The private life of Henry Maitland: A record dictated by J. H.

by Morley Roberts

CHAPTER I

It is never an easy thing to write the life, or even such a sketch as I propose making, of a friend whom one knew well, and in Henry Maitland's case it is most uncommonly difficult. The usual biographer is content with writing panegyric, and as he must depend for his material, and even sometimes for his eventual remuneration, on the relatives of his subject, he is from the start in a hopeless position, except, it may be, as regards the public side of the life in question. But in the case of a man of letters the personal element is the only real and valuable one, or so it seems to me, and even if I were totally ignorant of Maitland's work I think it would yet be possible for me to do a somewhat lifelike and live sketch of him. I believe, moreover, that it is my duty to do it, although no doubt in some ways it must be painful to those connected with him. Yet soon after his death many came to me desiring me to write his biography. It was an understood thing that of all his friends I knew him best, and was certainly the greatest and chief authority on his career from the Moorhampton College days up to his final break with his second wife. But in 1904 there were many obstacles to my doing this work. His two sons were young. His sisters and his mother were still alive. I say nothing of the wife herself, then being taken care of, or of a third lady of whom I must speak presently. Several people came to me with proposals about a book on Henry Maitland. One of the partners of a big publishing house made me a definite offer for it on behalf of his firm. On the other hand one of his executors, Miss Kingdon, a most kindly and amiable and very able woman employed in a great accountant's office in the city, who had done very much for Henry Maitland in his later life, begged me not to do the book, or if I did it to hold it over until her responsibilities as executrix and trustee for the sons were at an end. But it is now nearly nine years since he died, and I feel that if I do not put down at once what I knew of him it never will be written, and something will be lost, something which has perhaps a little value, even though it is not so great as those could wish who knew and loved Henry Maitland.

There is no doubt many people will accuse me of desiring to use his memory for my own advantage. "My withers are unwrung." Those who speak in this way must have little knowledge of the poor profit to be derived from writing such a book, and the proportion of that profit to the labour employed in it. On three separate occasions I spoke to Maitland about writing his biography, and it was an understood thing between us that if he died before me I was to write his life and tell the whole and absolute truth about him. This he gave me the most definite permission to do. I believe he felt that it might in some ways be of service to humanity for such a book to be written. Only the other day, when I wrote to Miss Kingdon concerning the biography, she answered me: "If I seem lacking in cordiality in this matter do not attribute it to any want of sympathy with you. I am not attempting to dissuade you. Henry Maitland was sent into hell for the purpose of saving souls; perhaps it is a necessary thing that his story should be written by all sorts of people from their different points of view." Once I proposed to him to use his character and career as the chief figure in a long story. He wrote to me, "By all means. Why not?" Had I not the letter in which he said this I should myself almost doubt my own recollection, but it is certain that he knew the value of his own experience, and felt that he might perhaps by his example save some from suffering as he did.

No doubt very much that I say of him will not be true to others. To myself it is true at any rate. We know very little of each other, and after all it is perhaps in biography that one is most acutely conscious of the truth in the pragmatic view of truth. Those things are true in Henry Maitland's life and character which fit in wholly with all my experience of him and make a coherent and likely theory. I used to think I knew him very well, and yet when I remember and reflect it seems to me that I know exceedingly little about him. And yet again, I am certain that of the two people in the world that I was best acquainted with he was one. We go through life believing that we know many, but if we sit down and attempt to draw them we find here and there unrelated facts and many vague incoherencies. We are in a fog about our very dear friend whom but yesterday we were ready to judge and criticise with an air of final knowledge. There is something humiliating in this, and yet how should we, who know so little of ourselves, know even those we love? To my mind, with all his weaknesses, which I shall not extenuate, Maitland was a noble and notable character, and if anything I should write may endure but a little while it is because there is really something of him in my words. I am far more concerned to write about Henry Maitland for those who loved him than for those who loved him not, and I shall be much better pleased if what I do about him takes the shape of an impression rather than of anything like an ordinary biography. Every important and unimportant political fool who dies nowadays is buried under obituary notices and a mausoleum in two volumes—a mausoleum which is, as a rule, about as high a work of art as the angels on tombstones in an early Victorian cemetery. But Maitland, I think, deserves, if not a better, a more sympathetic tribute.

When I left Radford Grammar School my father, being in the Civil Service, was sent to Moorhampton as Surveyor of Taxes, and his family shortly followed him. I continued my own education at Moorhampton College, which was then beginning to earn a high reputation as an educational centre. Some months before I met Maitland personally I knew his reputation was that of an extraordinary young scholar. Even as a boy of sixteen he swept everything before him. There was nobody in the place who could touch him at classical learning, and everybody prophesied the very greatest future for the boy. I met him first in a little hotel not very far from the College where some of us young fellows used to go between the intervals of lectures to play a game of billiards. I remember quite well seeing him sit on a little table swinging his legs, and to this day I can remember somewhat of the impression he made upon me. He was curiously bright, with a very mobile face. He had abundant masses of brown hair combed backwards over his head, grey-blue eyes, a very sympathetic mouth, an extraordinarily well-shaped chin—although perhaps both mouth and chin were a little weak—and a great capacity for talking and laughing.

