One day when I was with him he spoke of the bad luck of "The Flower," which seemed to him almost inexplicable. It was so very unlucky that it had not done well, for the loss of the extra ten pounds was not easy for him to get over in his perpetual and grinding poverty. When we had discussed the matter he determined to ask the firm what they would give him for all further rights in the book. He did this, and they were kind enough to pay the sum of ten pounds for them, making up the old price of fifty pounds for the whole book. Then, by one of those chances which only business men are capable of thoroughly appreciating, a demand suddenly sprang up for the story and the publishers were enabled to bring out a new edition at once. Some time later it went into a third edition, and, I believe, even into a fourth. Now it will hardly be credited that Maitland was very sore about this, for he was usually a very just man; and when I suggested, for the hundredth time but now at the psychological moment, that the firm of Bent and Butler who were then publishing for me, might give him very good terms, he actually had the courage to leave his own publishers, and never went back to them.
I have insisted time and again upon Maitland's weakness and his inability to move. Nothing, I believe, but a sense of rankling injustice would have made him move. I had been trying for three years to get him to go to my publishing friends, and I have heard his conduct in the matter described as obstinacy. But to speak truly it was sheer weakness and nervousness. The older firm at any rate gave him fifty pounds for a book, and they were wealthy people, likely to last. My own friends were new men, and although they gave him a hundred pounds on account of increasing royalties, it was conceivably possible that they might be a failure and presently go out of business. His notion was that the firm he had left would then refuse to have anything more to do with him, that he would get no other firm to publish his work, and that he would be thrown back into the ditch from which he had crawled with so much difficulty. It is an odd comment on himself where he makes one man say to another in "Paternoster Row": "You are the kind of man who is roused by necessity. I am overcome by it. My nature is feeble and luxurious. I never in my life encountered and overcame a practical difficulty." He spoke afterwards somewhat too bitterly of his earlier publishing experiences, and was never tired of quoting Mrs. Gaskell to show how Charlotte Brontë had fared.
In "The Meditations" he says: "Think of that grey, pinched life, the latter years of which would have been so brightened had Charlotte Brontë received but, let us say, one-third of what, in the same space of time, the publisher gained by her books. I know all about this; alas! no man better." There was no subject on which he was more bitterly vocal. Mr. Jones-Brown, the senior partner of Messrs. Miller and Company, I knew myself, for after I wrote "The Wake of the Sun," it was read by Glass and sold to them for fifty pounds. When this bargain was finally struck Mr. Jones-Brown said to me: "Now, Mr. H., as the business is all done, would you mind telling me quite frankly to what extent this book of yours is true?" I replied: "It is as true in every detail as it can possibly be." "Then you mean to say," he asked, "that you actually did starve as you relate?" I said: "Certainly I did, and I might have made it a deal blacker if I had chosen." He fell into a momentary silent reverie and shaking his head, murmured: "Ah, hunger is a dreadful thing;—I once went without dinner myself!" This was a favourite story of Henry Maitland's. It was so characteristic of the class he chiefly loathed. Those who have gathered by now what his satiric and ironic tendencies were, can imagine his bitter, and at the same time uproariously jocular comments on such a statement. For he was the man who had stood cursing outside a cookshop without even a penny to satisfy his raging hunger, as he truly relates under cover of "The Meditations."
It is an odd, and perhaps even remarkable fact, that the man who had suffered in this way, and was so wonderfully conscious of the absurdities and monstrosities of our present social system, working by the pressure of mere economics, should have regarded all kinds of reform not merely without hope, but with an actual terror. He had once, as he owned, been touched by Socialism, probably of a purely academic kind; and yet, when he was afterwards withdrawn from such stimuli as had influenced him to think for once in terms of sociology, he went back to his more natural depairing conservative frame of mind. He lived in the past, and was conscious every day that something in the past that he loved was dying and must vanish. No form of future civilisation, whatever it might be, which was gained by means implying the destruction of what he chiefly loved, could ever appeal to him. He was not even able to believe that the gross and partial education of the populace was better than no education at all, in that it must some day inevitably lead to better education and a finer type of society. It was for that reason that he was a Conservative. But he was the kind of Conservative who would now be repudiated by those who call themselves such, except perhaps in some belated and befogged country house.
A non-combative Tory seems a contradiction in words, but Maitland's loathing of disturbance in any form, or of any solution of any question by means other than the criticism of the Pure Reason, was most extreme. As for his feelings towards the Empire and all that it implied, that is best put in a few words he wrote to me about my novel "In the Sun": "Yes, this is good, but you know that I loathe the Empire, and that India and Africa are abomination to me." To anticipate as I tell his story I may quote again on the same point from a letter written to me in later years when he was in Paris: "I am very seriously thinking of trying to send my boy to some part of the world where there is at least a chance of his growing up an honest farmer without obvious risk of his having to face the slavery of military service. I would greatly rather never see him again than foresee his marching in ranks; butchering, or to be butchered."
This implies, of course, as I have said before, that he failed for ever to grasp the world as it was. He clung passionately and with revolt to his own ideas of what it ought to be, and protested with a curious feeble violence against the actual world as he would not see it. It is a wonder that he did any work at all. If he had had fifty pounds a year of his own he would have retreated into a cottage and asphyxiated himself with books.
