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.
CHAPTER VI
To have seen "Shelley plain" once only is to put down a single point on clear paper. To have seen him twice gives his biographer the right to draw a line. Out of three points may come a triangle. Out of the many times in many years that I saw Maitland comes the intricate pattern of him. I would rather do a little book like "Manon Lescaut" than many biographical quartos lying as heavy on the dead as Vanbrugh's mansions. If there are warts on Maitland so there were on Cromwell. I do not invent like the old cartographers, who adorned their maps with legends saying, "Here is much gold," or "Here are found diamonds." Nor have I put any imaginary "Mountains of the Moon" into his map, or adorned vacant parts of ocean with whales or wonderful monsters. I put down nothing unseen, or most reasonably inferred. In spite of my desire, which is sincere, to say as little as possible about myself, I find I have to speak sometimes of things primarily my own. There is no doubt it did Maitland a great deal of good to have somebody to interest himself in, even if it were no one of more importance than myself. Although he was so singularly a lonely man, he could not always bury himself in the classics, or even in his work, done laboriously in eight prodigious hours. We for ever talked about what we were going to do, and there was very little that I wrote, up to the time of his leaving London permanently, which I did not discuss with him. Yet I was aware that with much I wrote he was wholly dissatisfied. I remember when I was still living in Chelsea, not in Danvers Street but in Redburn Street, where I at last attained the glory of two rooms, he came to me one Sunday in a very uneasy state of mind. He looked obviously worried and troubled, and was for a long time silent as he sat over the fire. I asked him again and again what was the matter, because, as can be easily imagined, I always had the notion that something must be the matter with him, or soon would be. In answer to my repeated importunities he said, at last: "Well, the fact of the matter is, I want to speak to you about your work." It appeared that I and my affairs were at the bottom of his discomfort. He told me that he had been thinking of my want of success, and that he had made up his mind to tell me the cause of it. He was nervous and miserable, though I begged him to speak freely, but at last got out the truth. He told me that he did not think I possessed the qualities to succeed at the business I had so rashly commenced. He declared that it was not that he had not the very highest opinion of such a book as "The Western Trail," but as regards fiction he felt I was bound to be a failure. Those who knew him can imagine what it cost him to say as much as this. I believe he would have preferred to destroy half a book and begin it again. Naturally enough what he said I found very disturbing, but I am pleased to say that I took it in very good part, and told him that I would think it over seriously. As may be imagined, I did a great deal of thinking on the subject, but the result of my cogitations amounted to this: I had started a thing and meant to go through with it at all costs. I wrote this to him later, and the little incident never made any difference whatever to our affectionate friendship. I reminded him many years after of what he had said, and he owned then that I had done something to make him revise his former opinion. When I come to speak of some of his letters to me about my later books it will be seen how generous he could be to a friend who, for some time then, had not been very enthusiastic about his own work. I have said before, and I always believed, that it was he and not myself who was at the wrong kind of task. Fiction, even as he understood it, was not for a man of his nature and faculties. He would have been in his true element as a don of a college, and much of his love of the classics was a mystery to me, as it would have been to most active men of the world, however well educated. I did understand his passion for the Greek tragedies, but he had almost more delight in the Romans; and, with the exception of Catullus and Lucretius, the Latin classics are to me without any savour. There is no doubt that in many ways I was but a barbarian to him. For one thing, at that time I was something of a fanatical imperialist. He took no more interest in the Empire, except as literary material, than he did in Nonconformist theology. Then I was certainly highly patriotic as regards England, but he was very cosmopolitan. It was no doubt a very strange thing that he should have spoken to me about my having little faculty for writing fiction when I had so often come to the same silent conclusion about himself. Naturally enough I did not dare to tell him so, for if such a pronouncement had distressed me a little it would distress him very much more. Yet I think he did sometimes understand his real limitations, especially in later years, when he wrote more criticism. The man who could say that he was prepared to spend the years from thirty-six to forty in a vigorous apprenticeship to English, was perfectly capable of continuing that apprenticeship until he died.
