It is an interesting passage in this book in which Maitland declares that great popularity was never yet attained by any one deliberately writing down to a low ideal. Above all men he knew that the artist was necessarily sincere, however poor an artist he might be. So Rousseau in his "Confessions" asserts that nothing really great can come from an entirely venal pen. I remember Maitland greatly enjoyed a story I told him about myself. While I was still a poverty-stricken and struggling writer my father, who had no knowledge whatever of the artistic temperament, although he had a very great appreciation of the best literature of the past, came to me and said seriously: "My boy, if you want money and I know you do, why do you not write 'Bow Bells Novelettes'? They will give you fifteen pounds for each of them." I replied to him, not I think without a tinge of bitterness at being so misunderstood: "My dear sir, it is as much a matter of natural endowment to be a damned fool as to be a great genius, and I am neither."
I have said that Maitland was most essentially a conservative, indeed in many ways a reactionary, if one so passive can be called that. I think the only actual revolutionary utterance of his mind which stands on record is in the "Victorian Novelists." It is when he is speaking of Mr. Casby of the shorn locks. He wrote: "This question of landlordism should have been treated by Dickens on a larger scale. It remains one of the curses of English life, and is likely to do so till the victims of house-owners see their way to cutting, not the hair, but the throats, of a few selected specimens."
It may seem a hard thing to say, but it is a fact, that any revolutionary sentiment there was in Maitland was excited, not by any native liberalism of his mind, or even by his sympathy for the suffering of others, but came directly out of his own personal miseries and trials. He had had to do with landlords who refused to repair their houses, and with houses which he looked upon as the result of direct and wicked conspiracy between builders and plumbers. But his words are capable of a wider interpretation than he might have given them.
If I had indeed been satisfied that this departure of Maitland's to Italy had meant the end of all the personal troubles of his marriage, I should have been highly satisfied, and not displeased with any part I might have taken in bringing about so desirable a result. But I must say that, knowing him as I did, I had very serious doubts. I was well aware of what a little pleading might do with him. It was in fact possible that one plaintive letter from his wife might have brought him back again. Fortunately it was never written. The woman was even then practically mad, and though immensely difficult to manage by those friends, such as Miss Greathead and Miss Kingdon, who interested themselves in his affairs and did much more for him at critical times than I had been able to do, she never, I think, appealed to her husband. But it was extraordinary, before he went to Italy, to observe the waverings of his mind. When he was keeping his eldest boy at Mirefields, supplying his wife with money for the house and living in lodgings at Salcombe, he wrote giving a rough account of what he might do, or might have to do, and ended up by saying: "Already, lodgings are telling on my nerves. I almost think I suffer less even from yells and insults in a house of my own." He even began to forget "the fifth-rate dabblers in the British gravy," for which fine phrase T.E. Brown is responsible. Maitland ought to have known it and did not. It was this perpetual wavering and weakness in him which perplexed his friends, and would indeed have alienated at last very many of them had it not been for the enduring charm in all his weakness. Nevertheless he was now out of England, and those who knew him were glad to think it was so. He was, perhaps, to have a better time. Nevertheless, even so, he wrote to his friend Lake: "Yes, it is true that I am going to glorious scenes, but do not forget that I go with much anxiety in my mind—anxiety about the little children, the chances of life and death, &c., &c. It is not like my Italian travel eight years ago, when—save for cash—I was independent. I have to make a good two hundred a year apart from my own living and casual expenses. If I live I think I shall do it—but there's no occasion for merriment." Yet if it was no occasion for mere merriment it was an occasion for joy. He knew it well, and so did those know who understand the description that Maitland gave in "Paternoster Row," of the sunset at Athens. It is very wonderfully painted, and as he describes it he makes Gifford say: "Stop, or I shall clutch you by the throat. I warned you before that I cannot stand these reminiscences." And this reminds me that when I wrote to him once from Naples, he replied: "You fill me with envious gloom." But now, when he had finished his pot-boiler of Siena, he was going south to Naples, his "most interesting city of the modern world," and afterwards farther south to the Calabrian Hills, and the old dead world of Magna Graecia.
