The account Broughton gives in "Paternoster Row" of his visit to Troy is fairly representative of Maitland's experiences. It was there that he lived for two or three days on peanuts, buying five cents' worth in the street now and then at some Italian peanut stand. In "Paternoster Row" he calls them loathsome, and no doubt they soon do become loathsome. A few are rather pleasing, more than a few are objectionable; and when anybody tries a whole diet of them for a day or two there is no doubt "loathsome" would be the proper word. After that he worked for a photographer for a few days, and then, I think, for a plumber, but of this I remember very little. It is quite certain that he never earned enough money in America to enable him to return to England, but who lent it to him I have no idea. To have been twenty-four hours with no more than a handful of peanuts in his pocket was no doubt an unpleasant experience, but, as I told him, it seemed very little to me. On one occasion in Australia I had been rather more than four and a half days without food when caught in a flood. Nevertheless this starvation was for him one of the initiation ceremonies into the mysteries of literature, and he was always accustomed to say, "How can such an one write? He never starved."
Nevertheless to have been hard up in Chicago was a very great experience, as every one knows who knows that desperate city of the plains. Since that time I myself have known Chicago well, and have been there "dead broke." Thus I can imagine the state that he must have been in, and how desperate he must have become, to get out of his difficulties in the way that he actually employed. The endeavour to obtain work in a hustling country like the United States is ever a desperate proceeding for a nervous and sensitive man, and what it must have been to Henry Maitland to do what he did with the editor of the Chicago Tribune can only be imagined by those who knew him. In many ways he was the most modest and the shyest man who ever lived, and yet he actually told this editor: "I have come to point out to you there is a serious lack in your paper." To those who knew Maitland this must seem as surprising as it did to myself, and in later years he sometimes thought of that incident with inexpressible joy in his own courage. Of course the oddest thing about the whole affair is that up to that moment he had never written fiction at all, and only did it because he was driven to desperation. As will be seen when I come later to discuss his qualifications as a writer this is a curious comment on much of his bigger work. To me it seems that he should never have written fiction at all, although he did it so admirably. I think it would be very interesting if some American student of Maitland would turn over the files of the Tribune in the years 1878 and 1879 and disinter the work he did there. This is practically all I ever learnt about his life on the other side of the Atlantic. I was, indeed, more anxious to discover how he lived in London, and in what circumstances. I asked him as delicately as possible about his domestic circumstances, and he then told me that he was married, and that his wife was with him in London.
It is very curious to think that I never actually met his first wife. I had, of course, seen her photograph, and I have on several occasions been in the next room to her. On those occasions she was usually unable to be seen, mostly because she was intoxicated. When we renewed our acquaintance in the Horse Shoe Tavern he was then living in mean apartments in one of the back streets off Tottenham Court Road not very far from the hotel and indeed not far from a cellar that he once occupied in a neighbouring street. Little by little as I met him again and again I began to get some hold upon his actual life. Gradually he became more confidential, and I gathered from him that the habits of his wife were perpetually compelling him to move from one house to another. From what he told me, sometimes hopefully, and more often in desperation, it seems that this poor creature made vain and violent efforts to reform, generally after some long debauch. And of this I am very sure, that no man on earth could have made more desperate efforts to help her than he made. But the actual fact remains that they were turned out of one lodging after the other, for even the poorest places, it seems, could hardly stand a woman of her character in the house. I fear it was not only that she drank, but at intervals she deserted him and went back, for the sake of more drink, and for the sake of money with which he was unable to supply her, to her old melancholy trade. And yet she returned again with tears, and he took her in, doing his best for her. It was six months after our first meeting in Tottenham Court Road that he asked me to go and spend an evening with him. Naturally enough I then expected to make Mrs. Maitland's acquaintance, but on my arrival he showed some disturbance of mind and told me that she was ill and would be unable to see me. The house they lived in then was not very far from Mornington Crescent. It was certainly in some dull neighbourhood not half a mile away. The street was, I think, a cul-de-sac. It was full of children of the lower orders playing in the roadway. Their fathers and mothers, it being Saturday night, sat upon the doorsteps, or quarrelled, or talked in the road. The front room in which he received me was both mean and dirty. The servant who took me upstairs was a poor foul slut, and I do not think the room had been properly cleaned or dusted for a very long time. The whole of the furniture in it was certainly not worth seven and sixpence from the point of view of the ordinary furniture dealer. There were signs in it that it had been occupied by a woman, and one without the common elements of decency and cleanliness. Under a miserable and broken sofa lay a pair of dirty feminine boots. And yet on one set of poor shelves there were, still shining with gold, the prizes Maitland had won at Moorhampton College, and his painfully acquired stock of books that he loved so much.