He took a critical and wonderful interest in the methods of all men of letters, and that particular interest with regard to Balzac, which was known to many, has sometimes been mistaken. Folks have said, and even written, that he meant to write an English "Comedie Humaine." There is, no doubt, a touch of truth in this notion, but no more than a touch. He would have liked to follow in Balzac's mighty footsteps, and do something for England which would possibly be inclusive of all social grades. At any rate he began at the bottom and worked upwards. It is quite obvious to me that what prevented him from going further in any such scheme was not actually a want of power or any failure of industry, it was a real failure of knowledge and of close contact with the classes composing the whole nation. Beyond the lower middle class his knowledge was not very deep. He was mentally an alien, and a satiric if interested intruder. He had been exiled for the unpardonable sins of his youth. It is impossible for any man of intellect not to suspect his own limitations, and I am sure he knew that he should have been a pure child of books, for as soon as he got beyond the pale of his own grim surroundings, those surroundings which had been burnt, and were still being burnt into his soul, he apparently lost interest. Though two or three of these later books have indeed much merit, such novels as "The Vortex" and "The Best of All Things" are really failures. I believe he felt it. Anthony Hope Hawkins once wrote to me apropos of something, that there were very few men writing who really knew that all real knowledge had to be "bought." Maitland had bought his knowledge of sorrow and suffering and certain surroundings at a personal price that few can pay and not be bankrupt. But while I was associating with almost every class in the world he lived truly alone. There were, indeed, long months when he actually saw no one, and there were other periods when his only friend besides myself was that philosophic German whose philosophy put its lofty tail between its legs on a prolonged starvation diet.
As one goes on talking of him and considering his nature there are times when it seems amazing that he did not commit suicide and have done with it. Certainly there were days and seasons when I thought this might be his possible end. But some men break and others bend, and in him there was undoubtedly some curious strength though it were but the Will to Live of Schopenhauer, the one philosopher he sometimes read. I myself used to think that it was perhaps his native sensuousness which kept him alive in spite of all his misery. No man ever lived who enjoyed things that were even remotely enjoyable more acutely than himself, though I think his general attitude towards life was like his attitude towards people and the world. For so many good men Jehovah would have spared the Cities of the Plains. So in a certain sense the few good folk that he perceived in any given class made him endure the others that he hated, while he painted those he loved against their dingy and dreadful background. The motto on the original title-page of "The Under World" was a quotation from a speech by Renan delivered at the Académie Française in 1889: "La peinture d'un fumier peut être justifiée pourvu qu'il y pousse une belle fleur; sans cela, le fumier n'est que repoussant." The few beautiful flowers of the world for Henry Maitland were those who hated their surroundings and desired vainly to grow out of them. Such he pitied, hopeless as he believed their position, and vain as he knew to be their aspirations. In a way all this was nothing but translated self-pity. Had he been more fortunate in his youth I do not believe he would have ever turned his attention in any way towards social affairs, in which he took no native interest. His natural sympathy was only for those whom he could imagine to be his mental fellows. Almost every sympathetic character in all his best books was for him like the starling in the cage of Sterne—the starling that cried, "I can't get out! I can't get out!" Among the subjects that he refused to speak of or to discuss was one which for a long time greatly interested me, and interests me still—I refer to Socialism. But then Socialism, after all, is nothing but a more or less definitive view of a definite organisation with perfectly recognised ends, and he saw no possibility of any organisation doing away with the things he loathed. That is to say, he was truly hopeless, most truly pessimistic. He was a sensuous and not a scientific thinker, and to get on with him for any length of time it was necessary for me to suppress three-quarters of the things I wished to speak about. He was a strange egoist, though truly the hateful world was not his own. It appeared to me that he prayed, or strove, for the power to ignore it. It is for this reason that it seems to me now that all his so-called social work and analysis were in the nature of an alien tour de force. He bent his intellect in that direction, and succeeded even against his nature. He who desired to be a Bentley or a Porson wrote bitterly about the slums of Tottenham Court Road. With Porson he damned the nature of things, and wrote beautifully about them. I remember on one occasion telling him of a piece of script in the handwriting of the great surgeon, John Hunter, which ran: "Damn civilisation! It makes cats eat their kittens, sows eat their young, and women send their children out to nurse." I think that gave him more appreciation of science than anything he had ever heard. For it looked back into the past, and for Henry Maitland the past was the age of gold. In life, as he had to live it, it was impossible to ignore the horrors of the present time. He found it easier to ignore the horrors of the past, and out of ancient history he made his great romance, which, truly, he never wrote.
