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

by Morley Roberts

I learnt then a little of his early history. Even when he was but a boy of ten or eleven he was recognised as a creature of most brilliant promise. He always believed that he owed most, and perhaps everything, to his father, who must have been a very remarkable man. Henry never spoke about him in later life without emotion and affection. I have often thought since that Maitland felt that most of his disasters sprang from the premature death of his father, whom he loved so tenderly. Indeed the elder man must have been a remarkable figure, a gentle, courtly, and most kindly man, himself born in exile and placed in alien circumstances. Maitland often used to speak, with a catch in his voice, of the way his father read to him. I remember not what books, but they were the classic authors of England; Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Tennyson. Some seem to imagine that the father had what is called a well-stocked library. This was not true, but he had many good books and taught his son to love them. Among these there was one great volume of Hogarth's drawings which came into Henry Maitland's personal possession, only, I think, when he was finally domiciled in a London flat, where he and I often looked at it. It is curious that as a boy Hogarth had a fascination for him. He sometimes copied these drawings, for as a child he had no little skill as a draughtsman. What appealed to him in later days in Hogarth was the power of the man's satire, his painful bitterness, which can only be equalled by the ironies of Swift in another medium. Although personally I admire Hogarth I could never look at him with anything like pleasure or, indeed, without acute discomfort. I remember that Maitland in later years said in his book about the Victorian novelist: "With these faces who would spend hours of leisure? Hogarth copied in the strict sense of the word. He gives us life and we cannot bear it."

Maitland's family came, I think, from Worcester, but something led the elder Maitland to Mirefield's, and there he came in contact with a chemist called Lake, whose business he presently bought. Perhaps the elder Maitland was not a wholly happy man. He was very gentle, but not a person of marked religious feeling. Indeed I think the attitude of the family at that time was that of free thought. From everything that Henry said of his father it always seemed to me that the man had been an alien in the cold Yorkshire town where his son was born. And Maitland knew that had his father lived he would never have been thrown alone into the great city of Moorhampton, "Lord of himself, that heritage of woe." Not all women understand the dangers that their sons may meet in such surroundings, and those who had charge of Henry Maitland's future never understood or recognized them in his youth. But his father would have known. In one chapter of "The Vortex," there is very much of Maitland. It is a curiously wrought picture of a father and his son in which he himself played alternately the part of father and child. I knew his anxieties for his own children, and on reading that chapter one sees them renewed. But in it there was much that was not himself. It was drawn rather from what he believed his father had felt. In "The Vortex" the little boy spends an hour alone with his father just before bedtime, and he calls it "A golden hour, sacred to memories of the world's own childhood."

Maitland went to school in Mirefields and this school has been called a kind of "Dotheboys Hall," which of course is absolutely ridiculous. It was not, in fact, a boarding-school at all, but a day school. The man who ran it was called Hinkson. Maitland said he was an uneducated man, or at any rate uneducated from his point of view in later years, yet he was a person of very remarkable character, and did very good work, taking it all round. A man named Christopher started this school and sold it to Hinkson, who had, I believe, some kind of a degree obtained at Durham. The boys who attended it were good middle class and lower middle class, some the sons of professional men, some the offspring of the richer tradesmen. Upon the whole it was a remarkably good school for that time. Many of the boys actually left the Grammar School at Mirefields to attend it. Henry Maitland always owned that Hinkson took great pains with his scholars, and affirmed that many owed him much. As I said, the general religious air of Maitland's home at that time was one of free thought. I believe the feminine members of the family attended a Unitarian Church, but the father did not go to church at all. One example of this religious attitude of his home came out when Hinkson called on his boys to repeat the collect of the day and Maitland replied with an abrupt negative that they did not do that kind of thing at home. Whereupon Hinkson promptly set him to acquire it, saying sternly that it would do him no harm.

For the most part in those early days the elder Maitland and his son spent Sunday afternoon in the garden belonging to their Mirefields house. Oddly enough this garden was not attached to the dwelling but was a kind of allotment. It has been photographically reproduced by Henry Maitland in the seventh chapter of the first volume of "Morning." Very often Henry Maitland's father read to him in that garden.

One of Maitland's schoolfellows at Hinkson's school was the son of the man from whom his father had bought the druggist's business. The elder Lake was a friend of Barry Sullivan, and theatrically mad. He started plays in which Henry always took some part, though not the prominent part which has been attributed to him by some. Nevertheless he was always interested in plays and had a very dramatic way of reading anything that was capable of dramatic interpretation. He always loved the sound of words, and even when he was a boy of about twelve he took down a German book and read some of it aloud to the younger Lake, who did not know German and said so. Whereupon Maitland shook his fist at him and said: "But Lake, listen, listen, listen—doesn't it sound fine?" This endured through all his life. At this same time he used to read Oliver Wendell Holmes aloud to some of the other boys. This was when he was thirteen. Even then he always mouthed the words and loved their rhythm.

