At that time he was publishing books with the firm of Miller and Company, and, of course, he knew John Glass, who read for them, very well indeed. It seems that Glass, who had naturally enough, considering his period, certain old-fashioned ideas on the subject of books and their endings, absolutely and flatly declined to recommend his firm to publish "In the Morning," unless Maitland re-wrote the natural tragic end of the book and made it turn out happily. I think nothing on earth, or in some hell for men of letters, could have made Maitland more angry and wretched. If there was one thing that he clung to during the whole of his working time, it was sincerity, and sincerity in literary work implies an absolute freedom from alien and extrinsic influence. I can well remember what he said to me about Glass' suggestion. He abused him and the publishers; the public, England, the world, and the very universe. He almost burst into tears as he explained to me what he had been obliged to do for the sake of the great fifty pounds he was to get for the book. For at this time he only got fifty pounds for a long three-volume novel. He always wrote with the greatest pain and labour, but I do not suppose he ever put anything on paper in his life which cost him such acute mental suffering as the last three chapters of this book which were written to John Glass' barbaric order.
After his wife's death he wrote "The Under-World," "Bond and Free," "Paternoster Row," and "The Exile." It is a curious fact, although it was not always obvious even to himself, and is not now obvious to anybody but me, that I stood as a model to him in many of these books, especially, if I remember rightly, for one particular character in "Bond and Free." Some of these sketches are fairly complimentary, and many are much the reverse. The reason of this use of me was that till much later he knew very few men intimately but myself; and when he wanted anybody in his books of a more or less robust character, and sometimes more or less of a kind that he did not like, I, perforce, had to stand for him. On one occasion he acknowledged this to me, and once he was not at all sure how I should take it. As a matter of fact the most life-like portrait of me ends as a villain, and, as he had touched me off to the very life in the first volume, it did make me a little sorer than I acknowledged. I leave the curious to discover this particular scoundrel. Of course it was only natural that my wild habits and customs, the relics of Australia and America, afforded him a great deal of amusement and study. On one occasion they cost him, temporarily, the very large sum of three pounds. As he said, he used to look upon me as a kind of hybrid, a very ridiculous wild man with strong literary leanings, with an enormous amount of general and unrelated knowledge; and at the same time as a totally unregulated or ill-regulated ruffian. This was a favourite epithet of his, for which I daresay there was something to be said. Now one Sunday it happened that I was going up to see him at 7K, and came from Chelsea with two or three books in my hand, and, as it happened, a pair of spectacles on my nose. At that time I sometimes carried an umbrella, and no doubt looked exceedingly peaceful. As a result of this a young man, who turned out afterwards to be a professional cricketer, thought I was a very easy person to deal with, and to insult. As I came to York Place, which was then almost empty of passers by, I was walking close to the railings and this individual came up and pushing rudely past me, stepped right in front of me. Now this was a most outrageous proceeding, because he had fifteen free feet of pavement, and I naturally resented it. I made a little longer step than I should otherwise have done and "galled his kibe." He turned round upon me and, using very bad language, asked me where I was going to, who I thought I was, and what I proposed to do about it. I did not propose to do anything, but did it. I smote him very hard with the umbrella, knocking him down. He remained on the pavement for a considerable time, and then only got up at the third endeavour, and promptly gave me into custody. The policeman, who had happened to see the whole affair, explained to me, with that civility common among the custodians of order to those classes whose dress suggests they are their masters, that he was compelled to take the charge. I was removed to Lower Seymour Street and put in a cell for male prisoners only, where I remained fully half an hour.