It is a curious thing that a man who was thus so essentially romantic should have been mistaken, not without great reason, for a realist. In one sense he was a realist, but this was the fatal result of his nature and his circumstances. Had he lived in happier surroundings, still writing fiction, I am assured it would have been romance. And yet, curiously enough, I doubt if any of his ideas concerning women were at all romantic. His disaster with his first wife was due to early and unhappily awakened sex feeling, but I think he believed that his marrying her was due to his desire to save somebody whom he considered to be naturally a beautiful character from the dunghill in which he found her. This poor girl was his first belle fleur. In all his relations with women it seems as if his own personal loneliness was the dominating factor. So much did he feel these things that it was rarely possible to discuss them with him. Nevertheless it was the one subject, scientifically treated, on which I could get him to listen to me. In the first five years of my literary apprenticeship I began a book, which is still unfinished, and never will be finished, called "Social Pathology." So far as it dealt with sex and sex deprivation, he was much interested in it. In all his books there is to be found the misery of the man who lives alone and yet cannot live alone. I do not think that in any book but "The Unchosen," he ever made a study of that from the woman's side. But it is curiously characteristic of his sex view that the chief feminine character of that book apparently knew not love even when she thought that she knew it, but was only aware of awakened senses.
One might have imagined, considering his early experiences, that he would have led the ordinary life of man, and associated, if only occasionally, with women of the mercenary type. This, I am wholly convinced, was a thing he never did, though I possess one poem which implies the possible occurrence of such a passing liaison. There was, however, another incident in his life which occurred not long before I went to America. He was then living in one room in the house of a journeyman bookbinder. On several occasions when I visited him there I saw his landlady, a young and not unpleasing woman, who seemed to take great interest in him, and did her very best to make him comfortable in narrow, almost impossible, surroundings. Her husband, a man a great deal older than herself, drank, and not infrequently ill-treated her. This was not wholly Maitland's story, for I saw the man myself, as well as his wife. It appears she went for sympathy to her lodger, and he told her something of his own troubles. Their common griefs threw them together. She was obviously of more than the usual intelligence of her class. It appeared that she desired to learn French, or made Maitland believe so; my own view being that she desired his company. The result of this was only natural, and soon afterwards Maitland was obliged to leave the house owing to the jealousy of her husband, who for many years had already been suspicious of her without any cause. But this affair was only passing. He took other rooms, and so far as I know never saw her again.
While I was in America he was living at 7K, and in that gloomy flat there was an affair of another order, an incident not without many parallels in the lives of poor artists and writers. It seems that a certain lady not without importance in society, the wife of a rich husband, wrote to him about one of his books, and having got into correspondence with him allowed her curiosity to overcome her discretion. She visited him very often in his chambers, and though he told me but little I gathered what the result was. Oddly enough, by a curious chain of reasoning and coincidence, I afterwards discovered this woman's name, which I shall, of course, suppress. So far as I am aware these were the only two romantic or quasi-romantic incidents in Maitland's life until towards the end of it. When I came back from America he certainly had no mistress, and beyond an occasional visit from the sons of Harold Edgeworth, he practically received no one but myself. His poverty forbade him entertaining any but one of his fellows who was as poor as he was, and the few acquaintances he had once met in better surroundings than his own gradually drifted away from him, or died as Cotter Morison died. Although he spoke so very little about these matters of personal loneliness and deprivation I was yet conscious from the general tenor of his writing and an occasional dropped word, how bitterly he felt it personally. It had rejoiced my unregenerate heart in America to learn that he was not entirely without feminine companionship at a time when the horror of his life was only partially mitigated by the preference of his mad and wretched wife for the dens and slums of the New Cut. This woman of the upper classes had come to him like a star, and had been a lamp in his darkness. I wonder if she still retains within her heart some memories of those hours.