Henceforth he and I became very firm friends at the College, although we belonged to two entirely different sets. I was supposed to be an extraordinarily rowdy person, and was always getting into trouble both with the authorities and with my fellows, and he was a man who loathed anything like rowdiness, could not fight if he tried, objected even then to the Empire, hated patriotism, and thought about nothing but ancient Greece and Rome, or so it would appear to those who knew him at that time.

I learnt then a little of his early history. Even when he was but a boy of ten or eleven he was recognised as a creature of most brilliant promise. He always believed that he owed most, and perhaps everything, to his father, who must have been a very remarkable man. Henry never spoke about him in later life without emotion and affection. I have often thought since that Maitland felt that most of his disasters sprang from the premature death of his father, whom he loved so tenderly. Indeed the elder man must have been a remarkable figure, a gentle, courtly, and most kindly man, himself born in exile and placed in alien circumstances. Maitland often used to speak, with a catch in his voice, of the way his father read to him. I remember not what books, but they were the classic authors of England; Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Tennyson. Some seem to imagine that the father had what is called a well-stocked library. This was not true, but he had many good books and taught his son to love them. Among these there was one great volume of Hogarth's drawings which came into Henry Maitland's personal possession, only, I think, when he was finally domiciled in a London flat, where he and I often looked at it. It is curious that as a boy Hogarth had a fascination for him. He sometimes copied these drawings, for as a child he had no little skill as a draughtsman. What appealed to him in later days in Hogarth was the power of the man's satire, his painful bitterness, which can only be equalled by the ironies of Swift in another medium. Although personally I admire Hogarth I could never look at him with anything like pleasure or, indeed, without acute discomfort. I remember that Maitland in later years said in his book about the Victorian novelist: "With these faces who would spend hours of leisure? Hogarth copied in the strict sense of the word. He gives us life and we cannot bear it."

Maitland's family came, I think, from Worcester, but something led the elder Maitland to Mirefield's, and there he came in contact with a chemist called Lake, whose business he presently bought. Perhaps the elder Maitland was not a wholly happy man. He was very gentle, but not a person of marked religious feeling. Indeed I think the attitude of the family at that time was that of free thought. From everything that Henry said of his father it always seemed to me that the man had been an alien in the cold Yorkshire town where his son was born. And Maitland knew that had his father lived he would never have been thrown alone into the great city of Moorhampton, "Lord of himself, that heritage of woe." Not all women understand the dangers that their sons may meet in such surroundings, and those who had charge of Henry Maitland's future never understood or recognized them in his youth. But his father would have known. In one chapter of "The Vortex," there is very much of Maitland. It is a curiously wrought picture of a father and his son in which he himself played alternately the part of father and child. I knew his anxieties for his own children, and on reading that chapter one sees them renewed. But in it there was much that was not himself. It was drawn rather from what he believed his father had felt. In "The Vortex" the little boy spends an hour alone with his father just before bedtime, and he calls it "A golden hour, sacred to memories of the world's own childhood."

Maitland went to school in Mirefields and this school has been called a kind of "Dotheboys Hall," which of course is absolutely ridiculous. It was not, in fact, a boarding-school at all, but a day school. The man who ran it was called Hinkson. Maitland said he was an uneducated man, or at any rate uneducated from his point of view in later years, yet he was a person of very remarkable character, and did very good work, taking it all round. A man named Christopher started this school and sold it to Hinkson, who had, I believe, some kind of a degree obtained at Durham. The boys who attended it were good middle class and lower middle class, some the sons of professional men, some the offspring of the richer tradesmen. Upon the whole it was a remarkably good school for that time. Many of the boys actually left the Grammar School at Mirefields to attend it. Henry Maitland always owned that Hinkson took great pains with his scholars, and affirmed that many owed him much. As I said, the general religious air of Maitland's home at that time was one of free thought. I believe the feminine members of the family attended a Unitarian Church, but the father did not go to church at all. One example of this religious attitude of his home came out when Hinkson called on his boys to repeat the collect of the day and Maitland replied with an abrupt negative that they did not do that kind of thing at home. Whereupon Hinkson promptly set him to acquire it, saying sternly that it would do him no harm.

For the most part in those early days the elder Maitland and his son spent Sunday afternoon in the garden belonging to their Mirefields house. Oddly enough this garden was not attached to the dwelling but was a kind of allotment. It has been photographically reproduced by Henry Maitland in the seventh chapter of the first volume of "Morning." Very often Henry Maitland's father read to him in that garden.

