his very expressions of despair were all touched
with a grim humour. Nevertheless he and his rooms were grim enough.
On his shelves there was a French book, the title of which I forget,
dealing without any reticence with the lives of the band of young
French writers under the Second Empire, who perished miserably in the
conditions to which they were exposed. This book is a series of
short and bitter biographies, ending for the most part with, "mourut
à l'hôpital," or "brûlait la cervelle." We were by no means for ever
cheerful in these times.
I do not think I have said very much, except by bitter implication,
of his financial position, or what he earned. But his finances were
a part of his general life's tragedy. There is a passage somewhere
at the end of a chapter in "In the Morning" which says: "Put money in
thy purse; and again, put money in thy purse; for, as the world is
ordered, to lack current coin is to lack the privileges of humanity,
and indigence is the death of the soul." I have been speaking wholly
in vain if it is not understood that he was a man extremely difficult
to influence, even for his own good. This was because he was weak,
and his weakness came out with most exceeding force in all his
dealings with publishers and editors. For the most part he was
atrociously paid, but the fact remains that he was paid, and his
perpetual fear was that his books would presently be refused, and
that he would get no one to take them if he remonstrated with those
who were his taskmasters. In such an event he gloomily anticipated,
not so much the workhouse, but once more a cellar off the Tottenham
Court Road, or some low, poverty-stricken post as a private tutor or
the usher of a poor school. Sometimes when we were together he used
to talk with a certain pathetic jocosity, or even jealousy, of
Coleridge's luck in having discovered his amiable patron, Gillman.
He did not imagine that nowadays any Gillmans were to be found, nor
do I think that any Gillman would have found Maitland possible. One
night after we had been talking about Coleridge and Gillman he sat
down and wrote a set of poor enough verses, which are not without
humour, and certainly highly characteristic, that ran as follows:
THE HUMBLE ASPIRATION OF H.M., NOVELIST
"Hoc erat in votis."
Oh could I encounter a Gillman,
Who would board me and lodge me for aye,
With what intellectual skill, man,
My life should be frittered away!
What visions of study methodic
My leisurely hours would beguile!--
I would potter with details prosodic,
I would ponder perfections of style.
I would joke in a vein pessimistic
At all the disasters of earth;
I would trifle with schemes socialistic,
And turn over matters for mirth.
From the quiddities quaint of Quintilian
I would flit to the latest critiques;--
I would visit the London Pavilion,
And magnify lion-comiques.
With the grim ghastly gaze of a Gorgon
I would cut Hendersonian bores--
I would follow the ambulant organ
That jingles at publicans' doors.
In the odorous alleys of Wapping
I would saunter on evenings serene;
When the dews of the Sabbath were dropping
You would find me on Clerkenwell Green.
At the Hall Scientific of Bradlaugh
I would revel in atheist rant,
Or enjoy an attack on some bad law
By the notable Mrs. Besant.
I would never omit an oration
Of Cunninghame Graham or Burns;
And the Army miscalled of Salvation
Should furnish me frolic by turns.
Perchance I would muse o'er a mystic;
Perchance I would booze at a bar;
And when in the mind journalistic
I would read the "Pall Mall" and the "Star."
Never more would I toil with my quill, man,
Or plead for the publishers' pay.--
Oh where and O where is the Gillman,
Who will lodge me and board me for aye?
Now as to his actual earnings. His first book "Children of the
Dawn," was published by Hamerton's. So far as I am aware it brought
him in nothing. The book, naturally enough, was a dead failure;
nobody perceived its promise, and it never sold. I do not think he
received a penny on account for it. He got little more for "Outside
the Pale," which was published in 1884, the year I went to America,
and was dedicated to me, as the initials J.C.H. on the dedication
page of the first edition testify. At that time I still retained in
signature my second initial. This book was published by Andrews and
Company, and it was through it that he first made acquaintance in a
business way with George Meredith, then quite a poor man, and working
for the firm as a reader just before he went to Chapman and Hall.
In "Outside the Pale," as a manuscript there was a chapter, or part
of a chapter, of a curiously romantic kind. It was some such theme
as that which I myself treated in a romantic story called "The
Purification." Hilda Moon, the idealised heroine of the streets,
washed herself pure of her sins in the sea at midnight, if I remember
the incident rightly, for I never actually read it. It appears that
George Meredith was much taken with the book, but found his sense of
fitness outraged by the introduction of this highly romantic
incident. It seemed out of tone with the remainder of the book and
the way in which it was written. He begged Maitland to eliminate it.
