He was a man not without a certain sensuality, but it was his sensuousness which was in many ways the most salient point in his character. As I often told him, he was a kind of incomplete Rabelaisian. That was suggested to me by his delighted use of Gargantuan epithets with regard to the great recurrent subject of food. He loved all things which were redolent of oil and grease and fatness. The joy of great abundance appealed to him, and I verily believe that to him the great outstanding characteristic of the past in England was its abundant table. Indeed, in all things but rowdy indecency, he was a Rabelaisian, and being such, he yet had to put up with poor and simple food. However, provided it was at hand in large quantities, he was ready to feed joyously. He would exclaim: "Now for our squalid meal! I wonder what Harold Edgeworth, or good old Edmund Roden would say to this?" When I think of the meagre preface that Harold Edgeworth wrote in later years for "Basil," when that done by G.H. Rivers—afterwards published separately—did not meet with the approval of Maitland's relatives and executors, I feel that Edgeworth somewhat deserved the implied scorn of Maitland's words. As for Edmund Roden, he often spoke of him affectionately. In later years he sometimes went down to Felixstowe to visit him. He liked his house amazingly, and was very much at home in it. It was there that he met Grant Allen, and Sir Luke Redburn, whom he declared to be the most interesting people that he saw in Felixstowe at that time.
I am not sure whether it was on this particular occasion, perhaps in 1895, that he went down to Essex with a great prejudice against Grant Allen. The reason of this was curious. He was always most vicious when any writer who obviously lived in comfort, complained loudly and bitterly of the pittance of support given him by the public, and the public's faithful servants, the publishers. When Allen growled furiously on this subject in a newspaper interview Maitland recalled to me with angry amusement a certain previous article in which, if I remember rightly, Grant Allen proclaimed his absolute inability to write if he were not in a comfortable room with rose-coloured curtains. "Rose-coloured curtains!" said Maitland contemptuously, and looking round his own room one certainly found nothing of that kind. It was perhaps an extraordinary thing, one of the many odd things in his character, that the man who loved the south so, who always dreamed of it, seemed to see everything at that period of his life in the merest black and white. There was not a spark or speck of colour in his rooms. Now in my one poor room in Chelsea I had hung up all sorts of water-colours acquired by various means from artists who were friends of mine. By hook or by crook I got hold of curtains with colour in them, and carpets, too, and Japanese fans. My room was red and yellow and scarlet, while his were a dingy monochrome, as if they sympathised with the outlook at the back of his flat, which stared down upon the inferno of the Metropolitan Railway. But to return to Grant Allen. Maitland now wrote: "However, I like him very much. He is quite a simple, and very gentle fellow, crammed with multifarious knowledge, enthusiastic in scientific pursuits. With fiction and that kind of thing he ought never to have meddled; it is the merest pot-boiling. He reads nothing whatever but books of scientific interest."
It was at Felixstowe, too, that he met Carew Latter who induced him to write twenty papers in one of the journals Latter conducted. They were to be of more or less disreputable London life. Some of them at least have been reprinted in his volumes of short stories. There is certainly no colour in them; in some ways they resemble sketches with the dry-point. Of course after he had once been on the continent, and had got south to Marseilles and the Cannebiere, he learnt to know what colour was, and wrote of it in a way he had never done before, as I noticed particularly in one paragraph about Capri seen at sunset from Naples. In this sudden discovery of colour he reminded me, oddly enough, of my old acquaintance Wynne, the now justly celebrated painter, who, up to a certain time in his life, had painted almost in monochrome, and certainly in a perpetual grey chord. Then he met Marvell, the painter, who was, if anything, a colourist. I do not think Marvell influenced Wynne in anything but colour, but from that day Wynne was a colourist, and so remains, although to it he has added a great and real power of design and decoration. It is true that Maitland never became a colourist in writing, but those who have read his work with attention will observe that after a certain date he was much more conscious of the world's colour.
In those days our poverty and our ambition made great subjects for our talks. I myself had been writing for some years with no more than a succès d'estime, and I sometimes thought that I would throw up the profession and go back to Australia or America, or to the sea, or would try Africa at last. But Maitland had no such possibilities within him. He maintained grimly, though not without humour, that his only possible refuge when war, or some other final disaster made it impossible for writers to earn their difficult living, was a certain block of buildings opposite 7K. This, however, was not Madame Tussaud's as the careless might imagine, it was the Marylebone workhouse, which he said he regarded with a proprietary eye. It always afforded him a subject for conversation when his prospects seemed rather poorer than usual. It was, at any rate, he declared, very handy for him when he became unable to do more work. No doubt this was his humour, but there was something in this talk which was more than half serious. He always liked to speak of the gloomy side of things, and I possess many letters of his which end with references to the workhouse, or to some impending, black disaster. In one he said: "I wish I could come up, but am too low in health and spirits to move at present. A cold clings about me, and the future looks dark." Again he said: "No, I shall never speak of my work. It has become a weariness and toil—nothing more." And again: "It is a bad, bad business, that of life at present." And yet once more: "It is idle to talk about occupation—by now I have entered on the last stage of life's journey." This was by no means when he had come towards the end of his life. However, the workhouse does come up, even at the end, in a letter written about two months before his death. He wrote to me: "I have been turning the pages with great pleasure, to keep my thoughts from the workhouse." Those who did not know him would not credit him with the courage of desperation which he really possessed, if they saw his letters and knew nothing more of the man.
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.