One of Maitland's schoolfellows at Hinkson's school was the son of the man from whom his father had bought the druggist's business. The elder Lake was a friend of Barry Sullivan, and theatrically mad. He started plays in which Henry always took some part, though not the prominent part which has been attributed to him by some. Nevertheless he was always interested in plays and had a very dramatic way of reading anything that was capable of dramatic interpretation. He always loved the sound of words, and even when he was a boy of about twelve he took down a German book and read some of it aloud to the younger Lake, who did not know German and said so. Whereupon Maitland shook his fist at him and said: "But Lake, listen, listen, listen—doesn't it sound fine?" This endured through all his life. At this same time he used to read Oliver Wendell Holmes aloud to some of the other boys. This was when he was thirteen. Even then he always mouthed the words and loved their rhythm.

Naturally enough, his father being a poor man, there would have been no opportunity of Henry Maitland's going to Moorhampton and to its great college if he had not obtained some scholarship. This, I think, was the notion that his father had at the time, and the necessity for it became more imperative when his father died. He did obtain this scholarship when he was somewhere about sixteen, and immediately afterwards was sent over to Moorhampton quite alone and put into lodgings there. At his school in Mirefields he had taken every possible prize, and I think it was two exhibitions from the London University which enabled him to go to Moorhampton. The college was a curious institution, one of the earliest endeavours to create a kind of university centre in a great provincial city. We certainly had a very wonderful staff there, especially on the scientific side. Among the men of science at the college were Sir Henry Bissell; Schorstein, the great chemist; Hahn, also a chemist, and Balfour, the physicist. On the classical side were Professor Little and Professor Henry Parker, who were not by any means so eminent as their scientific colleagues. The eminence of our scientific professors did not matter very much from Henry Maitland's point of view, perhaps, for from the day of his birth to the day of his death, he took no interest whatever in science and loathed all forms of speculative thought with a peculiar and almost amusing horror. Mathematics he detested, and if in later years I ever attempted to touch upon metaphysical questions he used to shut up, to use an American phrase, just like a clam. But on the classical side he was much more than merely successful. He took every possible prize that was open to him. In his book "The Exile," there is a picture of a youth on prize day going up to receive prize after prize, and I know that this chapter contains much of what he himself must have felt when I saw him retire to a modest back bench loaded with books bound in calf and tooled in gold.

Of course a college of this description, which was not, properly speaking, a university, could only be regarded, for a boy of his culture, as a stepping-stone to one of the older universities, probably Cambridge, since most of my own friends who did go to the university went there from Moorhampton. I do not think there was a professor or lecturer or a single student in the college who did not anticipate for Henry Maitland one of the brightest possible futures, so far as success at the university could make it so. It is possible that I alone out of those who regarded him with admiration and affection had some doubt of this, and that was not because I disagreed as a boy with any of the estimates that had been formed of him, but simply because for some reason or another he chose me as a confidant. Many years afterwards he said to me with painful bitterness: "It was a cruel and most undesirable thing that I, at the age of sixteen, should have been turned loose in a big city, compelled to live alone in lodgings, with nobody interested in me but those at the college. I see now that one of my sisters should certainly have been sent with me to Moorhampton."

One day he showed me a photograph. It was that of a young girl, aged perhaps seventeen—he at the time being very little more—with her hair down her back. She was not beautiful, but she had a certain prettiness, the mere prettiness of youth, and she was undoubtedly not a lady. After some interrogation on my part he told me that she was a young prostitute whom he knew, and I do not think I am exaggerating my own feelings when I say that I recognised instinctively and at once that if his relations with her were not put an end to some kind of disaster was in front of him. It was not that I knew very much about life, for what could a boy of less than eighteen really know about it?—but I had some kind of instinctive sense in me, and I was perfectly aware, even then, that Henry Maitland had about as little savoir-vivre as anybody I had ever met up to that time, or anybody I could ever expect to meet. It may seem strange to some that even at that time I had no moral views, and extremely little religion, although I may say incidentally that I thought about it sufficiently to become deliberately a Unitarian, refusing to be confirmed in the English Church, very much to the rage of the parish clergyman, and with the result of much friction with my father. Yet although I had no moral views I did my best to get Maitland to give up this girl, but he would not do it. The thing went on, so far as I am aware, for the best part of a year. He did all he could, apparently, to get Marian Hilton to leave the streets. He even bought a sewing machine and gave it to her with this view. That was another sample of his early idealism.

