The private life of Henry Maitland: A record dictated by J. H.

by Morley Roberts

I have not been able to discover whether it is true, as has been said, that some of Maitland's ancestors were originally German. He himself thought this was so, without having anything definite that I remember to go upon. If it were true I wonder whether it was his Teutonic ancestry which made him turn with a certain joy to the German ideal of woman, that of the haus-frau. If little or nothing were known about him, or only so much as those know who have already written of him, it might, in some ways, be possible to reconstruct him by a process of deductive analysis, by what the school logicians call the regressus a principiatis ad principia. This is always a fascinating mental exercise, and indeed I think, with a very little light on Maitland's life, it should not have been difficult for some to build up a picture not unlike the man. For instance, no one with a gleam of intelligence, whether a critic or not, could read some portions of the chapter in "Victorian Novelists" on "Women and Dickens" without coming to the inevitable conclusion that Maitland's fortune with regard to the women with whom he had been thrown in contact must have been most lamentably unfortunate. Although Dickens drew certain offensive women with almost unequalled power, he treats them so that one becomes oblivious of their very offensiveness, as Maitland points out. Maitland's own commentary on such women is ten thousand times more bitter, and it is felt, not observed, as in Dickens' books. He calls them "these remarkable creatures," and declares they belong mostly to one rank of life, the lower middle class. "In general their circumstances are comfortable .... nothing is asked of them but a quiet and amiable discharge of their household duties; they are treated by their male kindred with great, often with extraordinary consideration. Yet their characteristic is acidity of temper and boundless licence of querulous or insulting talk. The real business of their lives is to make all about them as uncomfortable as they can. Invariably, they are unintelligent and untaught; very often they are fragrantly imbecile. Their very virtues (if such persons can be said to have any) become a scourge. In the highways and byways of life, by the fireside, and in the bed-chamber, their voices shrill upon the terrified ear." He adds that no historical investigation is needed to ascertain the truthfulness of these presentments. Indeed Maitland required no historical investigation, he had his personal experience to go upon; but this, indeed, is obvious. Nevertheless one cannot help feeling in reading this appalling indictment, that something might be said upon the other side, and that Maitland's attitude was so essentially male as to vitiate many of his conclusions.

A few pages further on in this book he says: "Another man, obtaining his release from these depths, would have turned away in loathing; Dickens found therein matter for his mirth, material for his art." But Maitland knew that Dickens had not suffered in the way he himself had done. Thus it was that he rejoiced in the punishment which Mrs. Joe Gargery received. Maitland writes: "Mrs. Joe Gargery shall be brought to quietness; but how? By a half-murderous blow on the back of her head, from which she will never recover. Dickens understood by this time that there is no other efficacious way with these ornaments of their sex."

Having spoken of Dickens it may be as well to dispose of him, with regard to Maitland, in this particular chapter. It seems to be commonly thought that Maitland wrote his book about the Victorian novelists not only with the sympathy which he expressed, but with considerable joy in the actual work. This is not true, for he regarded it essentially as a pot-boiler, and did it purely for the money. By some strange kink in his mind he chose to do it in Italy, far from any reference library. He wrote: "My little novelist book has to be written before Christmas, and to do this I must get settled at the earliest possible date in a quiet north Italian town. I think I shall choose Siena." On what principle he decided to choose a quiet north Italian town to write a book about Victorian novelists I have never been able to determine. It was certainly a very curious proceeding, especially as he had no overwhelming love of North Italy, which was for him the Italy of the Renaissance. As I have said, he actually disliked the work, and had no desire to do it, well as it was done. It is, however, curious, to me, in considering this book, to find that neither he nor any other critic of Dickens that I have ever read seems to give a satisfactory explanation of the great, and at times overwhelming, attraction that Dickens has for many. And yet on more than one occasion I discussed Dickens with him, and in a great measure he agreed with a theory I put forth with some confidence. I think it still worth considering. For me the great charm of Dickens lies not wholly in his humour or even greatly in his humour. It is not found in his characterisation, nor in his underlying philosophy of revolt, although almost every writer of consequence is a revolutionist. It results purely and simply from what the critics of the allied art of painting describe as "quality." This is a word exceedingly difficult to define. It implies more or less the characteristic way in which paint is put upon the canvas. A picture may be practically worthless from the point of view of subject or composition, it may even be comparatively poor in colouring, and yet it may have an extreme interest of surface. One finds, I think, the same thing in Dickens' writings. His page is full. It is fuller than the page of any other English writer. There are, so to speak, on any given page by any man a certain number of intellectual and emotional stimuli. Dickens' page is full of these stimuli to a most extreme degree. It is like a small mosaic, and yet clear. It has cross meanings, cross lights, reflections, suggestions. Compare a page of Dickens with a page, say, of Thackeray. Take a pencil and write down the number of mental suggestions given by a sentence of Thackeray. Take, again, a sentence of Dickens, and see how many more there are to be found. It is this tremendous and overflowing fulness which really constitutes Dickens' great and peculiar power.

