CHAPTER V
The art of portraiture, whether in words or paint, is very difficult, and appears less easy as I attempt to draw Maitland. Nevertheless the time comes when the artist seems to see his man standing on his feet before him, put down in his main planes, though not yet, perhaps, with any subtlety. The anatomy is suggested at any rate, if there are bones in the subject or in the painter. As it seems to me, Maitland should now stand before those who have read so far with sympathy and understanding. I have not finished my drawing, but it might even now suffice as a sketch, and seem from some points of view to be not wholly inadequate. It is by no means easy to put him down in a few words, but patience and the addition of detail reach their end, it may be not without satisfaction—for "with bread and steel one gets to China." It is not possible to etch Maitland in a few lines, for as it seems to me it is the little details of his character with which I am most concerned that give him his greatest value. It is not so much the detail of his actual life, but the little things that he said, and the way he seemed to think, or even the way that he avoided thinking, which I desire to put down. And when I say those things he wished not to think of, I am referring more especially to his views of the universe, and of the world itself, those views which are a man's philosophy, and not less his philosophy when of set purpose he declines to think of them at all, for this Maitland did without any doubt. Goethe said, when he spoke, if I remember rightly, about all forms of religious and metaphysical speculation, "Much contemplation, or brooding over these things is disturbing to the spirit." Unfortunately I do not know German so I cannot find the reference to this, but Maitland, who knew the language very thoroughly and had read nearly everything of great importance in it, often quoted this passage, having naturally a great admiration for Goethe. I do not mean that he admired him merely for his position in the world of letters. What he did admire in Goethe was what he himself liked and desired so greatly. He wished for peace, for calmness of spirit. He did not like to be disturbed in any way whatsoever. He would not disturb himself. He wished people to be reasonable, and thought this was a reasonable request to make of them. I remember on one occasion when I had been listening to him declaiming about some one's peculiar lack of reasonableness, which seemed to him the one great human quality, that I said: "Maitland, what would you do if you were having trouble with a woman who was in a very great rage with you?" He replied, with an air of surprise, "Why, of course, I should reason with her." I said shortly, "Don't ever get married again! " Nevertheless he was a wonderfully patient and reasonable man himself, and truly lacked everything characteristic of the combatant. He would discuss, he would never really argue. I do not suppose that he was physically a coward, but his dread of scenes and physical violence lay very deep in his organisation. Although he used me as a model I never really drew him at length in any of my own books, but naturally he was a subject of great psychological interest to me. Pursuing my studies in him I said, one day, "Maitland, what would you do if a man disagreed with you, got outrageously and unreasonably angry, and slapped you in the face?" He replied, in his characteristically low and concentrated voice, "Do? I should look at him with the most infinite disgust, and turn away."
His horror of militarism was something almost comic, for it showed his entire incapacity for grasping the world's situation as it shows itself to any real and ruthless student of political sociology who is not bogged in the mud flats of some Utopian island. Once we were together on the Horse Guards' Parade and a company of the Guards came marching up. We stood to watch them pass, and when they had gone by he turned to me and said, "Mark you, my dear man, this, this is the nineteenth century!" In one of his letters written to me after his second marriage he said of his eldest son: "I hope to send him abroad, to some country where there is no possibility of his having to butcher or be butchered." This, of course, was his pure reason pushed to the point where reason becomes mere folly, for such is the practical antinomy of pure reason in life. It was in this that he showed his futile idealism, which was in conflict with what may be called truly his real pessimism. That he did good work in many of his books dealing with the lower classes is quite obvious, and cannot be denied. He showed us the things that exist. It is perfectly possible, and even certainly true, that many of the most pessimistic writers are in reality optimists. They show us the grey in order that we may presently make it rose. But Maitland wrote absolutely without hope. He took his subjects as mere subjects, and putting them on the table, lectured in pathology. He made books of his dead-house experiences, and sold them, but never believed that he, or any other man, could really do good by speaking of what he had seen and dilated upon. The people as a body were vile and hopeless. He did not even inquire how they became so. He thought nothing could be done, and did not desire to do it. His future was in the past. The world's great age would never renew itself, and only he and a few others really understood the desperate state into which things had drifted. Since his death there has been some talk about his religion. I shall speak of this later, on a more fitting occasion; but, truly speaking, he had no religion. When he gave up his temporary Positivist pose, which was entirely due to his gratitude to Harold Edgeworth for helping him, he refused to think of these things again. They disturbed the spirit. If I ever endeavoured to inveigle him into a discussion or an argument upon any metaphysical subject he grew visibly uneasy. He declined to argue, or even to discuss, and though I know that in later life he admitted that even immortality was possible I defy any one to bring a tittle of evidence to show that he ever went further. This attitude to all forms of religious and metaphysical thought was very curious to me. It was, indeed, almost inexplicable, as I have an extreme pleasure in speculative inquiry of all kinds. The truth is that on this side of his nature he was absolutely wanting. Such things interested him no more than music interests a tone-deaf man who cannot distinguish the shriek of a tom-cat from the sound of a violin. If I did try to speak of such things he listened with an air of outraged and sublime patience which must have been obvious to any one but a bore. Whether his philosophy was sad or not, he would not have it disturbed.
