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

by Morley Roberts

I do not think that this letter requires much comment or illustration. Although it is written soberly enough, and without actual accusation, its meaning is as plain as daylight. His wife was alternately too familiar, or at open hostility with the servant; none could endure her temper. She complained to him, or the servant complained to him, and he had to make peace, or to try to make it—mostly in vain. And then the quarrel broke out anew, and the servant left. The result was that Maitland himself often did the household work when he should have been writing. He was dragged away from his ordinary tasks by an uproar in the kitchen; or perhaps one or both of the angry women came to him for arbitration about some point of common decency. There is a phrase of his in "The Meditations" which speaks of poor Hooker, whose prose he so much admired, being "vixen-haunted." This epithet of his is a reasonable and admirable one, but how bitter it was few know so well as myself.

In this place it does not seem to me unnatural or out of place to comment a little on Raymond, the chief character in "The Vortex." He was undoubtedly in a measure the later Maitland. His idea was to present a man whose character developed with somewhat undue slowness. He said that Raymond would probably never have developed at all after a certain stage but for the curious changes wrought in his views and sentiments by the fact of his becoming a father. Of course it must be obvious to any one, from what I have said, that Maitland himself would never have remained so long with his second wife after the first few months if it had not been that she was about to become a mother. The earlier passages in "The Vortex" where he speaks about children, or where Raymond himself speaks about them, are meant to contrast strongly with his way of thinking in the later part of the book when this particular character had children of his own. The author declared that Raymond, as a bachelor, was largely an egoist. Of course the truth of the matter is that Maitland himself was essentially an egoist. I once suggested to him that he came near being a solipsist, a word he probably had never heard of till then, as he never studied psychology, modern or otherwise. However, when Raymond grew riper in the experience which killed his crude egoism, he became another man. Maitland, in writing about this particular book, said: "That Raymond does nothing is natural to the man. The influences of the whirlpool—that is London—and its draught on the man's vitality embarrass any efficiency there might have been in him." Through the whole story of Maitland one feels that everything that was in any way hostile to his own views of life did essentially embarrass, and almost make impossible, anything that was in him. He had no strength to draw nutriment by main force from everything around him, as a strong man does. He was not so fierce a fire as to burn every kind of fuel.

I remember in this connection a very interesting passage in Hamley's "Operations of War": "When a general surveying the map of the theatre finds direct obstacles in the path he must advance by, he sees in them, if he be confident of his skill in manoeuvring, increased opportunities for obtaining strategical successes ... in fact, like any other complications in a game, they offer on both sides additional opportunities to skill and talent, and additional embarrassments to incapacity." But then Maitland loathed and hated and feared obstacles of every kind. He was apt to sit down before them wringing his hands, and only desperation moved him, not to attack, but to elude them. It is an odd thing in this respect to note that he played no games, and despised them with peculiar vigour. There is a passage in one of his letters to Rivers about a certain Evans, mentioned with a note of exclamation, and thus kindly embalmed: "Evans, strange being! Yet, if his soul is satisfied with golf and bridge, why should he not go on golfing and bridging? At all events he is working his way to sincerity."

The long letter I quoted from above was written, I believe, in 1895, when the boy was nearly three years old. I have not attempted, and shall not attempt, to give any detailed account month by month, or even year by year, of his domestic surroundings. It was a wonder to me that the marriage lasted, but still it did last, and all one knew was that some day it must come to an end. The record of his life in these days would be appalling if I remembered it sufficiently, or had kept a diary—as no doubt I ought to have done—or had all the documents which may be in existence dealing with that time. That he endured so many years was incredible, and still he did endure, and the time went on, and he worked; mostly, as he said to me, against time, and a good deal on commission. He wrote: "The old fervours do not return to me, and I have got into the very foolish habit of perpetually writing against time and to order. The end of this is destruction." But still I think he knew within him that it could not last. Had it not been for the boy, and, alas, for the birth of yet another son, he would now have left her. He acknowledged it to me—if he could not fight he would have to fly.

This extraordinary lack of power to deal with any obstacle must seem strange to most men, though no doubt many are weak. Yet few are so weak as Maitland. Oddly enough I have heard the idea expressed that there was more power of fight in Maitland than he ever possessed, and on inquiry I have learned that this notion was founded on a partial, or perhaps complete misunderstanding of certain things he expressed in the latter part of "The Vortex." Towards the end of the book it seems to be suggested that Maitland, or Raymond, tended really towards what he calls in one of his letters a "barrack-room" view of life. Some people seem to think that the man who was capable of writing what he did in that book really meant it, and must have had a little touch of that native and natural brutality which makes Englishmen what they are. But Maitland himself, in commenting on this particular attitude of Raymond, declared that this quasi or semi-ironic imperialism of the man was nothing but his hopeless recognition of facts which filled him with disgust. The world was going in a certain way. There was no refusing to see it. It stared every one in the eyes. Then he adds: "But what a course for things to take!"