I have often thought that the most painful thing in all his work was what he insisted on so often in "Paternoster Row" with regard to the poor novelist there depicted. The man was always destroying commenced work. Once he speaks about "writing a page or two of manuscript daily, with several holocausts to retard him." Within my certain knowledge this happened scores of times to Maitland. He destroyed a quarter of a volume, half a volume, three quarters of a volume, a whole volume, and even more, time and time again. He did this, to my mind, because he fancied nervously that he must write, that he had to write, and began without adequate preparation. It became absolutely tragic, for he commenced work knowing that he would destroy it, and knowing the pain such destruction would cost him, when a little rest might have enabled him to begin cheerfully with a fresh mind. I used to suggest this to him, but it was entirely useless. He would begin, and destroy, and begin again, and then only partially satisfy himself at last when he was in a state of financial desperation, with the ditch or the workhouse in front of him.
In this he never seemed to learn by experience. It was a curious futility, which was all the odder because he was so peculiarly conscious of a certain kind of futility exhibited by our friend Schmidt. He used to write to Maitland at least a dozen times a year from Potsdam. These letters were all almost invariably read to me. They afforded Maitland extraordinary amusement and real pleasure, and yet great pain. Schmidt used to begin the letter with something like this: "I have been spending the last month or two in deep meditation on the work which it lies in my power to do. I have now discovered that I was not meant to write fiction. I am therefore putting it resolutely aside, and am turning to history, to which I shall henceforward devote my life." About two months later Maitland would read me a portion of a letter which began: "I have been much troubled these last two months, and have been considering my own position and my own endowments with the greatest interest. I find that I have been mistaken in thinking that I had any powers which would enable me to write history in a satisfactory manner. I see that I am essentially a philosopher. Henceforth I shall devote myself to philosophy." Again, a month or two after, there would come a letter from him, making another statement as if he had never made one before: "I am glad to say that I have at last discovered my own line. After much thought I am putting aside philosophy. Henceforward I devote myself to fiction." This kind of thing occurred not once but twenty or thirty times, and the German for ever wrote as if he had never written anything before with regard to his own powers and capabilities. One is reminded forcibly of a similar case in England, that of J.K. Stephen.
As I have been speaking of "Paternoster Row," it is very interesting to observe that Maitland was frequently writing most directly of himself in that book. It is curious that in this, one of his most successful novels, he should have recognised his own real limitations. He says that "no native impulse had directed him to novel-writing. His intellectual temper was that of the student, the scholar, but strongly blended with a love of independence which had always made him think with detestation of a teacher's life." He goes on to speak of the stories which his hero wrote, "scraps of immature psychology, the last thing a magazine would accept from an unknown man." It may be that he was thinking here of some of his own short stories, for which I was truly responsible. Year after year I suggested that he should do some, as they were, on the whole, the easiest way of making a little money. Naturally I had amazing trouble with him because it was a new line, but I returned to the charge in season and out of season, every Sunday and every week-day that I saw him, and every time I wrote. We were both perfectly conscious that he had not the art of writing dramatic short stories which were essentially popular. There is no doubt that he did not possess this faculty. When one goes through his shorter work one discovers few indeed which are stories or properly related to the conte. They are, indeed, often scraps of psychology, sometimes perhaps a little crude, but the crudeness is mostly in the construction. They are in fact rather possible passages from a book than short stories. Nevertheless he did fairly well with these when he worked with an agent, which he did finally and at last on continued pressure from me. I notice, however, that in his published volumes of short stories there are several missing which I should like to see again. I do not know whether they are good, but two or three that I remember vaguely were published, I believe, in the old "Temple Bar." One was a story about a donkey, which I entirely forget, and another was called "Mr. Why." It was about a poor man, not wholly sane, who lived in one room and left all that that room contained to some one else upon his death. On casual search it seemed that the room contained nothing, but the heir or heiress discovered at last on the top of an old cupboard Why's name written large in piled half-crowns.
It may have been noticed by some that he spoke in the little "Gillman" set of verses which I have quoted, of "Hendersonian bores." This perhaps requires comment. For one who loved his Rabelais and the free-spoken classics of our own tongue, Maitland had an extreme purity of thought and speech, a thing which one might not, in some ways, have looked for. No one, I think, would have dared to tell him a gross story, which did not possess remarkable wit or literary merit, more than once. His reception of such tales was never cordial, and I remember his peculiar and astounding indignation at one incident. Somehow or another he had become acquainted with an East End clergyman named Henderson. This Henderson had, I believe, read "The Under World," or one of the books dealing with the kind of parishioner that he was acquainted with, and had written to Maitland. In a way they became friends, or at any rate acquaintances, for the clergyman too was a peculiarly lonely man. He occasionally came to 7K, and I myself met him there. He was a man wholly misplaced, in fact he was an absolute atheist. Still, he had a cure of souls somewhere the other side of the Tower, and laboured, as I understood, not unfaithfully. He frequently discussed his mental point of view with Maitland and often used to write to him. By some native kink in his mind he used to put into these letters indecent words. I suppose he thought it was a mere outspoken literary habit. As a matter of fact this enraged Maitland so furiously that he brought the letters to me, and showing them demanded my opinion as to what he should do. He said: "This kind of conduct is outrageous! What am I to do about it?" Now, it never occurred to Maitland in a matter like this, or indeed in any matter, to be absolutely outspoken and straightforward. He was always so afraid of hurting people's feelings. I said: "It is perfectly obvious what to do. My good man, if you don't like it, write and tell him that you don't." This was to him a perfectly impossible solution of a very great difficulty. How it was solved I do not exactly remember, but I do know that we afterwards saw very little of Mr. Henderson, who is embalmed, like a poor fly, in the "Gillman" poem.