Naturally enough, his father being a poor man, there would have been no opportunity of Henry Maitland's going to Moorhampton and to its great college if he had not obtained some scholarship. This, I think, was the notion that his father had at the time, and the necessity for it became more imperative when his father died. He did obtain this scholarship when he was somewhere about sixteen, and immediately afterwards was sent over to Moorhampton quite alone and put into lodgings there. At his school in Mirefields he had taken every possible prize, and I think it was two exhibitions from the London University which enabled him to go to Moorhampton. The college was a curious institution, one of the earliest endeavours to create a kind of university centre in a great provincial city. We certainly had a very wonderful staff there, especially on the scientific side. Among the men of science at the college were Sir Henry Bissell; Schorstein, the great chemist; Hahn, also a chemist, and Balfour, the physicist. On the classical side were Professor Little and Professor Henry Parker, who were not by any means so eminent as their scientific colleagues. The eminence of our scientific professors did not matter very much from Henry Maitland's point of view, perhaps, for from the day of his birth to the day of his death, he took no interest whatever in science and loathed all forms of speculative thought with a peculiar and almost amusing horror. Mathematics he detested, and if in later years I ever attempted to touch upon metaphysical questions he used to shut up, to use an American phrase, just like a clam. But on the classical side he was much more than merely successful. He took every possible prize that was open to him. In his book "The Exile," there is a picture of a youth on prize day going up to receive prize after prize, and I know that this chapter contains much of what he himself must have felt when I saw him retire to a modest back bench loaded with books bound in calf and tooled in gold.

Of course a college of this description, which was not, properly speaking, a university, could only be regarded, for a boy of his culture, as a stepping-stone to one of the older universities, probably Cambridge, since most of my own friends who did go to the university went there from Moorhampton. I do not think there was a professor or lecturer or a single student in the college who did not anticipate for Henry Maitland one of the brightest possible futures, so far as success at the university could make it so. It is possible that I alone out of those who regarded him with admiration and affection had some doubt of this, and that was not because I disagreed as a boy with any of the estimates that had been formed of him, but simply because for some reason or another he chose me as a confidant. Many years afterwards he said to me with painful bitterness: "It was a cruel and most undesirable thing that I, at the age of sixteen, should have been turned loose in a big city, compelled to live alone in lodgings, with nobody interested in me but those at the college. I see now that one of my sisters should certainly have been sent with me to Moorhampton."

One day he showed me a photograph. It was that of a young girl, aged perhaps seventeen—he at the time being very little more—with her hair down her back. She was not beautiful, but she had a certain prettiness, the mere prettiness of youth, and she was undoubtedly not a lady. After some interrogation on my part he told me that she was a young prostitute whom he knew, and I do not think I am exaggerating my own feelings when I say that I recognised instinctively and at once that if his relations with her were not put an end to some kind of disaster was in front of him. It was not that I knew very much about life, for what could a boy of less than eighteen really know about it?—but I had some kind of instinctive sense in me, and I was perfectly aware, even then, that Henry Maitland had about as little savoir-vivre as anybody I had ever met up to that time, or anybody I could ever expect to meet. It may seem strange to some that even at that time I had no moral views, and extremely little religion, although I may say incidentally that I thought about it sufficiently to become deliberately a Unitarian, refusing to be confirmed in the English Church, very much to the rage of the parish clergyman, and with the result of much friction with my father. Yet although I had no moral views I did my best to get Maitland to give up this girl, but he would not do it. The thing went on, so far as I am aware, for the best part of a year. He did all he could, apparently, to get Marian Hilton to leave the streets. He even bought a sewing machine and gave it to her with this view. That was another sample of his early idealism.

This was in 1876, and the younger Lake, who was three years older than Maitland, had by then just qualified as a doctor. He was an assistant at Darwen and one day went over to Moorhampton to see Henry, who told him what he had told me about this Marian Hilton. He even went so far as to say that he was going to marry her. Dr. Lake, of course, being an older man, and knowing something of life through his own profession, did not approve of this and strongly objected. Afterwards he regretted a thousand times that he had not written direct to Maitland's people to tell them of what was going on. Still, although he was the older man, he was not so much older as to have got rid of the boyish loyalty of one youth to another, and he did not do what he knew he ought to have done. He found out that Maitland had even sold his father's watch to help this girl. This affair was also known to a young accountant who came from Mirefields whom I did not know, and also to another man at the college who is now in the Government Service. So far as I remember the accountant was not a good influence, but his other friend did what he could to get Maitland to break off this very undesirable relationship, with no more success than myself.

I have never understood how it was that he got into such frightful financial difficulties. I can only imagine that Marian must have had, in one way or another, the greater portion of the income which he got from the scholarships he held. I do know that his affection for her seemed at this time to be very sincere. And out of that affection there grew up, very naturally, a horror in his sensitive mind for the life this poor child was leading. He haunted the streets which she haunted, and sometimes saw her with other men. I suppose even then she must have been frightfully extravagant, and perhaps given to drink, but considering what his income was I think he should have been able to give her a pound a week if necessary, and yet have had sufficient to live on without great difficulty. Nevertheless he did get into difficulties, and never even spoke to me about it. I was quite aware, in a kind of dim way, that he was in trouble and looked very ill, but he did not give me his fullest confidence, although one day he told me, as he had told Lake, that he proposed marrying her. I was only a boy, but I was absolutely enraged at the notion and used every possible means to prevent him committing such an absurd act of folly. When I met him I discussed it with him. When I was away from him I wrote him letters. I suppose I wrote him a dozen letters begging that he would do no such foolish thing. I told him that he would wrong himself, and could do the girl no possible good. My instincts told me even then that she would, instead of being raised, pull him down. These letters of mine were afterwards discovered in his rooms when the tragedy had happened.