His real interest in religion seemed to lie in his notion that it was a curious form of delusion almost ineradicable from the human mind. There is a theory, very popular among votaries of the creeds, which takes the form of denying that any one can really be an atheist. This is certainly not true, but it helps one to understand the theologic mind, which has an imperative desire to lay hold of something like an inclusive hypothesis to rest on. So far as Maitland was concerned there was no more necessity to have an hypothesis about God than there was to have one about quaternions, and quaternions certainly did not interest him. He shrugged his shoulders and put these matters aside, for in many things he had none of the weaknesses of humanity, though in others he had more than his share. In his letters to G.H. Rivers, which I have had the privilege of reading, there are a few references to Rivers' habits and powers of speculation. I think it was somewhere in 1900 or 1901 that he read "Forecasts." By this time he had a strong feeling of affection for Rivers, and a very great admiration for him. His references to him in the "Meditations" are sufficiently near the truth to corroborate this. Nevertheless his chief feeling towards Rivers and his work, beyond the mere fact that it was a joy to him that a man could make money by doing good stuff, was one of amazement and surprise that any one could be deeply interested in the future, and could give himself almost wholly or even with partial energy, to civic purposes. And so he wrote to Rivers: "I must not pretend to care very much about the future of the human race. Come what may, folly and misery are sure to be the prevalent features of life, but your ingenuity in speculation, the breadth of your views, and the vigour of your writing, make this book vastly enjoyable. The critical part of it satisfies, and often delights me. Stupidity should have a sore back for some time to come, and many a wind-bag will be uneasily aware of collapse."
It is interesting to note, now that I am speaking of his friendship for Rivers, and apropos of what I shall have to say later about his religious views, that he wrote to Rivers: "By the bye, you speak of God. Well, I understand what you mean, but the word makes me stumble rather. I have grown to shrink utterly from the use of such terms, and though I admit, perforce, a universal law, I am so estranged by its unintelligibility that not even a desire to be reverent can make those old names in any way real to me." So later he said that he was at a loss to grasp what Rivers meant when he wrote: "There stirs something within us now that can never die again." I think Maitland totally misinterpreted the passage, which was rather apropos of the awakening of the civic spirit in mankind than of anything else, but he went on to say that he put aside the vulgar interpretation of such words. However, was it Rivers' opinion that the material doom of the earth did not involve the doom of earthly life? He added that Rivers' declared belief in the coherency and purpose of things was pleasant to him, for he himself could not doubt for a moment that there was some purpose. This is as far as he ever went. On the other hand, he did doubt whether we, in any sense of the pronoun, should ever be granted understanding of that purpose. Of course all this shows that he possessed no metaphysical endowments or apparatus. He loved knowledge pure and simple, but when it came to the exercises of the metaphysical mind he was pained and puzzled. He lacked any real education in philosophy, and did not even understand its peculiar vocabulary. However vain those of us who have gone through the metaphysical mill may think it in actual products, we are all yet aware that it helps greatly to formulate our own philosophy, or even our own want of it. For it clears the air. It cuts away all kinds of undergrowth. It at any rate shows us that there is no metaphysical way out, for the simple reason that there has never existed one metaphysician who did not destroy another. They are all mutually destructive. But Maitland had no joy in construction or destruction; and, as I have said, he barely understood the technical terms of metaphysics. There was a great difference with regard to these inquiries between him and Rivers. The difference was that Rivers enjoyed metaphysical thinking and speculation where Maitland hated it. But all the same Rivers took it up much too late in life, and about the year 1900 made wonderful discoveries which had been commonplaces to Aristotle. A thing like this would not have mattered much if he had regarded it as education. However, he regarded it as discovery, and wrote books about it which inspired debates, and apparently filled the metaphysicians with great joy. It is always a pleasure to the evil spirit that for ever lives in man to see the ablest people of the time showing that they are not equally able in some other direction than that in which they have gained distinction.
