[X.]
The wonderful work which has here been imperfectly described was accomplished under a shadow. Maitland, who was never really a strong man, was, even before his marriage, not without warnings that he was overtaxing his physical resources. When he delivered his inaugural lecture he was already conscious that his days might be few. "I see again," writes one who was present, "the dim room, the grey light and the shadowy but inspired fragileness of the lecturer who was then fighting a very serious illness.... It was no ordinary lecture, rather a sort of sermon, grave and beautiful with its solemn call to work, even though that work might lie in humble and obscure fields. And the impression that was perhaps most immediately insistent, seeming to underlie each word and sentence, was that the speaker felt the hours of his own work to be already numbered and but few." In 1889, the year after his election to the Downing Chair, a doctor pronounced over him a sentence from which there is generally no successful appeal. "I very much want to see you again," he wrote to a friend, March 12, 1889, "and I don't know that I can wait for another year; this I say rather seriously and only to you; many things are telling me that I have not got unlimited time at my command and I have to take things very easily."
Devoted nursing, great care in diet, and a resolute avoidance of many of the pleasant things of life enabled the work to proceed as buoyantly as ever. There were bouts of illness and pain, when the French novelist and especially the beloved and well-known Balzac had to be invoked, but there were also periods of revival and at one time an assurance that the alarming symptoms had disappeared. But in truth the malady was never dislodged. "Slowly it is doing for me; but quite slowly," he wrote to a friend in 1899, "and it may cheer you to know that I have had ten happy and busy years under the ban." In the summer and autumn of that tenth year there was a sudden change for the worse and it became clear that Maitland could no longer winter in England. "If I have to sing a Nunc Dimittis," he wrote to Mr R. L. Poole, "it will run 'Quia oculi mei viderunt originalem Actum de Uniformitate primi anni Reg. Eliz.' Few can say as much.... I think of a voyage to S. America as S. Africa looks too warm for a man of peace."
From 1898 the Maitlands were compelled to fly south with the approach of winter. Their regular resort was Grand Canary but once, in 1904, this was exchanged for Madeira. Like all other habits idleness requires cultivation and Maitland had never been idle. Under a tropical sky and with an exquisite sense of relief from physical pain he worked his writing muscles as busily as ever. In the first exile he translated that part of Otto Gierke's Deutsche Genossenschaftrecht, which dealt with medieval political theory, and published it with a brilliant Introduction. Later he copied manuscripts of the Year Books lent to him by the wise generosity of the Cambridge University Library and collated or transcribed photographs of those manuscripts which it was impossible to export. The last two winters were divided between the Year Books and the composition of a biography of Leslie Stephen, and so far was exile from being a holiday that the fruit of each winter spent in the fortunate islands was never less than the substantial part of the volume. Some letters shall speak of the impressions and activities of these years.
To Leslie Stephen.
Hotel Santa Catalina,
Las Palmas,
Gran Canaria.
5 Nov. 1898.
I am beginning Guy Fawkes's day by sitting in the verandah before breakfast to write letters for a homeward-bound mail. Certainly it is enjoyable here and I mean to get good out of a delightful climate. Also I mean to convert your half promise of a visit into a whole, and without going beyond the truth I can say that there is a good deal here that should please you. At first sight I was repelled by the arid desolation of the island. I suppose that I ought to have been prepared for grasslessness, but somehow or another I was not. But then the wilderness is broken by patches of wonderful green—the green of banana fields. Wherever a little water can be induced to flow in artificial channels there are all manner of beautiful things to be seen. I have picked a date and mustered enough Spanish to buy me a pair of shoes in the "city" of Las Palmas—a dirty city it is with strange smells; but we are well outside of it. Between Las Palmas and its port there is a little English colony. This hotel is so English that they give me my bill in £ s. d. and my change in British ha'pence which have seen better days. Indeed now I know where our coppers go to when they have become too bad for use at home. Also the "library" of this hotel seems a sort of hades to which the bad three-voller is sent after its decease. But the proposition that all the worst books collect there is (as you must be aware) not convertible into the proposition that only bad books come there, and I see a copy of a certain Life of Henry Fawcett which you may have read. I laze away my time under verandahs and in gardens—but am not wholly inactive. Sometimes when it is cool I walk some miles and explore country that is well worth exploration. By the time you come I shall be ready for an ascent of our central range with you—it touches 6000 ft. I think, and by that time we shall be having cooler weather. Yesterday we were breathless: to-day is cloudy but would be September in England.
It is breakfast time and the porridge is good.