While I was in this cell a small boy of about nine was introduced and left there. I went over to him and said, "Hullo, my son, what's brought you here?" Naturally enough he imagined that I was not a prisoner but a powerful official, and bursting into tears he said, "Oh, please, sir, it warn't me as nicked the steak!" I consoled him to the best of my ability until I was shortly afterwards invited down to Marlborough Street Police Court, where Mr. De Rutzen, now Sir Albert De Rutzen, was sitting. As I had anticipated the likelihood of my being fined, and as I had no more than a few shillings with me, I had written a letter to Maitland, and procuring a messenger through the police, had sent it up to him. He came down promptly and sat in the court while I was being tried for this assault. After hearing the case Mr. De Rutzen decided to fine me three pounds, which Maitland paid, with great chuckles at the incident, even though he considered his prospect of getting the money back for some months was exceedingly vague. It was by no means the first time that he had gone to the police court for copy which "is very pretty to observe," as Pepys said, when after the Fire of London it was discovered that as many churches as public houses were left standing in the city. That such a man should have had to pursue his studies of actual life in the police courts and the slums was really an outrage, another example of the native malignity of matter. For, as I have insisted, and must insist again, he was a scholar and a dreamer. But his pressing anxieties for ever forbade him to dream, or to pursue scholarship without interruption. He desired time to perfect his control of the English tongue, and he wanted much that no man can ever get. It is my firm conviction that if he had possessed the smallest means he would never have thought himself completely master of the medium in which he worked. He often spoke of poor Flaubert saying: "What an accursed language is French!" He was for ever dissatisfied with his work, as an artist should be, and I think he attained seldom, if ever, the rare and infrequent joy that an artist has in accomplishment. It was not only his desire of infinite perfection as a writer pure and simple, which affected and afflicted him. It was the fact that he should never have written fiction at all. He often destroyed the first third of a book. I knew him to do so with one three times over. This, of course, was not always out of the cool persuasion that what he had done was not good, for it often was good in its way, but frequently he began, in a hurry, in despair, and with the prospects of starvation, something that he knew not to be his own true work, or something which he forced without adequate preparation. Then I used to get a dark note saying, "I have destroyed the whole of the first volume and am, I hope, beginning to see my way." It was no pleasant thing to be a helpless spectator of these struggles, in which he found no rest, when I knew his destiny was to have been a scholar at a great university.
When one understands his character, or even begins to understand it, it is easy enough to comprehend that the temporary ease with regard to money which came after his wife's death did not last so very long. The pressure of her immediate needs and incessant demands being at last relaxed he himself relaxed his efforts in certain directions and presently was again in difficulties. I know that it will sound very extraordinary to all but those who know the inside of literary life that this should have been so. A certain amount of publicity is almost always associated in the minds of the public with monetary success of a kind. Yet one very well-known acquaintance of mine, an eminent if erratic journalist, one day had a column of favourable criticism in a big daily, and after reading it went out and bought a red herring with his last penny and cooked it over the fire in his solitary room. It was the same with myself. It was almost the same with Maitland even at this time. No doubt the worst of his financial difficulties were before I returned from America, and even before his wife died, but never, till the end of his life, was he at ease with regard to money. He never attained the art of the pot-boiler by which most of us survive, even when he tried short stories, which he did finally after I had pressed him to attempt them for some years.
In many ways writing to him was a kind of sacred mission. It was not that he had any faith in great results to come from it, but the profession of a writer was itself sacred, and even the poorest sincere writer was a sacer vates. He once absolutely came down all the way to me in Chelsea to show me a well-known article in which Robert Louis Stevenson denied, to my mind not so unjustly, that a writer could claim payment at all, seeing that he left the world's work to do what he chose to do for his own pleasure. Stevenson went on to compare such a writer to a fille de joie. This enraged Maitland furiously. I should have been grieved if he and Stevenson had met upon that occasion. I really think something desperate might have happened, little as one might expect violence from such a curious apostle of personal peace as Maitland. Many years afterwards I related this little incident to Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa, but I think by that time Maitland himself was half inclined to agree with his eminent brother author. And yet, as I say, writing was a mission, even if it was with him an acquired passion; but his critical faculties, which were so keenly developed, almost destroyed him. There can be no stronger proof that he was not one of those happy beings who take to the telling of stories because they must, and because it is in them. There was no time that he was not obliged to do his best, though every writer knows to his grief that there are times when the second best must do. And thus it was that John Glass so enraged him. All those things which are the care of the true writer were of most infinite importance to him. A misprint, a mere "literal," gave him lasting pain. He desired classic perfection, both of work and the mere methods of production. He would have taken years over a book if fear and hunger and poverty had permitted him to do so. And yet he wrote "Isabel," "The Mob," and "In the Morning," all in seven months, even while he read through the whole of Dante's "Divina Commedia," for recreation, and while he toiled at the alien labour of teaching. Yet this was he who wrote to one friend: "Would it not be delightful to give up a year or so to the study of some old period of English history?" When he was thirty-six he said: "The four years from now to forty I should like to devote to a vigorous apprenticeship in English." But this was the man who year after year was compelled to write books which the very essence of his being told him would work no good. Sometimes I am tempted to think that the only relief he got for many, many years came out of the hours we spent in company, either in his room or mine. We read very much together, and it was our delight, as I have said, to exchange quotations, or read each other passages which we had discovered during the week. He recited poetry with very great feeling and skill, and was especially fond of much of Coleridge. I can hear him now reading those lines of Coleridge to his son which end:
"Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon."
