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

by Morley Roberts

It was unfortunate that he took these things so seriously, for nobody knows so well as the reviewers that their work is not serious. Yet, according to them the general effect of Maitland's books, especially "Jubilee," was false, misleading, and libellous; and was in essence caricature. One particular critic spoke of "the brutish stupefaction of his men and women," and said, "his realism inheres only in his rendering of detail." Now Maitland declared that the writer exhibited a twofold ignorance—first of the life he depicted, and again of the books in which he depicted it. Maitland went on to say: "He—the critic—speaks specially of 'Jubilee,' so for the moment we will stick to that. I have selected from the great mass of lower middle-class life a group of people who represent certain of its grossnesses, weaknesses, &c., peculiar to our day. Now in the first place, this group of people, on its worst side, represents a degradation of which the critic has obviously no idea. In the second place, my book, if properly read, contains abundant evidence of good feeling and right thinking in those members of the group who are not hopelessly base. Pass to instances: 'The seniors live a ... life unglorified by a single fine emotion or elevating instinct.' Indeed? What about Mr. Ward, who is there precisely to show that there can be, and are, these emotions and instincts in individuals? Of the young people (to say not a word about Nancy, at heart an admirable woman), how is it possible to miss the notes of fine character in poor Halley? Is not the passionate love of one's child an 'elevating instinct'? nor yet a fine emotion? Why, even Nancy's brother shows at the end that favourable circumstances could bring out in him gentleness and goodness."

There indeed spoke Maitland. He felt that everything was circumstance, and that for nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand circumstance was truly too much, as it had been for him. It appears that the critic added that the general effect of the book was false; and Maitland replied that it would be so to a very rapid skimmer of the book, precisely as the general effect upon a rapid observer of the people themselves would be false. He was enraged to think that though people thought it worth while to write at length about his books, they would not take the trouble to study them seriously. He added: "In this section of the lower middle class the good is not on the surface; neither will it be found on the surface of my narrative."

In this letter he went on to say something more of his books in general. Apropos of a paragraph written by Mr. Glass about his work as a whole, he said: "My books deal with people of many social strata; there are the vile working class, the aspiring and capable working class, the vile lower middle, the aspiring and capable lower middle, and a few representatives of the upper middle class. My characters range from the vileness of 'Arry Parson to the genial and cultured respectability of Mr. Comberbatch. There are books as disparate as 'The Under World' and 'The Unchosen.' But what I desire to insist upon is this, that the most characteristic, the most important, part of my work is that which deals with a class of young men distinctive of our time—well-educated, fairly bred, but without money. It is this fact, as I gather from reviews and conversation, of the poverty of my people which tells against their recognition as civilised beings. 'Oh,' said some one to Butler, 'do ask Mr. Maitland to make his people a little better off.' There you have it."

And there one has also the source of Maitland's fountain of bitterness. He went on to say: "Now think of some of these young men, Hendon, Gifford, Medwin, Pick, Early, Hillward, Mallow. Do you mean to say that books containing such a number of such men deal, first and foremost, with the commonplace and the sordid? Why, these fellows are the very reverse of commonplace; most of them are martyred by the fact of possessing uncommon endowments. Is it not so? This side of my work, to me the most important, I have never yet seen recognised. I suppose Glass would class these men as 'at best genteel, and not so very genteel.' Why, 'ods bodikins! there's nothing in the world so hateful to them as gentility. But you know all this, and can you not write of it rather trenchantly? I say nothing about my women. That is a moot point. But surely there are some of them who help to give colour to the groups I draw." The end of the letter was: "I write with a numbed hand. I haven't been warm for weeks. This weather crushes me. Let me have a line about this letter."

The sort of poverty which crushed the aspiring is the keynote to the best work he did. He knew it, and was right in knowing it. He played all these parts himself. In many protean forms Maitland himself is discerned under the colour and character of his chosen names; and so far as he depicted a class hitherto untouched, or practically untouched, in England, as he declares, he was a great writer of fiction. But he was not a romantic writer. There were some books of romance he loved greatly. We often and often spoke of Murger's "Vie de Bohème." I do not think there was any passage in that book which so appealed to him as when Rodolphe worked in his adventitious fur-coat in his windy garret, declaring genially: "Maintenant le thermomètre va être furieusement vexé." Nevertheless, as I have said before, he knew, and few knew so well, the very bitter truth that Murger only vaguely indicated here and there in scattered passages. In the "Vie de Bohème" these characters "range" themselves at last; but mostly such men did not. They went under, they died in the hospital, they poisoned themselves, they blew out their brains, they sank and became degraded parasites of an uncomprehending bourgeoisie.

I spoke some time back of the painful hour when Maitland came to me to declare his considered opinion that I myself could not write successful fiction. It is an odd thing that I never returned the compliment in any way, for though I knew he could, and did, write great fiction, I knew his best work would not have been fiction in other circumstances. Out of martyrdom may come great things, but not out of martyrdom spring the natural blossoms of the natural mind. That he lived in the devil's twilight between the Dan of Camberwell and the Beersheba of Camden Town, when his natural environment should have been Italy, and Rome, or Sorrento, is an unfading tragedy. Only once or twice in his life did a spring or summer come to him in which he might grow the flowers he loved best and knew to be his natural destiny. The greatest tragedy of all, to my mind, is that final tragedy of "Basil" where at last, after long years of toil in fiction while fiction was yet necessary to his livelihood, he was compelled by his training to put into the form of a novel a theme not fit for such treatment save in the hands of a native and easy story-teller.

I have said nothing, or little except by implication, of the man's style. In many ways it was notable and even noble. To such a literary intelligence, informed with all the learning of the past towards which he leant, much of his style was inevitable; it was the man and his own. For the greater part it is lucid rather than sparkling, clear, if not cold; yet with a subdued rhythm, the result of much Latin and more Greek, for the metres of the Greek tragedies always inspired him with their noble rhythms. Though he was often cold and bitter, especially in his employment of irony, of which he is the only complete master in English literature except Samuel Butler, he could rise to heights of passionate description; and here and there a sense of luxury tinges his words with Tyrian purple—and this in spite of all his sense of restraint, which was more marked than that of almost any living writer.

When I think of it all, and consider his partly wasted years, I even now wonder how it was he induced himself to deal with the life he knew so well; but while that commercialism exists which he abhorred as much as he abhorred the society in which it flourishes, there seems no other practicable method for a man of letters to attain speech and yet to live. I often declared that fiction as we wrote it was truly diagnostic of a disordered and unnecessarily degraded form of civilisation; and he replied with deep feeling that to him the idylls of Theocritus, of Moschus, the simple tragedies, the natural woes and joys of men who ploughed the soil or worked at the winepress, were the truest and most vivid forms and subjects of Art. Neither before his death nor after did he attain the artist's true and great reward of recognition in the full sense that would have satisfied him even if he had remained poor. Nevertheless there were some who knew. There are perhaps a few more who know now that he is gone and cannot hear them. Popularity he never hoped for, and never will attain, but he has a secure place in the hierarchy of the literature of England which he loved. But he appeals now, as he appealed while he lived, not to the idle and the foolish, not to the fashionable mob, but to the more august tribunal of those who have the sympathy which comes from understanding.