Now as a rule Maitland, being a young writer, naturally objected to
altering anything, but he knew that Meredith was right. At any rate,
even at that period, the older man had had such an enormous
experience that Maitland accepted his opinion and acted upon it. He
told me that George Meredith came downstairs with him into the
street, and standing on the doorstep once more reiterated his advice
as to this particular passage. He said in the peculiar way so
characteristic of him, "My dear sir, I beg you to believe, it made me
_shiver_!" That passage is missing in the published book.
"Outside the Pale" had a kind of _succès d'estime_. Certain people
read it, and certain people liked it. It was something almost fresh
in English. Nevertheless he made little or nothing out of it. Few,
indeed, were those who made money out of Andrews and Company at that
time. The business was run by Harry Andrews, known in the trade as
"the liar," a man who notoriously never spoke the truth if a lie
would bring him in a penny. I afterwards published a book with the
same firm, and had to deal with the same man. After "Outside the
Pale" came "Isabel," which, as I have said, was obviously written
under the influence of Tourgeniev. So far as I am aware this
influence has not been noted, even by so acute a critic as Thomas
Sackville, but I myself was at that time a great reader of
Tourgeniev, partly owing to Maitland's recommendation and insistence
upon the man, and I recognised his influence at once. Maitland
openly acknowledged it, a thing no writer does without very strong
reason. This book, of course, was not a success. That, I believe,
was the last work he published with Andrews and Company. So far as
he was concerned the firm had not been a success. He was still
compelled to earn his bread and cheese and rent by teaching.
Although Tourgeniev was the earliest great influence upon Maitland,
his influence was very largely that of form. So far as feeling was
concerned his god for many years was undoubtedly Dostoievsky. That
Russian writer himself suffered and had been down into the depths
like the modern writer Gorki, which was what appealed to Maitland.
Indeed he says somewhere: "Dostoievsky, a poor and suffering man,
gives us with immense power his own view of penury and wretchedness."
It was Maitland who first introduced "Crime and Punishment," to me.
There is no doubt, when one comes to think of it seriously, a certain
likeness between the modern Russian school and Maitland's work, and
that likeness is perhaps founded on something deeper than mere
community of subject which shows itself here and there. Perhaps
there is something essentially Slav-like in Maitland's attitude to
life. He was a dreamer, rebellious and unable. If, indeed, his
ancestry was partly Teutonic, he might have been originally as much
Slav as German.
In 1886, while I was still in America, he began "The Mob." At that
time, just when he had almost done the first two volumes, there
occurred the Trafalgar Square Riots, in which John Burns, Hyndman,
and Henry Hyde Champion, were concerned. Fool as Maitland was about
his own affairs, he yet saw that it was a wonderful coincidence from
his point of view that he should have been dealing with labour
matters and the nature of the mob at this juncture. Some rare
inspiration or suggestion led him to rush down with the first two
volumes to Messrs. Miller and Company, where they were seen by John
Glass, who said to him, "Give us the rest at once and we will begin
printing it now." He went home and wrote the third volume in a
fortnight while the other two volumes were in the press. This book
was published anonymously, as it was thought, naturally enough, that
this would give it a greater chance of success. It might reasonably
be attributed to any one, and Maitland's name at that time, or indeed
at any time afterwards, was very little help towards financial
success. Now I am of opinion, speaking from memory, that this book
was bought out and out by the publishing firm for fifty pounds. To a
young writer who had never made so much fifty pounds was a large sum.
In Maitland's exaggerated parlance it was "gross and riotous wealth."
Having succeeded in getting hold of a good firm of notable and
well-known publishers, he dreaded leaving them, even though he very
soon discovered that fifty pounds for a long three-volume novel was
most miserable pay. That he wrote books rapidly at times was no
guarantee that he would always write them as rapidly. For once in
his life he had written a whole volume in a fortnight, but it might
just as well take him many months. There are, indeed, very few of
his books of which most of the first volume was not destroyed,
rewritten, and sometimes destroyed and again rewritten. Nevertheless
he discovered a tremendous reluctance to ask for better terms. It
was not only his fear of returning to the old irremediable poverty
which made him dread leaving a firm who were not all they might have
been, but he was cursed with a most unnecessary tenderness for them.
He actually dreaded hurting the feelings of a publishing firm which
had naturally all the qualities and defects of a corporation. The
reason that he did at last leave this particular firm was rather
curious. It shows that what many might think a mere coincidence may
prejudice a fair man's mind.