This was in 1876, and the younger Lake, who was three years older than Maitland, had by then just qualified as a doctor. He was an assistant at Darwen and one day went over to Moorhampton to see Henry, who told him what he had told me about this Marian Hilton. He even went so far as to say that he was going to marry her. Dr. Lake, of course, being an older man, and knowing something of life through his own profession, did not approve of this and strongly objected. Afterwards he regretted a thousand times that he had not written direct to Maitland's people to tell them of what was going on. Still, although he was the older man, he was not so much older as to have got rid of the boyish loyalty of one youth to another, and he did not do what he knew he ought to have done. He found out that Maitland had even sold his father's watch to help this girl. This affair was also known to a young accountant who came from Mirefields whom I did not know, and also to another man at the college who is now in the Government Service. So far as I remember the accountant was not a good influence, but his other friend did what he could to get Maitland to break off this very undesirable relationship, with no more success than myself.

I have never understood how it was that he got into such frightful financial difficulties. I can only imagine that Marian must have had, in one way or another, the greater portion of the income which he got from the scholarships he held. I do know that his affection for her seemed at this time to be very sincere. And out of that affection there grew up, very naturally, a horror in his sensitive mind for the life this poor child was leading. He haunted the streets which she haunted, and sometimes saw her with other men. I suppose even then she must have been frightfully extravagant, and perhaps given to drink, but considering what his income was I think he should have been able to give her a pound a week if necessary, and yet have had sufficient to live on without great difficulty. Nevertheless he did get into difficulties, and never even spoke to me about it. I was quite aware, in a kind of dim way, that he was in trouble and looked very ill, but he did not give me his fullest confidence, although one day he told me, as he had told Lake, that he proposed marrying her. I was only a boy, but I was absolutely enraged at the notion and used every possible means to prevent him committing such an absurd act of folly. When I met him I discussed it with him. When I was away from him I wrote him letters. I suppose I wrote him a dozen letters begging that he would do no such foolish thing. I told him that he would wrong himself, and could do the girl no possible good. My instincts told me even then that she would, instead of being raised, pull him down. These letters of mine were afterwards discovered in his rooms when the tragedy had happened.

During that time in 1876, we students at Moorhampton College were much disturbed by a series of thefts in the common room, and from a locker room in which we kept our books and papers and our overcoats. Books disappeared unaccountably and so did coats. Money was taken from the pockets of coats left in the room, and nobody knew who was to blame for this. Naturally enough we suspected a porter or one of the lower staff, but we were wrong. Without our knowledge the college authorities set a detective to discover who was to blame. One day I went into the common room, and standing in front of the fire found a man, a young fellow about my age, called Sarle, with whom I frequently played chess—he was afterwards president of the chess club at Oxford—and he said to me: "Have you heard the news?" "What news?" I asked. "Your friend, Henry Maitland, has been stealing those things that we have lost," he said. And when he said it I very nearly struck him, for it seemed a gross and incredible slander. But unfortunately it was true, and at that very moment Maitland was in gaol. A detective had hidden himself in the small room leading out of the bigger room where the lockers were and had caught him in the act. It was a very ghastly business and certainly the first great shock I ever got in my life. I think it was the same for everybody who knew the boy. The whole college was in a most extraordinary ferment, and, indeed, I may say the whole of Moorhampton which took any real interest in the college.

Professor Little, who was then the head of the college, sent for me and asked me what I knew of the matter. I soon discovered that this was because the police had found letters from me in Maitland's room which referred to Marian Hilton. I told the professor with the utmost frankness everything that I knew about the affair, and maintained that I had done my utmost to get him to break with her, a statement which all my letters supported. I have often imagined a certain suspicion, in the minds of some of those who are given to suspicion, that I myself had been leading the same kind of life as Henry Maitland. This was certainly not true; but I believe that one or two of those who did not like me—and there are always some—threw out hints that I knew Maitland had been taking these things. Yet after my very painful interview with Professor Little, who was a very delightful and kindly personality—though certainly not so strong a man as the head of such an institution should be—I saw that he gave me every credit for what I had tried to do. Among my own friends at the college was a young fellow, Edward Wolff, the son of the Rev. Mr. Wolff, the Unitarian minister at the chapel in Broad Street. Edward was afterwards fifth wrangler of his year at Cambridge. He got his father to interest himself in Henry Maitland's future. Mr. Wolff and several other men of some eminence in the city did what they could for him. They got together a little money and on his release from prison sent him away to America. He was met on coming out of prison by Dr. Lake's father, who also helped him in every possible way.

It seemed to me then that I had probably seen the last of Maitland, and the turn my own career took shortly afterwards rendered this even more likely. In the middle of 1876 I had a very serious disagreement with my father, who was a man of great ability but very violent temper, and left home. On September 23 of that year I sailed for Australia and remained there, working mostly in the bush, for the best part of three years. During all that time I heard little of Henry Maitland, though I have some dim remembrance of a letter I received from him telling me that he was in America. It was in 1879 that I shipped before the mast at Melbourne in a blackwall barque and came back to England as a seaman.