Raymond in fact talks with a little throwing up of the arm, and in a voice of quiet sarcasm, "Go ahead—I sit by and watch, and wonder what will be the end of it all." This was his own habit of mind in later years. He had come at last and at long last, to recognise a course of things which formerly he could not, or would not, perceive; and he recognised it with just that tossing of arm or head, involuntary of course. I do not think that at this time he would have seen a battalion of Guards go by and have turned to me saying: "And this, this is the nineteenth century!" He once wrote to Rivers, what he had said a hundred times to me: "I have a conviction that all I love and believe in is going to the devil. At the same time I try to watch with interest this process of destruction, admiring any bit of sapper work that is well done." It is rather amusing to note that in the letter, written in the country, which puts these things most dolefully, he adds: "The life here shows little trace of vortical influence." Of course this is a reference to the whirlpool of London.

In 1896 I was myself married, and went to live in a little house in Fulham. I understood what peace was, and he had none. As Maitland had not met my wife for some years I asked him to come and dine with us. It was not the least heavy portion of his burden that he always left his own house with anxiety and returned to it with fear and trembling. This woman of his home was given to violence, even with her own young children. It was possible, as he knew, for he often said so to me, that he might return and find even the baby badly injured. And yet at last he made up his mind to accept my invitation. Whether it was the fact that he had accepted one from me—and I often fancy that his wife had a grudge against me because I would not go to her house any more—I do not know, but when I met him in the hall of my own house I found him in the most extraordinary state of nervous and physical agitation. Though usually of a remarkable, if healthy, pallor, he was now almost crimson, and his eyes sparkled with furious indignation. He was hot, just as if he had come out of an actual physical struggle. What he must have looked like when he left Ewell I do not know, for he had had all the time necessary to travel from there to Fulham to cool down in. After we shook hands he asked me, almost breathlessly, to allow him to wash his face, so I took him into the bathroom. He removed his coat, and producing his elastic band from his waistcoat pocket, put it about his hair like a fillet, and began to wash his face in cold water. As he was drying himself he broke out suddenly: "I can't stand it any more. I have left her for ever." I said: "Thank heaven that you have. I am very glad of it—and for every one's sake don't go back on it."

Whatever the immediate cause of this outburst was, it seems that that afternoon the whole trouble came to a culmination. The wife behaved like a maniac; she shrieked, and struck him. She abused him in the vilest terms, such as he could not or would not repeat to me. It was with the greatest difficulty that I at last got him calm enough to meet any one else. When he did calm down after he had had something to eat and a little to drink, the prospect of his freedom, which he believed had come to him once more, inspired him with pathetic and peculiar exhilaration. In one sense I think he was happy that night. He slept in London.

I should have given a wholly false impression of Maitland if any one now imagined that I believed that the actual end had come to his marriage. No man knew his weakness better than I did, and I moved heaven and earth in my endeavours to keep him to his resolution, to prevent him going back to Epsom on any pretext, and all my efforts were vain. In three days I learned that his resolution had broken down. By the help of some busybody who had more kindness than intelligence, they patched up a miserable peace, and he went back to Ewell. And yet that peace was no peace. Maitland, perhaps the most sensitive man alive, had to endure the people in the neighbouring houses coming out upon the doorstep, eager to inquire what disaster was occurring in the next house. There were indeed legends in the Epsom Road that the mild looking writer beat and brutalised his wife, though most knew, by means of servants' chatter, what the actual facts were.

It was in this year that he did at last take an important step which cost him much anxiety before putting it through. His fears for his eldest child were so extreme that he induced his people in the north to give the child a home—the influence and example of the mother he could no longer endure for the boy. His wife parted with the child without any great difficulty, though of course she made it an occasion for abusing her husband in every conceivable way. He wrote to me in the late summer of that year: "I much want to see you, but just now it is impossible for me to get to town, and the present discomfort of everything here forbids me to ask you to come. I am straining every nerve to get some work done, for really it begins to be a question whether I shall ever again finish a book. Interruptions are so frequent and so serious. The so-called holiday has been no use to me; a mere waste of time—but I was obliged to go, for only in that way could I have a few weeks with the boy who, as I have told you, lives now at Mirefields and will continue to live there. I shall never let him come back to my own dwelling. Have patience with me, old friend, for I am hard beset." He ends this letter with: "If the boy grows up in clean circumstances, that will be my one satisfaction."