As I have said, he had been in the habit of selling his books
outright for fifty pounds. After this had gone on for many books I
suggested to him, as everything he wrote went into several editions
under the skilful management of the firm, that it might be as well to
sell them the first edition only and ask for a royalty on the
succeeding ones. Now this would never have occurred to him, and he
owned that it was a good idea. So when "The Flower," was finished he
sold the first edition for forty pounds, and arranged for a
percentage on succeeding editions. He went on with the next book at
once. Now as it happened, curiously enough, there was no second
edition of "The Flower" called for, and this so disheartened poor
Maitland that he sold his two next novels outright for the usual sum.
One day when I was with him he spoke of the bad luck of "The Flower,"
which seemed to him almost inexplicable. It was so very unlucky that
it had not done well, for the loss of the extra ten pounds was not
easy for him to get over in his perpetual and grinding poverty. When
we had discussed the matter he determined to ask the firm what they
would give him for all further rights in the book. He did this, and
they were kind enough to pay the sum of ten pounds for them, making
up the old price of fifty pounds for the whole book. Then, by one of
those chances which only business men are capable of thoroughly
appreciating, a demand suddenly sprang up for the story and the
publishers were enabled to bring out a new edition at once. Some
time later it went into a third edition, and, I believe, even into a
fourth. Now it will hardly be credited that Maitland was very sore
about this, for he was usually a very just man; and when I suggested,
for the hundredth time but now at the psychological moment, that the
firm of Bent and Butler who were then publishing for me, might give
him very good terms, he actually had the courage to leave his own
publishers, and never went back to them.
I have insisted time and again upon Maitland's weakness and his
inability to move. Nothing, I believe, but a sense of rankling
injustice would have made him move. I had been trying for three
years to get him to go to my publishing friends, and I have heard his
conduct in the matter described as obstinacy. But to speak truly it
was sheer weakness and nervousness. The older firm at any rate gave
him fifty pounds for a book, and they were wealthy people, likely to
last. My own friends were new men, and although they gave him a
hundred pounds on account of increasing royalties, it was conceivably
possible that they might be a failure and presently go out of
business. His notion was that the firm he had left would then refuse
to have anything more to do with him, that he would get no other firm
to publish his work, and that he would be thrown back into the ditch
from which he had crawled with so much difficulty. It is an odd
comment on himself where he makes one man say to another in
"Paternoster Row": "You are the kind of man who is roused by
necessity. I am overcome by it. My nature is feeble and luxurious.
I never in my life encountered and overcame a practical difficulty."
He spoke afterwards somewhat too bitterly of his earlier publishing
experiences, and was never tired of quoting Mrs. Gaskell to show how
Charlotte Brontë had fared.
In "The Meditations" he says: "Think of that grey, pinched life, the
latter years of which would have been so brightened had Charlotte
Brontë received but, let us say, one-third of what, in the same space
of time, the publisher gained by her books. I know all about this;
alas! no man better." There was no subject on which he was more
bitterly vocal. Mr. Jones-Brown, the senior partner of Messrs.
Miller and Company, I knew myself, for after I wrote "The Wake of the
Sun," it was read by Glass and sold to them for fifty pounds. When
this bargain was finally struck Mr. Jones-Brown said to me: "Now, Mr.
H., as the business is all done, would you mind telling me quite
frankly to what extent this book of yours is true?" I replied: "It
is as true in every detail as it can possibly be." "Then you mean to
say," he asked, "that you actually did starve as you relate?" I
said: "Certainly I did, and I might have made it a deal blacker if I
had chosen." He fell into a momentary silent reverie and shaking his
head, murmured: "Ah, hunger is a dreadful thing;--I once went without
dinner myself!" This was a favourite story of Henry Maitland's. It
was so characteristic of the class he chiefly loathed. Those who
have gathered by now what his satiric and ironic tendencies were, can
imagine his bitter, and at the same time uproariously jocular
comments on such a statement. For he was the man who had stood
cursing outside a cookshop without even a penny to satisfy his raging
hunger, as he truly relates under cover of "The Meditations."
It is an odd, and perhaps even remarkable fact, that the man who had
suffered in this way, and was so wonderfully conscious of the
absurdities and monstrosities of our present social system, working
by the pressure of mere economics, should have regarded all kinds of
reform not merely without hope, but with an actual terror. He had
once, as he owned, been touched by Socialism, probably of a purely
academic kind; and yet, when he was afterwards withdrawn from such
stimuli as had influenced him to think for once in terms of
sociology, he went back to his more natural depairing conservative
frame of mind. He lived in the past, and was conscious every day
that something in the past that he loved was dying and must vanish.