But all this is anticipation. Not yet was he to write of Dickens, Thackeray, and the Brontës, for much was to befall him before he went to Italy again. He was once more alone, and I think I knew that this loneliness would not last for long. I have often regretted that I did not foresee what I might have foreseen if I had considered the man and his circumstances with the same fulness which comes to one in later years after Fate has wrought itself out. Had I known all that I might have known, or done all that I might have done, I could perhaps have saved him from something even worse than his first marriage. Yet, after all, I was a poor and busy man, and while living in Chelsea had many companions, some of them men who have now made a great name in the world of Art. The very nature of Maitland and his work, the dreadful concentration he required to do something which was, as I insist again, alien from his true nature, forbade my seeing him very often, or even often enough to gather from his reticence what was really in his mind. Had I gone to see him without any warning, it would, I knew, have utterly destroyed his whole day's work. But this solitude, this enforced and appalling loneliness, which seemed to him necessary for work if he was to live, ate into him deeply. It destroyed his nerve and what judgment he ever had which, heaven knows, was little enough. What it means to some men to live in such solitude only those who know can tell, and they never tell. To Maitland, with his sensual and sensuous nature, it was most utter damnation.

By now he had come out of the pit of his first marriage, and gradually the horrors he had passed through became dim to his eyes. They were like a badly toned photograph, and faded. I did foresee that something would happen sooner or later to alter the way in which he lived, but I know I did not foresee, and could not have foreseen or imagined what was actually coming, for no one could have prophesied it. It was absurd, impossible, monstrous, and almost bathos. And yet it fits in with the character of the man as it had been distorted by circumstance. One Sunday when I visited him he told me, with a strange mixture of abruptness and hesitation, that he had made the acquaintance of a girl in the Marylebone road. Naturally enough I thought at first that his resolution and his habits had broken down and that he had picked up some prostitute of the neighbourhood. But it turned out that the girl was "respectable." He said to me: "I could stand it no longer, so I rushed out and spoke to the very first woman I came across." It was an unhappy inspiration of the desperate, and was the first act of a prolonged drama of pain and misery. It took me some time and many questions to find out what this meant, and what it was to lead to, but presently he replied sullenly that he proposed to marry the girl if she would marry him. On hearing this, I fell into silence and we sat for a long time without speaking. Knowing him as I did, it was yet a great shock to me. For I would rather have seen him in the physical clutches of the biggest harpy in the Strand—knowing that such now could not long hold him. I had done my best, as a mere boy, to prevent him marrying his first wife, and had failed with the most disastrous results. I now determined to stop this marriage if I could. I ventured to remind him of the past, and the part I had played in it when I implored him to have no more to do with Marian Hilton long before he married her. I told him once more, trying to renew it in him, of the relief it had been when his first wife died, but nothing that I could say seemed to move, or even to offend him. His mind recognised the truth of everything, but his body meant to have its way. He was quiet, sullen, set—even when I told him that he would repent it most bitterly. The only thing I could at last get him to agree to was that he would take no irrevocable step for a week.

