What dismal catastrophe or prolonged domestic uproar led to the final
end of his married life in 1897 I do not know. Nor have I cared to
inquire very curiously. The fact remains, and it was inevitable.
Towards the end of the summer he made up his mind to go to Italy in
September. He wrote to me: "All work in England is at an end for me
just now. I shall be away till next spring--looking forward with
immense delight to solitude. Of course I have a great deal to do as
soon as I can settle, which I think will be at Siena first." As a
matter of fact the very next letter of his which I possess came to me
from Siena. He said: "I am so confoundedly hard at work upon the
Novelists book that I find it very difficult to write my letters.
Thank heaven, more than half is done. I shall go south about the
tenth of November. It is dull here, and I should not stay for the
pleasure of it. You know that I do not care much for Tuscany. The
landscape is never striking about here, and one does not get the
glorious colour of the south." So one sees how Italy had awakened
his colour sense. As I have said, it was after his first visit to
Italy that I noted, both in his books and his conversation, an acute
awakening passion for colour. I think it grew in him to the end of
his life. He ended this last letter to me with: "Well, well, let us
get as soon as possible into Magna Graecia and the old dead world."
I said some time ago that I had finished all I had to write about the
Victorian novelists, and yet I find there is something still to say
of Dickens, and it is not against the plan of such a rambling book as
this to put it down here and now. When he went to Siena to write his
book of criticism it seemed to me a very odd choice of a place for
such a piece of work, and indeed I wondered at his undertaking it at
any price. It is quite obvious to all those who really understand
his attitude towards criticism of modern things that great as his
interest was in Dickens it would never have impelled him to write a
strong, rough, critical book mostly about him had it not been for the
necessity of making money. Indeed he expressed so much to me, and I
find again in a letter that he wrote to Mrs. Rivers, with whom he was
now on very friendly terms, "I have made a good beginning with my
critical book, and long to have done with it, for of course it is an
alien subject." No doubt there are at least two classes of
Maitland's readers, those who understand the man and love his really
characteristic work, and those who have no understanding of him at
all, or any deep appreciation, but probably profess a great
admiration for this book which they judge by the part on Dickens. I
think that Andrew Lang was one of these, judging from a criticism
that he once wrote on Maitland. I know that I have often heard
people of intelligence express so high an opinion of the "Victorian
Novelists" as to imply a lack of appreciation of his other work. The
study is no doubt written with much skill, and with a good writer's
command of his subject, and command of himself. That is to say, he
manages by skill to make people believe he was sufficiently
interested in his subject to write about it. To speak plainly he
thought it a pure waste of time, except from the mere financial point
of view, just as he did his cutting down of Mayhew's "Life of
Dickens"--which, indeed, he considered a gross outrage, but professed
his inability to refuse the "debauched temptation" of the hundred and
fifty pounds offered him for the work.
It would be untrue if I seemed to suggest that he was not
enthusiastic about Dickens, even more so than I am myself save at
certain times and seasons. For me Dickens is a man for times and
periods. I cannot read him for years, and then I read him all. What
I do mean is that Maitland's love of this author, or of Thackeray,
say, would never have impelled him to write. Yet there is much in
the book which is of great interest, if it were only as matter of
comment on Maitland's own self. The other day I came across one
sentence which struck me curiously. It was where Maitland asked the
reader to imagine Charles Dickens occupied in the blacking warehouse
for ten years. He said: "Picture him striving vainly to find
utterance for the thoughts that were in him, refused the society of
any but boors and rascals, making perhaps futile attempts to succeed
as an actor, and in full manhood measuring the abyss which sundered
him from all he had hoped." When I came to the passage I put the
book down and pondered for a while, knowing well that as Maitland
wrote these words he was thinking even more of himself than of
Dickens, and knowing that what was not true of his subject was most
bitterly true of the writer. There is another passage somewhere in
the book in which he says that Dickens could not have struggled for
long years against lack of appreciation. This he rightly puts down
to Dickens' essentially dramatic leanings. The man needed immediate
applause. But again Maitland was thinking of himself, for he had
indeed struggled many years without any appreciation save that of one
or two friends and some rare birds among the public. I sometimes
think that one of Maitland's great attractions to Dickens lay in the
fact, which he himself mentions and enlarges on, that Dickens treated
of the lower middle class and the class immediately beneath it. This
is where the great novelist was at his best, and in the same way
these were the only classes that Maitland really knew well. There is
in several things a curious likeness between Dickens and Maitland,
though it lies not on the surface. He says that Dickens never had
any command of a situation although he was so very strong in
incident. This was also a great weakness of Henry Maitland. It
rarely happens that he works out a powerful and dramatic situation to
its final limits, though sometimes he does succeed in doing so. This
failure in dealing with great situations is peculiarly characteristic
of most English novelists. I have frequently noticed in otherwise
admirable books by men of very considerable abilities and
attainments, with tolerable command of their own language, that they
have on every occasion shirked the great dramatic scene just when it
was expected and needed. Perhaps this is due to the peculiar
_mauvaise honte_ of the English mind. To write, and yet not to give
oneself away, seems to be the aim of too many writers, though the
great aim of all great writing is to do, or to try to do, what they
avoid. The final analysis of dreadful passion and pain comes,
perhaps, too close to them. They feel the glow but also a sensation
of shame in the great emotions. There are times that Maitland felt
this, though perhaps unconsciously. It is at any rate certain that,
like so many people, he never actually depicted with blood and tears
the frightful situations in which his life was so extraordinarily
full.