As a result of that journey he gave us "Magna Graecia." This book of itself is a sufficient proof that he was by nature a scholar, an inhabitant of the very old world, a discoverer of the time of the Renaissance, a Humanist, a pure man of letters, and not by nature a writer of novels or romances. Although Maitland's scholarship was rather wide than deep save in one or two lines of investigation, yet his feeling for all those matters with which a sympathetic scholarship can deal was amazingly deep and true. Once in Calabria and the south he made and would make great discoveries. In spite of his poverty, which comes out so often in the description of his conditions upon this journey, he loved everything he found there with a strange and wonderful and almost pathetic passion. I remember on his return how he talked to me of the far south, and of his studies in Cassiodorus. One incident in "Magna Graecia," which is related somewhat differently from what he himself told me at the time, pleased him most especially. It was when he met two men and mentioned the name of Cassiodorus, whereupon they burst out with amazement, "Cassiodoria, why we know Cassiodoria!" That the name should be yet familiar to these live men of the south gratified his historic sense amazingly, and I can well remember how he threw his head back and shook his long hair with joy, and burst into one of his most characteristic roars of laughter. It was a simple incident, but it brought back the past to him.
Of all his books I think I love best "Magna Graecia." I always liked it much better than "The Meditations of Mark Sumner," and for a thousand reasons. For one thing it is a wholly true book. In "The Meditations," he falsified, in the literary sense, very much that he wrote. As I have said, it needs to be read with a commentary or guide. But "Magna Graecia" is pure Maitland; it is absolutely himself. It is, indeed, very nearly the Maitland who might have been if ill luck had not pursued him from his boyhood. Had he been a successful man on the lines that fate pointed out to him; had he succeeded greatly—or nobly, as he would have said—at the University; had he become a tutor, a don, a notable man among men of letters, still would he have travelled in southern Italy, and made his great pilgrimage to the Fonte di Cassiodorio. Till he knew south Italy his greatest joy had been in books. That he loved books we all know. There, of a certainty, "The Meditations" is a true witness. But how much more he loved the past and the remains of Greece and old, old Italy, "Magna Graecia" proves to us almost with tears.
I have said that Maitland was perhaps not a deep scholar, for scholarship nowadays must needs be specialised if it is to be deep. He had his odd prejudices, and hugged them. The hypothesis of Wolf concerning Homer visibly annoyed him. He preferred to think of the Iliad and the Odyssey as having been written by one man. This came out of his love of personality—the great ones of the past were as gods to him. All works of art, or books, or great events were wholly theirs, for they made even the world, and the world made them not. Though I know that he would have loved, in many ways, a book such as Gilbert Murray's "Rise of the Greek Epic," yet Murray's fatally decisive analysis of the Homeric legend would have pained him deeply. On one occasion I remember sending to him, partly as some reasonable ground for my own scepticism, but more, I think, out of some mischievous desire to plague him, a cleverly written pamphlet by a barrister which threw doubts upon the Shakespearean legend. He wrote to me: "I have read it with great indignation. Confound the fellow!—he disturbs me." But then he was essentially a conservative, and he lived in an alien time.
CHAPTER X
What he suffered, endured, and enjoyed in Magna Graecia and his old dead world, those know who have read with sympathy and understanding. It was truly as if the man, born in exile, had gone home at last—so much he loved it, so well he understood the old days. And now once more he came back to England to a happier life, even though great anxieties still weighed him down. Yet with some of these anxieties there was joy, for he loved his children and thought very much of them, hoping and fearing. One of the very first letters I received from him on his return from Italy is dated May 7, 1898, and was written from Henley in Arden: "You have it in your power to do me a most important service. Will you on every opportunity industriously circulate the news that I am going to live henceforth in Warwickshire? It is not strictly true, but a very great deal depends on my real abode being protected from invasion. If you could inspire a newspaper paragraph.... I should think it impudent to suppose that newspapers cared about the matter but that they have so often chronicled my movements, and if by any chance the truth got abroad it would mean endless inconvenience and misery to me. You shall hear more in detail when I am less be-devilled." All this requires little comment. Every one can understand how it was with him.