And to hear him chant the mighty verse of the great Greeks who were dead, and yet were most alive to him, was always inspiring. The time was to come, though not yet, when he was to see Greece, and when he had entered Piræus and seen the peopled mountains of that country Homer became something more to him than he had been, and the language of Æschylus and Sophocles took on new glories and clothed itself in still more wondrous emotions. He knew a hundred choruses of the Greek tragedies by heart, and declaimed them with his wild hair flung back and his eyes gleaming as if the old tragedians, standing in the glowing sun of the Grecian summer, were there to hear him, an alien yet not an alien, using the tongue that gave its chiefest glories to them for ever. But he had been born in exile, and had made himself an outcast.
Those who have read so far, and are interested in him, will see that I am much more concerned to say what I felt about him than to relate mere facts and dates. I care little or nothing that in some ways others know more or less of him, or know it differently. I try to build up my little model of him, try to paint my picture touch by touch; often, it may be, by repetition, for so a man builds himself for his friends in his life. I must paint him as a whole, and put him down, here and there perhaps with the grain of the canvas showing through the paint, or perhaps with what the worthy critics call a rich impasto, which may be compiled of words. Others may criticise, and will criticise, what I write. No doubt they will find much of it wrong, or wrong-headed, and will attribute to me other motives than those which move me, but if it leads them to bring out more of his character than I know or remember, I shall be content. For the more that is known of him, the more he will be loved.
It was somewhere about this time that I undertook to write one of two or three articles which I have done about him for periodicals, and the remembrance of that particular piece of work reminds me very strongly of his own ideas of his own humour in writing. There have been many discussions, wise and otherwise, as to whether he possessed any at all, and I think the general feeling that he was very greatly lacking in this essential part of the equipment of a writer, to be on the whole true. Among my lost letters there was one which I most especially regret not to be able to quote, for it was very long, perhaps containing two thousand words, which he sent to me when he knew I had been asked to do this article. Now the purport of Maitland's letter was to prove to me that every one was wrong who said he had no humour. In one sense there can be no greater proof that anybody who said so was right. He enumerated carefully all the characters in all the books he had hitherto written in whom he thought there was real humour. He gave me a preposterous list of these individuals, with his comments, and appealed to me in all deadly seriousness to know whether I did not agree with him that they were humorous. But the truth is that, save as a talker, he had very little humour, and even then it was frequently verbal. It was, however, occasionally very grim, and its strength, oddly enough, was of the American kind, since it consisted of managed exaggeration. He had a certain joy in constructing more or less humorous nicknames for people. Sometimes these were good, and sometimes bad, but when he christened them once he kept to it always. I believe the only man of his acquaintance who had no nickname at all was George Meredith, but then he loved and admired Meredith in no common fashion.
In some of his books he speaks, apparently not without some learning, of music, but there are, I fancy, signs that his knowledge of it was more careful construction than actual knowledge or deep feeling. Nevertheless he did at times discover a real comprehension of the greater musicians, especially of Chopin. Seeing that this was so, it is very curious, and more than curious in a writer, that he had a measureless adoration of barrel organs. He delighted in them strangely, and when any Italian musician came into his dingy street or neighbourhood, he would set the window open and listen with ardour. Being so poor, he could rarely afford to give away money even in the smallest sum. Pennies were indeed pennies to him. But he did sometimes bestow pence on wandering Italians who ground out Verdi in the crowded streets. Among the many languages which he knew was, of course, Italian; for, as I have said, he read the "Divina Commedia" easily, reading it for relaxation as he did Aristophanes. It was a great pleasure to him, even before he went to Italy, to speak a few words in their own tongue to these Italians of the English streets. He remembered that this music came from the south, the south that was always his Mecca, the Kibleh of the universe. Years afterwards, when he had been in the south, and knew Naples and the joyous crowds of the Chaiaja—long before I had been there and had listened to its uproar from the Belvidere of San Martino—he found Naples chiefly a city of this joyous popular music. Naples, he said, was the most interesting modern city in Europe; and yet I believe the chief joy he had there was hearing its music, and the singing of the lazzaroni down by Santa Lucia. "Funiculi, Funicula," he loved as much as if it were the work of a classic, and "Santa Lucia" appealed to him like a Greek chorus. I remember that, years later, he wrote to me a letter of absurd and exaggerated anger, which was yet perfectly serious, about the action of the Neapolitan municipality in forbidding street organs to play in the city. Sometimes, though rarely, seeing that he could not often afford a shilling, he went to great concerts in London. Certainly he spoke as one not without instruction in musical subjects in "The Vortex," but I fancy that musical experts might find flaws in his nomenclature. Nevertheless he did love music with a certain ardent passion.