No form of future civilisation, whatever it might be, which was
gained by means implying the destruction of what he chiefly loved,
could ever appeal to him. He was not even able to believe that the
gross and partial education of the populace was better than no
education at all, in that it must some day inevitably lead to better
education and a finer type of society. It was for that reason that
he was a Conservative. But he was the kind of Conservative who would
now be repudiated by those who call themselves such, except perhaps
in some belated and befogged country house.
A non-combative Tory seems a contradiction in words, but Maitland's
loathing of disturbance in any form, or of any solution of any
question by means other than the criticism of the Pure Reason, was
most extreme. As for his feelings towards the Empire and all that it
implied, that is best put in a few words he wrote to me about my
novel "In the Sun": "Yes, this is good, but you know that I loathe
the Empire, and that India and Africa are abomination to me." To
anticipate as I tell his story I may quote again on the same point
from a letter written to me in later years when he was in Paris: "I
am very seriously thinking of trying to send my boy to some part of
the world where there is at least a chance of his growing up an
honest farmer without obvious risk of his having to face the slavery
of military service. I would greatly rather never see him again than
foresee his marching in ranks; butchering, or to be butchered."
This implies, of course, as I have said before, that he failed for
ever to grasp the world as it was. He clung passionately and with
revolt to his own ideas of what it ought to be, and protested with a
curious feeble violence against the actual world as he would not see
it. It is a wonder that he did any work at all. If he had had fifty
pounds a year of his own he would have retreated into a cottage and
asphyxiated himself with books.
I have often thought that the most painful thing in all his work was
what he insisted on so often in "Paternoster Row" with regard to the
poor novelist there depicted. The man was always destroying
commenced work. Once he speaks about "writing a page or two of
manuscript daily, with several holocausts to retard him." Within my
certain knowledge this happened scores of times to Maitland. He
destroyed a quarter of a volume, half a volume, three quarters of a
volume, a whole volume, and even more, time and time again. He did
this, to my mind, because he fancied nervously that he must write,
that he had to write, and began without adequate preparation. It
became absolutely tragic, for he commenced work knowing that he would
destroy it, and knowing the pain such destruction would cost him,
when a little rest might have enabled him to begin cheerfully with a
fresh mind. I used to suggest this to him, but it was entirely
useless. He would begin, and destroy, and begin again, and then only
partially satisfy himself at last when he was in a state of financial
desperation, with the ditch or the workhouse in front of him.
In this he never seemed to learn by experience. It was a curious
futility, which was all the odder because he was so peculiarly
conscious of a certain kind of futility exhibited by our friend
Schmidt. He used to write to Maitland at least a dozen times a year
from Potsdam. These letters were all almost invariably read to me.
They afforded Maitland extraordinary amusement and real pleasure, and
yet great pain. Schmidt used to begin the letter with something like
this: "I have been spending the last month or two in deep meditation
on the work which it lies in my power to do. I have now discovered
that I was not meant to write fiction. I am therefore putting it
resolutely aside, and am turning to history, to which I shall
henceforward devote my life." About two months later Maitland would
read me a portion of a letter which began: "I have been much troubled
these last two months, and have been considering my own position and
my own endowments with the greatest interest. I find that I have
been mistaken in thinking that I had any powers which would enable me
to write history in a satisfactory manner. I see that I am
essentially a philosopher. Henceforth I shall devote myself to
philosophy." Again, a month or two after, there would come a letter
from him, making another statement as if he had never made one
before: "I am glad to say that I have at last discovered my own line.
After much thought I am putting aside philosophy. Henceforward I
devote myself to fiction." This kind of thing occurred not once but
twenty or thirty times, and the German for ever wrote as if he had
never written anything before with regard to his own powers and
capabilities. One is reminded forcibly of a similar case in England,
that of J.K. Stephen.