As I came in by arrangement after my own dinner, we simply sat and smoked and drank a little whiskey. Twice in the course of an hour our conversation was interrupted by the servant knocking at the door and beckoning to Maitland to come out. In the next room I then heard voices, sometimes raised, sometimes pleading. When Maitland returned the first time he said to me, "I am very sorry to have to leave you for a few minutes. My wife is really unwell." But I knew by now the disease from which she suffered. Twice or thrice I was within an ace of getting up and saying, "Don't you think I'd better go, old chap?" And then he was called out again. He came back at last in a state of obvious misery and perturbation, and said, "My dear man, my wife is so ill that I think I must ask you to go." I shook hands with him in silence and went, for I understood. A little afterwards he told me that that very afternoon his wife had gone out, and obtaining drink in some way had brought it home with her, and that she was then almost insane with alcohol. This was the kind of life that Henry Maitland, perhaps a great man of letters, lived for years. Comfortable people talk of his pessimism, and his greyness of outlook, and never understand. The man really was a hedonist, he loved things beautiful—beautiful and orderly. He rejoiced in every form of Art, in books and music, and in all the finer inheritance of the past. But this was the life he lived, and the life he seemed to be doomed to live from the very first.
When a weak man has a powerful sense of duty he is hard to handle by those who have some wisdom. In the early days I had done my best to induce him to give up this woman, long before he married her, when he was but a foolish boy. Now I once more did my best to get him to leave her, but I cannot pretend for an instant that anything I said or did would have had any grave effect if it had not been that the poor woman was herself doomed to be her own destroyer. Her outbreaks became more frequent, her departures from his miserable roof more prolonged. The windy gaslight of the slums appealed to her, and the money that she earned therein; and finally when it seemed that she would return no more he changed his rooms, and through the landlady of the wretched house at which he found she was staying he arranged to pay her ten shillings a week. As I know, he often made much less than ten shillings a week, and frequently found himself starving that she might have so much more to spend in drink.
This went on for years. It was still going on in 1884 when I left England again and went out to Texas. I had not succeeded in making a successful attack upon the English Civil Service, and the hateful work I did afterwards caused my health to break down. I was in America for three years. During that time I wrote fully and with a certain regularity to Maitland. When I came back and was writing "The Western Trail," he returned me the letters he had received from me. Among them I found some, frequently dealing with literary subjects, addressed from Texas, Minnesota, Iowa, the Rocky Mountains, Lower British Columbia, Oregon, and California. In his letters to me he never referred to Marian, but I gathered that his life was very hard, and, of course, I understood, without his saying it, that he was still supporting her. I found that this was so when I returned to England in 1887. At that time, by dint of hard, laborious work, which included a great deal of teaching, he was making for the first time something of a living. He occupied a respectable but very dismal flat somewhere at the back of Madame Tussaud's, in a place at that time called "Cumberland Residences." It was afterwards renamed "Cumberland Mansions," and I well remember Maitland's frightful and really superfluous scorn of the snobbery which spoke in such a change of name. As I said, we corresponded the whole of the time I was in America. I used to send him a great deal of verse, some of which he pronounced actually poetry. No doubt this pleased me amazingly, and I wish that I still possessed his criticisms written to me while I was abroad. It is, from any point of view, a very great disaster that in some way which I cannot account for I have lost all his letters written to me previous to 1894. Our prolonged, and practically uninterrupted correspondence began in 1884, so I have actually lost the letters of ten whole years. They were interesting from many points of view. Much to my surprise, while I was in America, they came to me, not dated in the ordinary way, but according to the Comtist calendar. I wrote to him for an explanation, because up to that time I had never heard of it. In his answering letter he told me that he had become a Positivist. This was doubtless owing to the fact that he had come accidentally under the influence of some well-known Positivists.
It seems that in desperation at his utter failure to make a real living at literature he had taken again to a tutor's work, which in a way was where he began. I find that in the marriage certificate between him and Marian Hilton he called himself a teacher of languages. But undoubtedly he loathed teaching save in those rare instances where he had an intelligent and enthusiastic pupil. At the time that I came back to England he was teaching Harold Edgeworth's sons. Without a doubt Harold Edgeworth was extremely kind to Henry Maitland and perhaps to some little extent appreciated him, in spite of the preface which he wrote in later years to the posthumous "Basil." He was not only tutor to Harold Edgeworth's sons, but was also received at his house as a guest. He met there many men of a certain literary eminence; Cotter Morrison, for instance, of whom he sometimes spoke to me, especially of his once characterising a social chatterer as a cloaca maxima of small talk. He also met Edmund Roden, with whom he remained on terms of friendship to the last, often visiting him in his house at Felixstowe, which is known to many men of letters. I think the fact that Edmund Roden was not only a man of letters but also, oddly enough, the manager of a great business, appealed in some way to Maitland's sense of humour. He liked Roden amazingly, and it was through him, if I remember rightly, that he became socially acquainted with George Meredith, whom, however, he had met in a business way when Meredith was reading for some firm of publishers at a salary of two hundred a year.
