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

by Morley Roberts

CHAPTER IX

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.