It is curious how this native dislike of Maitland to being disturbed by speculative thought comes out in a criticism he made of Thomas Hardy. He had always been one of this writer's greatest admirers, and I know he especially loved "The Woodlanders," but he wrote in a letter to Dr. Lake something very odd about "Jude the Obscure." He calls it: "a sad book! Poor Thomas is utterly on the wrong tack, and I fear he will never get back into the right one. At his age, a habit of railing at the universe is not overcome." Of course this criticism is wholly without any value as regards Hardy's work, but it is no little side light on Maitland's own peculiar habits of thought, or of persistent want of thought, on the great matters of speculation. His objection was not to anything that Hardy said, but to the fact that the latter's work, filled with what Maitland calls "railing at the universe," personally disturbed him. Anything which broke up his little semi-classic universe, the literary hut which he had built for himself as a shelter from the pitiless storm of cosmic influences, made him angry and uneasy for days and weeks. He never lived to read Hardy's "Dynasts," a book which stands almost alone in literature, and is to my mind a greater book than Goethe's "Faust," but if he had read it I doubt if he would have forgiven Thomas Hardy for disturbing him. He always wanted to be left alone. He had constructed his pattern of the universe, and any one who shook it he denounced with, "Confound the fellow! He makes me unhappy." The one book that he did read, which is in itself essentially a disturbing book to many people, and apparently read with some pleasure, was the earliest volume of Dr. Frazer's "Golden Bough"; but it is a curious thing that what interested him, and indeed actually pleased him, was Frazer's side attacks upon the dogmas of Christianity. He said: "The curious thing about Frazer's book is, that in illustrating the old religious usages connected with tree-worship and so on, he throws light upon every dogma of Christianity. This by implication; he never does it expressly. Edmund Roden has just pointed this out to the Folk-lore Society, with the odd result that Gladstone wrote at once resigning membership." This was written after Gladstone died, but it reads as if Maitland was not aware that he was dead. Odd as it may seem, it is perfectly possible that he did not know it. He cared very little for the newspapers, and sometimes did not read any for long periods. It is rather curious that when I proved to him in later years that he had once dated his letters according to the Positivist Calendar, he seemed a little disturbed and shocked. Still, it was very natural that when exposed to Positivist influences he should have become a Positivist, for among the people of that odd faith, if faith it can be called, he found both kindness and intellectual recognition. But when his mind became clearer and calmer, and something of the storm and stress had passed by, he was aware that his attitude had been somewhat pathologic, and did not like to recall it. This became very much clearer to him, and indeed to me, when another friend of ours, a learned and very odd German who lived and starved in London, went completely under in the same curious religious way. His name was Schmidt. He remained to the day of Maitland's death a very great friend of his, and I believe he possesses more letters from Henry Maitland than any man living—greatly owing to his own vast Teutonic energy and industry in writing to his friends.
But in London Schmidt came to absolute destitution. I myself got to know him through Maitland. It appeared that he owned a collie dog, which he found at last impossible to feed, even though he starved himself to do so. Maitland told me of this, and introduced me to Schmidt. On hearing his story, and seeing the dog, I went to my own people, who were then living in Clapham, and asked them if they would take the animal from Schmidt and keep it. When I saw the German again I was given the dog, together with a paper on which were written all Don's peculiar tricks, most of which had been taught to him by his master and needed the German language for their words of command. Soon after this Schmidt fell into even grimmer poverty, and was rescued from the deepest gulf by some religious body analogous in those days to the Salvation Army of the present time. Of this Maitland knew nothing, until one day going down the Strand he found his friend giving away religious pamphlets at the door of Exeter Hall. When he told me this he said he went next day to see the man in his single room lodging and found him sitting at the table with several open Bibles spread out before him. He explained that he was making a commentary on the Bible at the instigation of one of his new friends, and he added: "Here, here is henceforth my life's work." Shortly after this, I believe through Harold Edgeworth or some one else to whom Maitland appealed, the poor German was given work in some quasi-public institution, and with better fare and more ease his brain recovered. He never mentioned religion again. It was thus that Maitland himself recovered from similar but less serious influences in somewhat similar conditions. For some weeks in 1885 I was myself exposed to such influences in Chicago, in even bitterer conditions than those from which Schmidt and Maitland had suffered, but not for one moment did I alter my opinions. As a kind of final commentary on this chapter and this side of Maitland's mind, one might quote from a letter to Rivers: "Seeing that mankind cannot have done altogether with the miserable mystery of life, undoubtedly it behoves us before all else to enlighten as we best can the lot of those for whose being we are responsible. This for the vast majority of men—a few there are, I think, who are justified in quite neglecting that view of life, and, by the bye, Marcus Aurelius was one of them. Nothing he could have done would have made Commodus other than he was—I use, of course, the everyday phrases, regardless of determinism—and then one feels pretty sure that Commodus was not his son at all. For him, life was the individual, and whether he has had any true influence or not, I hold him absolutely justified in thinking as he did." There again comes out Maitland's view, his anti-social view, the native egoism of the man, his peculiar solitude of thought.