Nevertheless, in spite of his making money by some tutorial work, Maitland was still as poor as a rat in a cellar, and the absurd antinomy between the society he frequented at times and his real position, made him sometimes shout with laughter which was not always really humorous. It was during this period of his life that a lady asked him at an "at-home" what his experience was in the management of butlers. According to what he told me he replied seriously that he always strictly refrained from having anything to do with men servants, as he much preferred a smart-looking young maid. It was during this period that he did some work with a man employed, I think, at the London Skin Hospital. This poor fellow, it seemed, desired to rise in life, and possessed ambition. He wanted to pass the London matriculation examination and thus become, as he imagined, somebody of importance. Naturally enough, being but a clerk, he lacked time for work, and the arrangement come to between him and Maitland was that his teacher should go to his lodging at seven o'clock in the morning and give him his lesson in bed before breakfast. As this was just before the time that Maitland worked for Mr. Harold Edgeworth, he was too poor, so he said, to pay bus fares from the slum in which he lived, and as a result he had to rise at six o'clock in the morning, walk for a whole hour to his pupil's lodging, and then was very frequently met with the message that Mr. So-and-so felt much too tired that morning to receive him, and begged Mr. Maitland would excuse him. It is a curious comment on the authority of "The Meditations of Mark Sumner," which many cling to as undoubtedly authentic, that he mentions this incident as if he did not mind it. As a matter of fact he was furiously wrath with this man for not rising to receive him, and used to go away in a state of almost ungovernable rage, as he told me many and many a time.
After my return from America we used to meet regularly once a week on Sunday afternoons, for I had now commenced my own initiation into the mystery of letters, and had become an author. By Maitland's advice, and, if I may say so, almost by his inspiration—most certainly his encouragement—I wrote "The Western Trail," and having actually printed a book I felt that there was still another bond between me and Maitland. I used to turn up regularly at 7K Cumberland Residences at three o'clock on Sundays. From then till seven we talked of our work, of Latin and of Greek, of French, and of everything on earth that touched on literature. Long before seven Maitland used to apply himself very seriously to the subject of cooking. As he could not afford two fires he usually cooked his pot on the fire of the sitting-room. This pot of his was a great institution. It reminds me something of the gypsies' pot in which they put everything that comes to hand. Maitland's idea of cooking was fatness and a certain amount of gross abundance. He used to put into this pot potatoes, carrots, turnips, portions of meat, perhaps a steak, or on great days a whole rabbit, all of which he had bought himself, and carried home with his own hands. We used to watch the pot boiling, and perhaps about seven or half-past he would investigate its contents with a long, two-pronged iron fork, and finally decide much to our joy and contentment that the contents were edible. After our meal, for which I was usually ready, as I was practically starving much of this time myself, we removed the débris, washed up in company, and resumed our literary conversation, which sometimes lasted until ten or eleven. By that time Maitland usually turned me out, although my own day was not necessarily done for several hours. At those times when I was writing at all, I used to write between midnight and six o'clock in the morning.
Those were great talks that we had, but they were nearly always talks about ancient times, about the Greeks and Romans, so far as we strayed from English literature. It may seem an odd thing, and it is odd until it is explained, that he had very little interest in the Renaissance. There is still in existence a letter of his to Edmund Roden saying how much he regretted that he took no interest in it. That letter was, I think, dated from Siena, a city of the Renaissance. The truth of the matter is that he was essentially a creature of the Renaissance himself, a pure Humanist. For this very reason he displayed no particular pleasure in that period. He was interested in the time in which the men of the Renaissance revelled after its rediscovery and the new birth of learning. He would have been at his best if he had been born when that time was in flower. The fathers of the Renaissance rediscovered Rome and Athens, and so did he. No one can persuade me that if this had been his fate his name would not now have been as sacred to all who love literature as those of Petrarch and his glorious fellows. As a matter of fact it was this very quality of his which gave him such a lofty and lordly contempt for the obscurantist theologian. In my mind I can see him treating with that irony which was ever his favourite weapon, some relic of the dark ages of the schools. In those hours that we spent together it was wonderful to hear him talk of Greece even before he knew it, for he saw it as it had been, or as his mind made him think it had been, not with the modern Greek—who is perhaps not a Greek at all—shouting in the market-place. I think that he had a historical imagination of a very high order, even though he undoubtedly failed when endeavouring to use it. That was because he used it in the wrong medium. But when he saw the Acropolis in his mind he saw it before the Turks had stabled their horses in the Parthenon, and before the English, worse vandals than the Turks, had brought away to the biting smoke of London the marbles of Pheidias. Even as a boy he loved the roar and fume of Rome, although he had not yet seen it and could only imagine it. He saw in Italy the land of Dante and Boccaccio, a land still peopled in the south towards Sicily with such folks as these and Horace had known. My own education had been wrought out in strange, rough places in the new lands. It was a fresh education for me to come back to London and sit with Maitland on these marvellous Sunday afternoons and evenings when he wondered if the time would ever come for him to see Italy and Greece in all reality. It was for the little touches of realism, the little pictures in the Odes, that he loved Horace, and loved still more his Virgil; and, even more, Theocritus and Moshos, for Theocritus wrote things which were ancient and yet modern, full of the truth of humanity. Like all the men of the Renaissance he turned his eyes wistfully to the immemorial past, renewed in the magic alembic of his own mind.