Whether he had peace or not he still worked prodigiously, though not perhaps for so many hours as was his earlier custom. But his health about this time began to fail. Much of this came from his habits of work, which were entirely incompatible with continued health of brain and body. He once said to Rivers: "Visitors—I fall sick with terror in thinking of them. If by rare chance any one comes here it means to me the loss of a whole day, a most serious matter." And his whole day was, of course, a long day. No man of letters can possibly sit for ever at the desk during eight hours, as was frequently "his brave custom" as he phrased it somewhere. If he had worked in a more reasonable manner, and had been satisfied with doing perhaps a thousand words a day, which is not at all an unreasonably small amount for a man who works steadily through most of the year, his health might never have broken down in the way it did. He had been moved in a way towards these hours, partly by actual desperation; partly by the great loneliness which had been thrust upon him; very largely by the want of money which prevented him from amusing himself in the manner of the average man, but chiefly by his sense of devotion to what he was doing. One of his favourite stories was that of Heyne, the great classical scholar, who was reported to work sixteen hours a day. This he did, according to the literary tradition, for the whole of his working life, except upon the day when he was married. He made, for that occasion only, a compact with the bride that he was to be allowed to work half his usual stint. And half Heyne's usual amount was Maitland's whole day, which I maintain was at least five hours too much. This manner of working, combined with his quintessential and habitual loneliness made it very hard, not only upon him, but also on his friends. It was quite impossible to see him, even about matters of comparative urgency, unless a meeting had been arranged beforehand. For even after his work was done, it was never done. He started preparing for the next day, turning over phrases in his mind, and considering the next chapter. I believe that in one point I was very useful to him in this matter, for I suggested to him, as I have done to others, that my own practice of finishing a chapter and then writing some two or three lines of the next one while my mind was warm upon the subject, was a vast help for the next day's labour.
Now the way he worked was this. After breakfast, at nine o'clock, he sat down and worked till one. Then he had his midday meal, and took a little walk. In the afternoon, about half-past three, he sat down again and wrote till six o'clock or a little after. Then he worked again from half-past seven to ten. I very much doubt whether there is any modern writer who has ever tried to keep up work at this rate who did not end in a hospital or a lunatic asylum, or die young. To my mind it shows, in a way that nothing else can, that he had no earthly business to be writing novels and spinning things largely out of his subjective mind, when he ought to have been dealing with the objective world, or with books. I myself write with a certain amount of ease. It may, indeed, be difficult to start, but when a thing is begun I go straight ahead, writing steadily for an hour, or perhaps an hour and a half—rarely any more. I have then done my day's work, which is now very seldom more than two thousand words, although on one memorable occasion I actually wrote thirteen thousand words with the pen in ten hours. Maitland used to write three or four of his slips, as he called them, which were small quarto pages of very fine paper, and on each slip there were twelve hundred words. Whether he wrote one, or two, or three slips in the day he took an equal length of time.
Among my notes I find one about a letter of his written in June 1895 to Mrs. Lake, declining an invitation to visit Dr. Lake's house which, no doubt, would have done him a great deal of good. He says: "Let me put before you an appalling list of things that have to be done, (1) Serial story (only begun) of about eighty thousand words. (2) Short novel for Cassell's to be sent in by end of October. Neither begun nor thought of. (3) Six short stories for the English Illustrated—neither begun nor thought of. (4) Twenty papers for The Sketch of a thousand words each. Dimly foreseen." Now to a man who had the natural gift of writing fiction and some reasonable time to do it in, this would seem no such enormous amount of work. For Maitland it was appalling, not so much, perhaps, on account of the actual amount of labour—if it had been one book—but for its variousness. He moved from one thing to another in fiction with great slowness.
As I have said, his health was not satisfactory. I shall have something to say about this in detail a little later. It was his own opinion, and that of certain doctors, that his lung was really affected by tuberculosis. Of this I had then very serious doubts. But he wrote in January 1897: "The weather and my lung are keeping me indoors at present, but I should much like to come to you. Waterpipes freezing—a five-pound note every winter to the plumber. Of course this is distinctly contrived by the building fraternity."
But things were not always as bad as may be gathered from a casual consideration of what I have said. In writing a life events come too thickly. For instance in 1897 he wrote to me: "Happily things are far from being as bad as last year." It appears that a certain lady, a Miss Greathead, about whom I really know nothing but what he told me, interested herself with the utmost kindness in his domestic affairs. He wrote to me: "Miss Greathead has been of very great use, and will continue to be so, I think. This house is to be given up in any case at Michaelmas, and another will not be taken till I see my way more clearly. Where I myself shall live during the autumn is uncertain. We must meet in the autumn. Work on—I have plans for seven books."