It is an interesting passage in this book in which Maitland declares
that great popularity was never yet attained by any one deliberately
writing down to a low ideal. Above all men he knew that the artist
was necessarily sincere, however poor an artist he might be. So
Rousseau in his "Confessions" asserts that nothing really great can
come from an entirely venal pen. I remember Maitland greatly enjoyed
a story I told him about myself. While I was still a
poverty-stricken and struggling writer my father, who had no
knowledge whatever of the artistic temperament, although he had a
very great appreciation of the best literature of the past, came to
me and said seriously: "My boy, if you want money and I know you do,
why do you not write 'Bow Bells Novelettes'? They will give you
fifteen pounds for each of them." I replied to him, not I think
without a tinge of bitterness at being so misunderstood: "My dear
sir, it is as much a matter of natural endowment to be a damned fool
as to be a great genius, and I am neither."
I have said that Maitland was most essentially a conservative, indeed
in many ways a reactionary, if one so passive can be called that. I
think the only actual revolutionary utterance of his mind which
stands on record is in the "Victorian Novelists." It is when he is
speaking of Mr. Casby of the shorn locks. He wrote: "This question
of landlordism should have been treated by Dickens on a larger scale.
It remains one of the curses of English life, and is likely to do so
till the victims of house-owners see their way to cutting, not the
hair, but the throats, of a few selected specimens."
It may seem a hard thing to say, but it is a fact, that any
revolutionary sentiment there was in Maitland was excited, not by any
native liberalism of his mind, or even by his sympathy for the
suffering of others, but came directly out of his own personal
miseries and trials. He had had to do with landlords who refused to
repair their houses, and with houses which he looked upon as the
result of direct and wicked conspiracy between builders and plumbers.
But his words are capable of a wider interpretation than he might
have given them.
If I had indeed been satisfied that this departure of Maitland's to
Italy had meant the end of all the personal troubles of his marriage,
I should have been highly satisfied, and not displeased with any part
I might have taken in bringing about so desirable a result. But I
must say that, knowing him as I did, I had very serious doubts. I
was well aware of what a little pleading might do with him. It was
in fact possible that one plaintive letter from his wife might have
brought him back again. Fortunately it was never written. The woman
was even then practically mad, and though immensely difficult to
manage by those friends, such as Miss Greathead and Miss Kingdon, who
interested themselves in his affairs and did much more for him at
critical times than I had been able to do, she never, I think,
appealed to her husband. But it was extraordinary, before he went to
Italy, to observe the waverings of his mind. When he was keeping his
eldest boy at Mirefields, supplying his wife with money for the house
and living in lodgings at Salcombe, he wrote giving a rough account
of what he might do, or might have to do, and ended up by saying:
"Already, lodgings are telling on my nerves. I almost think I suffer
less even from yells and insults in a house of my own." He even
began to forget "the fifth-rate dabblers in the British gravy," for
which fine phrase T.E. Brown is responsible. Maitland ought to have
known it and did not. It was this perpetual wavering and weakness in
him which perplexed his friends, and would indeed have alienated at
last very many of them had it not been for the enduring charm in all
his weakness. Nevertheless he was now out of England, and those who
knew him were glad to think it was so. He was, perhaps, to have a
better time. Nevertheless, even so, he wrote to his friend Lake:
"Yes, it is true that I am going to glorious scenes, but do not
forget that I go with much anxiety in my mind--anxiety about the
little children, the chances of life and death, &c., &c. It is not
like my Italian travel eight years ago, when--save for cash--I was
independent. I have to make a good two hundred a year apart from my
own living and casual expenses. If I live I think I shall do it--but
there's no occasion for merriment." Yet if it was no occasion for
mere merriment it was an occasion for joy. He knew it well, and so
did those know who understand the description that Maitland gave in
"Paternoster Row," of the sunset at Athens. It is very wonderfully
painted, and as he describes it he makes Gifford say: "Stop, or I
shall clutch you by the throat. I warned you before that I cannot
stand these reminiscences." And this reminds me that when I wrote to
him once from Naples, he replied: "You fill me with envious gloom."