I asked him questions about the girl. He admitted that he did not love her in any sense of the word love. He admitted that she had no great powers of attraction, that she seemed to possess no particularly obvious intellect. She had received his advances in the street in the way that such girls, whose courtship is traditionally carried on in the open thoroughfare, do receive them. But when he asked her to visit him in his chambers she replied to that invitation with all the obvious suspicion of a lower-class girl from whom no sex secrets were hidden. From the very start the whole affair seemed hopeless, preposterous, intolerable, and I went away from him in despair. It was a strange thing that Maitland did not seem to know what love was. If I have not before this said something about his essential lack of real passion in his dealings with women it must be said now. Of course, it is quite obvious that he had a boyish kind of passion for Marian Hilton, but it was certainly not that kind of passion which mostly keeps boys innocent. Indeed those calf loves which afflict youths are at the same time a great help to them, for a boy is really as naturally coy as any maiden. If by any chance Maitland, instead of coming into the hands of a poor girl of the streets of Moorhampton, had fallen in love with some young girl of decent character and upbringing, his passions would not have been so fatally roused. I think it was probably the whole root of his disaster that this should have occurred at all. Possibly it was the horror and rage and anger connected with this first affair, combined with the fact that it became actually sensual, which prevented him having afterwards what one might without priggishness describe as a pure passion. At any rate I never saw any signs of his being capable of the overwhelming passion which might under other circumstances drive a man down to hell, or raise him to heaven. To my mind all his books betray an extreme lack of this. His characters in all their love-affairs are essentially too reasonable. A man wishes to marry a girl, not because he desires her simply and overwhelmingly, but because she is a fitting person, or the kind of woman of whom he has been able to build up certain ideas which suit his mind. In fact the love of George Hardy for Isabel in "The Exile" is somewhat typical of the whole attitude he had towards affairs of passion. Then again in "Paternoster Row" there is the suicide of Gifford which throws a very curious light on Maitland's nature. Apparently Gifford did not commit suicide because of his failure, or because he was half starving, it was because he was weakly desirous of a woman like Anne—not necessarily Anne herself. In Maitland's phrase, he desired her to complete his manhood, to my mind the most ridiculous way of putting the affair. It is in this, I think, that Maitland showed his essential lack of knowledge of the other sex. A man does not captivate women by going to them and explaining, with more or less periphrasis, that they are required to complete his manhood, that he feels a rather frustrate male individual without them. And if he has these ideas at the back of his head and goes courting, the result is hardly likely to be successful. Maitland never understood the passion in the man that sweeps a woman off her feet. One finds this lack in all his men who live celibate lives. They suffer physically, or they suffer to a certain degree from loneliness, but one never feels that only one woman could cure their pain, or alleviate their desolation. At times Maitland seemed, as it were, to be in love with the sex but not with the woman. Of course he had a bitter hatred of the general prejudices of morality, a thing which was only natural to any one who had lived his life and thought what he thought. It is a curious thing to note that his favourite poem in the whole English language was perhaps the least likely one that could be picked out. This was Browning's "Statue and the Bust," which is certainly of a teaching not Puritan in its essence. The Puritan ideal Maitland loathed with a fervour which produced the nearest I have ever seen in him to actual rage and madness. He roared against it if he did not scoff. He sometimes quoted the well-known lines from the unknown Brathwait:

"Where I saw a Puritane one
Hanging of his Cat on Monday,
For killing of a Mouse on Sonday."