CHAPTER IX
What dismal catastrophe or prolonged domestic uproar led to the final end of his married life in 1897 I do not know. Nor have I cared to inquire very curiously. The fact remains, and it was inevitable. Towards the end of the summer he made up his mind to go to Italy in September. He wrote to me: "All work in England is at an end for me just now. I shall be away till next spring—looking forward with immense delight to solitude. Of course I have a great deal to do as soon as I can settle, which I think will be at Siena first." As a matter of fact the very next letter of his which I possess came to me from Siena. He said: "I am so confoundedly hard at work upon the Novelists book that I find it very difficult to write my letters. Thank heaven, more than half is done. I shall go south about the tenth of November. It is dull here, and I should not stay for the pleasure of it. You know that I do not care much for Tuscany. The landscape is never striking about here, and one does not get the glorious colour of the south." So one sees how Italy had awakened his colour sense. As I have said, it was after his first visit to Italy that I noted, both in his books and his conversation, an acute awakening passion for colour. I think it grew in him to the end of his life. He ended this last letter to me with: "Well, well, let us get as soon as possible into Magna Graecia and the old dead world."
I said some time ago that I had finished all I had to write about the Victorian novelists, and yet I find there is something still to say of Dickens, and it is not against the plan of such a rambling book as this to put it down here and now. When he went to Siena to write his book of criticism it seemed to me a very odd choice of a place for such a piece of work, and indeed I wondered at his undertaking it at any price. It is quite obvious to all those who really understand his attitude towards criticism of modern things that great as his interest was in Dickens it would never have impelled him to write a strong, rough, critical book mostly about him had it not been for the necessity of making money. Indeed he expressed so much to me, and I find again in a letter that he wrote to Mrs. Rivers, with whom he was now on very friendly terms, "I have made a good beginning with my critical book, and long to have done with it, for of course it is an alien subject." No doubt there are at least two classes of Maitland's readers, those who understand the man and love his really characteristic work, and those who have no understanding of him at all, or any deep appreciation, but probably profess a great admiration for this book which they judge by the part on Dickens. I think that Andrew Lang was one of these, judging from a criticism that he once wrote on Maitland. I know that I have often heard people of intelligence express so high an opinion of the "Victorian Novelists" as to imply a lack of appreciation of his other work. The study is no doubt written with much skill, and with a good writer's command of his subject, and command of himself. That is to say, he manages by skill to make people believe he was sufficiently interested in his subject to write about it. To speak plainly he thought it a pure waste of time, except from the mere financial point of view, just as he did his cutting down of Mayhew's "Life of Dickens"—which, indeed, he considered a gross outrage, but professed his inability to refuse the "debauched temptation" of the hundred and fifty pounds offered him for the work.
It would be untrue if I seemed to suggest that he was not enthusiastic about Dickens, even more so than I am myself save at certain times and seasons. For me Dickens is a man for times and periods. I cannot read him for years, and then I read him all. What I do mean is that Maitland's love of this author, or of Thackeray, say, would never have impelled him to write. Yet there is much in the book which is of great interest, if it were only as matter of comment on Maitland's own self. The other day I came across one sentence which struck me curiously. It was where Maitland asked the reader to imagine Charles Dickens occupied in the blacking warehouse for ten years. He said: "Picture him striving vainly to find utterance for the thoughts that were in him, refused the society of any but boors and rascals, making perhaps futile attempts to succeed as an actor, and in full manhood measuring the abyss which sundered him from all he had hoped." When I came to the passage I put the book down and pondered for a while, knowing well that as Maitland wrote these words he was thinking even more of himself than of Dickens, and knowing that what was not true of his subject was most bitterly true of the writer. There is another passage somewhere in the book in which he says that Dickens could not have struggled for long years against lack of appreciation. This he rightly puts down to Dickens' essentially dramatic leanings. The man needed immediate applause. But again Maitland was thinking of himself, for he had indeed struggled many years without any appreciation save that of one or two friends and some rare birds among the public. I sometimes think that one of Maitland's great attractions to Dickens lay in the fact, which he himself mentions and enlarges on, that Dickens treated of the lower middle class and the class immediately beneath it. This is where the great novelist was at his best, and in the same way these were the only classes that Maitland really knew well. There is in several things a curious likeness between Dickens and Maitland, though it lies not on the surface. He says that Dickens never had any command of a situation although he was so very strong in incident. This was also a great weakness of Henry Maitland. It rarely happens that he works out a powerful and dramatic situation to its final limits, though sometimes he does succeed in doing so. This failure in dealing with great situations is peculiarly characteristic of most English novelists. I have frequently noticed in otherwise admirable books by men of very considerable abilities and attainments, with tolerable command of their own language, that they have on every occasion shirked the great dramatic scene just when it was expected and needed. Perhaps this is due to the peculiar mauvaise honte of the English mind. To write, and yet not to give oneself away, seems to be the aim of too many writers, though the great aim of all great writing is to do, or to try to do, what they avoid. The final analysis of dreadful passion and pain comes, perhaps, too close to them. They feel the glow but also a sensation of shame in the great emotions. There are times that Maitland felt this, though perhaps unconsciously. It is at any rate certain that, like so many people, he never actually depicted with blood and tears the frightful situations in which his life was so extraordinarily full.