But now, when he had finished his pot-boiler of Siena, he was going
south to Naples, his "most interesting city of the modern world," and
afterwards farther south to the Calabrian Hills, and the old dead
world of Magna Graecia.
As a result of that journey he gave us "Magna Graecia." This book of
itself is a sufficient proof that he was by nature a scholar, an
inhabitant of the very old world, a discoverer of the time of the
Renaissance, a Humanist, a pure man of letters, and not by nature a
writer of novels or romances. Although Maitland's scholarship was
rather wide than deep save in one or two lines of investigation, yet
his feeling for all those matters with which a sympathetic
scholarship can deal was amazingly deep and true. Once in Calabria
and the south he made and would make great discoveries. In spite of
his poverty, which comes out so often in the description of his
conditions upon this journey, he loved everything he found there with
a strange and wonderful and almost pathetic passion. I remember on
his return how he talked to me of the far south, and of his studies
in Cassiodorus. One incident in "Magna Graecia," which is related
somewhat differently from what he himself told me at the time,
pleased him most especially. It was when he met two men and
mentioned the name of Cassiodorus, whereupon they burst out with
amazement, "Cassiodoria, why we know Cassiodoria!" That the name
should be yet familiar to these live men of the south gratified his
historic sense amazingly, and I can well remember how he threw his
head back and shook his long hair with joy, and burst into one of his
most characteristic roars of laughter. It was a simple incident, but
it brought back the past to him.
Of all his books I think I love best "Magna Graecia." I always liked
it much better than "The Meditations of Mark Sumner," and for a
thousand reasons. For one thing it is a wholly true book. In "The
Meditations," he falsified, in the literary sense, very much that he
wrote. As I have said, it needs to be read with a commentary or
guide. But "Magna Graecia" is pure Maitland; it is absolutely
himself. It is, indeed, very nearly the Maitland who might have been
if ill luck had not pursued him from his boyhood. Had he been a
successful man on the lines that fate pointed out to him; had he
succeeded greatly--or nobly, as he would have said--at the
University; had he become a tutor, a don, a notable man among men of
letters, still would he have travelled in southern Italy, and made
his great pilgrimage to the Fonte di Cassiodorio. Till he knew south
Italy his greatest joy had been in books. That he loved books we all
know. There, of a certainty, "The Meditations" is a true witness.
But how much more he loved the past and the remains of Greece and
old, old Italy, "Magna Graecia" proves to us almost with tears.
I have said that Maitland was perhaps not a deep scholar, for
scholarship nowadays must needs be specialised if it is to be deep.
He had his odd prejudices, and hugged them. The hypothesis of Wolf
concerning Homer visibly annoyed him. He preferred to think of the
Iliad and the Odyssey as having been written by one man. This came
out of his love of personality--the great ones of the past were as
gods to him. All works of art, or books, or great events were wholly
theirs, for they made even the world, and the world made them not.
Though I know that he would have loved, in many ways, a book such as
Gilbert Murray's "Rise of the Greek Epic," yet Murray's fatally
decisive analysis of the Homeric legend would have pained him deeply.
On one occasion I remember sending to him, partly as some reasonable
ground for my own scepticism, but more, I think, out of some
mischievous desire to plague him, a cleverly written pamphlet by a
barrister which threw doubts upon the Shakespearean legend. He wrote
to me: "I have read it with great indignation. Confound the
fellow!--he disturbs me." But then he was essentially a
conservative, and he lived in an alien time.