I remember very well his taking down Browning when I was with him one afternoon at 7K. He read a great portion of "The Statue and the Bust" out aloud, and we discussed it afterwards, of course pointing out to each other with emphasis its actual teaching, its loathing of futility. It teaches that the two people who loved each other but never achieved love were two weaklings, who ought to have acted, and should not have allowed themselves to be conquered by the lordly husband. Maitland said: "Those people who buy Browning and think they understand it—oh, if they really knew what he meant they would pick him up with a pair of tongs, and take him out, and burn him in their back yards—in their back yards!" It strikes one that Maitland, in his haste, seemed to imagine that the kind of bourgeois or bourgeoise whom he imagined thus destroying poor Browning with the aid of tongs, possessed such things as back yards, and, perhaps, frequented them on Sunday afternoons. But he had lived for so many years in houses which had not a garden, or anything but a small, damp yard behind, that he began to think, possibly, that all houses were alike. I roared with laughter at his notion of what these prosperous Puritans would do. I had a picture in my mind of some well-dressed woman of the upper middle-class bringing out "The Statue and the Bust" with a pair of tongs, and burning it in some small and horrible back yard belonging to a house in the slums between Tottenham Court Road and Fitzroy Square. And yet, although he understood Browning's sermon against the passive futility of these weak and unfortunate lovers he could not, I think, have understood wholly, or in anything but a literary sense the enormous power of passion which Browning possessed. This lack in him is one of the keys to his character, and it unlocks much. When I left him after he told me about this new affair, I went back to my own rooms and sat thinking it over, wondering if it were possible even now to do anything to save him from his own nature, and the catastrophe his nature was preparing. Without having seen the girl I felt sure that it would be a catastrophe, for I knew him too well. Nevertheless on reflecting over the matter it did seem to me that there was one possible chance of saving him from himself. It was a very unlikely thing that I should succeed, but at any rate I could try.

I have said that we rarely spoke of his early life, and never of what had happened in Moorhampton. Nevertheless I was, of course, aware that it dominated the whole of his outlook and all of his thoughts in any way connected with ordinary social life, especially with regard to intercourse with those who might know something about his early career. At this time I do not think that he actually blamed himself much for what had happened. Men die many times in life and are born again, and by this time he must have looked on the errant youth who had been himself as little more than an ancestor. He himself had died and risen again, and if he was not the man he might have been, he was certainly not the man he had been. Nevertheless he was perpetually alive to what other people might possibly think of him. I believe that the real reason for his almost rigid seclusion from society was that very natural fear that some brute, and he knew only too well that there are such brutes, might suddenly and unexpectedly expose his ancient history. It is true that even in our society in England, which is not famous all the world over for tact, it was not very likely to happen. Nevertheless the bare possibility that it might occur absolutely dominated him. It requires very little sympathy or understanding of his character to see that this must have been so. No doubt it was mainly from this cause that he considered he had no right to approach women of his own class, seeing that he had declassed himself, without telling the whole truth. But this was quite impossible for him to do, and I knew it. In some cases it would have been wise, in some unwise, but Henry Maitland was unable to do such a thing. The result was this sudden revolt, and the madness which led him to speak to this girl of the Marylebone Road, whom I had not yet met but whom I pictured, not inadequately, in my mind. At the first glance it seemed that nothing could possibly be done, that the man must be left to "dree his weird," to work out his fate and accomplish his destiny. And yet I lay awake for a very long time that night thinking of the whole situation, and I at last determined to take a step on his behalf which, at any rate, had the merit of some originality and courage.

Years ago in Moorhampton, when he was a boy, before the great disaster came, Maitland had visited my uncle's house, and had obviously pleased every one he met there. He was bright, not bad looking, very cheerful and enthusiastic, and few that met him did not like him. Among those whose acquaintance he made at that house were two of my own cousins. In later years they often spoke of him to me, even although they had not seen him since he was a boy of seventeen. I now went to both of them and told them the whole affair in confidence, speaking quite openly of his character, and the impossibility he discovered within himself of living in the desolation which fate had brought upon him. They understood his character, and were acquainted with his reputation. He was a man of genius, if not a man of great genius, and occupied a certain position in literature which would one day, we all felt assured, be still a greater position. They were obviously exceedingly sorry for him, and not the less sorry when I told them of the straits in which he sometimes found himself. Nevertheless it seemed to me, as I explained to them, that if he had been lucky enough to marry some one in sympathy with him and his work, some one able to help in a little way to push him forward on the lines on which he might have attained success, there was yet great hope for him even in finance, or so I believed. Then I asked them whether it would not be possible to stop this proposed outrageous marriage, a thing which seemed to me utterly unnatural. They were, however, unable to make any suggestion, and certainly did not follow what was in my mind. Then I opened what I had to say, and asked them abruptly if it were not possible for one of them to consider whether she would marry him if the present affair could be brought decently to an end. They were both educated women, and knew at least two foreign languages. They were accustomed to books, and appreciated his work.