As I have been speaking of "Paternoster Row," it is very interesting
to observe that Maitland was frequently writing most directly of
himself in that book. It is curious that in this, one of his most
successful novels, he should have recognised his own real
limitations. He says that "no native impulse had directed him to
novel-writing. His intellectual temper was that of the student, the
scholar, but strongly blended with a love of independence which had
always made him think with detestation of a teacher's life." He goes
on to speak of the stories which his hero wrote, "scraps of immature
psychology, the last thing a magazine would accept from an unknown
man." It may be that he was thinking here of some of his own short
stories, for which I was truly responsible. Year after year I
suggested that he should do some, as they were, on the whole, the
easiest way of making a little money. Naturally I had amazing
trouble with him because it was a new line, but I returned to the
charge in season and out of season, every Sunday and every week-day
that I saw him, and every time I wrote. We were both perfectly
conscious that he had not the art of writing dramatic short stories
which were essentially popular. There is no doubt that he did not
possess this faculty. When one goes through his shorter work one
discovers few indeed which are stories or properly related to the
_conte_. They are, indeed, often scraps of psychology, sometimes
perhaps a little crude, but the crudeness is mostly in the
construction. They are in fact rather possible passages from a book
than short stories. Nevertheless he did fairly well with these when
he worked with an agent, which he did finally and at last on
continued pressure from me. I notice, however, that in his published
volumes of short stories there are several missing which I should
like to see again. I do not know whether they are good, but two or
three that I remember vaguely were published, I believe, in the old
"Temple Bar." One was a story about a donkey, which I entirely
forget, and another was called "Mr. Why." It was about a poor man,
not wholly sane, who lived in one room and left all that that room
contained to some one else upon his death. On casual search it
seemed that the room contained nothing, but the heir or heiress
discovered at last on the top of an old cupboard Why's name written
large in piled half-crowns.
It may have been noticed by some that he spoke in the little
"Gillman" set of verses which I have quoted, of "Hendersonian bores."
This perhaps requires comment. For one who loved his Rabelais and
the free-spoken classics of our own tongue, Maitland had an extreme
purity of thought and speech, a thing which one might not, in some
ways, have looked for. No one, I think, would have dared to tell him
a gross story, which did not possess remarkable wit or literary
merit, more than once. His reception of such tales was never
cordial, and I remember his peculiar and astounding indignation at
one incident. Somehow or another he had become acquainted with an
East End clergyman named Henderson. This Henderson had, I believe,
read "The Under World," or one of the books dealing with the kind of
parishioner that he was acquainted with, and had written to Maitland.
In a way they became friends, or at any rate acquaintances, for the
clergyman too was a peculiarly lonely man. He occasionally came to
7K, and I myself met him there. He was a man wholly misplaced, in
fact he was an absolute atheist. Still, he had a cure of souls
somewhere the other side of the Tower, and laboured, as I understood,
not unfaithfully. He frequently discussed his mental point of view
with Maitland and often used to write to him. By some native kink in
his mind he used to put into these letters indecent words. I suppose
he thought it was a mere outspoken literary habit. As a matter of
fact this enraged Maitland so furiously that he brought the letters
to me, and showing them demanded my opinion as to what he should do.
He said: "This kind of conduct is outrageous! What am I to do about
it?" Now, it never occurred to Maitland in a matter like this, or
indeed in any matter, to be absolutely outspoken and straightforward.
He was always so afraid of hurting people's feelings. I said: "It is
perfectly obvious what to do. My good man, if you don't like it,
write and tell him that you don't." This was to him a perfectly
impossible solution of a very great difficulty. How it was solved I
do not exactly remember, but I do know that we afterwards saw very
little of Mr. Henderson, who is embalmed, like a poor fly, in the
"Gillman" poem.
It was characteristic, and one of the causes of his continued
disastrous troubles, that Maitland was incapable of being abruptly or
strenuously straightforward. A direct "No," or "This shall not be
done," seemed to him, no doubt, to invite argument and struggle, the
one thing he invariably procured for himself by invariably avoiding
it.
"Paternoster Row," was written, if I remember rightly, partly in
1890, and finished in 1891, in which year it was published. It is an
odd thing to think of that he was married to his second wife in March
1891, shortly before this book came out. In the third volume there
is practically a strange and bitter, and very remarkable, forecast of
the result of that marriage, showing that whilst Maitland's instincts
and impulses ran away with him, his intellect was yet clear and cold.
It is the passage where the hero suggests that he should have married
some simple, kind-hearted work-girl. He says, "We should have lived
in a couple of poor rooms somewhere, and--we should have loved each
other." Whereupon Gifford--here Maitland's intellect--exclaims upon
him for a shameless idealist, and sketches, most truly the likely
issue of such a marriage, given Maitland or Reardon. He says: "To
begin with, the girl would have married you in firm persuasion that
you were a 'gentleman' in temporary difficulties, and that before
long you would have plenty of money to dispose of. Disappointed in
this hope, she would have grown sharp-tempered, querulous, selfish.
All your endeavours to make her understand you would only have
resulted in widening the impassable gulf. She would have
misconstrued your every sentence, found food for suspicion in every
harmless joke, tormented you with the vulgarest forms of jealousy.
The effect upon your nature would have been degrading." Never was
anything more true.