CHAPTER III
There are many methods of writing biography. Each has its advantages, even the chronological compilation. But chronology is no strong point of mine, and in this sketch I shall put but little stress on dates. There is great advantage in describing things as they impress themselves on the writer. A portrait gains in coherency and completeness by temporary omissions more than it can ever gain by the empty endeavour to handle each period fully. In this last chapter I might have endeavoured to describe Maitland at work, or to speak of his ambitions, or even to criticise what he had already done, or to give my own views of what he meant to achieve. There is authority for every method, and most authorities are bad, save Boswell—and few would pine for Boswell's qualities at the price of his failings. Yet one gets help from him everywhere, little as it may show. Only the other day I came across a passage in the "Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides" which has some value. Reporting Johnson, he writes: "Talking of biography, he said he did not think the life of any literary man in England had been well written. Besides the common incidents of life it should tell us his studies, his mode of living, the means by which he attained to excellence, and his opinion of his own works." Such I shall endeavour to do. Nevertheless Johnson was wrong. Good work had then been done in biography by Walton, whose Lives, by the way, Maitland loved; and Johnson himself was not far from great excellence when he described his friend Savage in the "Lives of the Poets" in spite of its want of colloquial ease. There came in then the value of friendship and actual personal knowledge, as it did in Boswell's "Life," I can only hope that my own deep acquaintance with Maitland will compensate for my want of skill in the art of writing lives, for which novel-writing is but a poor training. Yet the deeper one's knowledge the better it is to simplify as one goes, taking things by themselves, going forwards or backwards as may seem best, without care of tradition, especially where tradition is mostly bad. We do not write biography in England now as Romain Rolland writes that of Beethoven. Seldom are we grieved for our heroes, or rejoice with them. Photography, or the photographic portrait, is more in request than an impression. However, to resume in my own way, having to be content with that, and caring little for opinion, that fluctuant critic.
Long as our friendship existed it is perhaps curious that we never called each other, except on very rare occasions, by anything but our surnames. This, I think, is due to the fact that we had been at Moorhampton College together. It is, I imagine, the same thing with all schoolboys. Provided there is no nickname given, men who have been chums at school seem to prefer the surname by which they knew their friends in the early days. I have often noticed there is a certain savage tendency on the part of boys to suppress their Christian names, their own peculiar mark. And sometimes I have wondered whether this is not in some obscure way a survival of the savage custom of many tribes in which nobody is ever mentioned by his right name, because in that name there inheres mysteriously the very essence of his being and inheritance, the knowledge of which by others may expose him to some occult danger.
I believe I said above that from the time I first met Maitland after my return from Australia, until I went away again to Arizona, I was working in the Admiralty and the India Office as a writer at tenpence an hour. No doubt I thought the pay exiguous, and my prospects worth nothing. Yet when I came back from America and found him domiciled at 7K Cumberland Residences, my economic basis in life became even more exiguous, whatever hope might have said of my literary future. I was, in fact, a great deal poorer than Maitland. He lived in a flat and had at least two rooms and a kitchen. Yet it was a horrible place of extraordinary gloom, and its back windows overlooked the roaring steam engines of the Metropolitan Railway. In some ways no doubt my own apartment, when I took to living by myself in Chelsea, was superior in cheerfulness to 7K. Shortly after my return to England, when I had expended the fifty pounds I received for my first book, "The Western Trail," I took a single room in Chelsea, put in a few sticks of furniture given to me by my people, and commenced housekeeping on my own account on all I could make and the temporary ten shillings a week allowed me by my father, who at that time, for all his native respect for literature, regarded the practice of it with small hope and much suspicion. I know that it greatly amused Maitland to hear of his views on the subject of the self revelations in "The Western Trail," which dealt with my life in Western America. After reading that book he did not speak to me for three days, and told my younger brother, "These are pretty revelations about your brother having been a common loafer." At this Maitland roared, but he roared none the less when he understood that three columns of laudation in one of the reviews entirely changed my father's view of that particular book.
I should not trouble to say anything about my own particular surroundings if it were not that in a sense they also became Maitland's, although I went more frequently to him than he came to me. Nevertheless he was quite familiar with my one room and often had meals there which I cooked for him. Of course at that time, from one point of view, I was but a literary beginner and aspirant, while Maitland was a rising and respected man, who certainly might be poor, and was poor, but still he had published "The Mob" and other books, his name was well known, and his prospects, from the literary, if not from the financial point of view, seemed very good. I was the author of one book, the result of three years' bitter hard experience, written in twenty-six days as a tour de force, and though I had ambition I seemed to have nothing more to write about. From my own point of view Maitland was, of course, very successful. His flat with more rooms than one in it was a mansion, and he was certainly making something like a hundred a year. Still, I think that when he came down to me and found me comparatively independent, he rather envied me. At any rate I had not to keep an errant wife on the money that I made with infinite difficulty. He came to see me in Chelsea in my very early days, and took great joy in my conditions. For one thing I had no attendance with this room. I was supposed to look after it for myself in every way. This, he assured me, made my estate the more gracious, as any one can understand who remembers all that he has said about landladies and lodging-house servants and charwomen. He was overjoyed with the list of things I bought: a fender and fire-irons, a coal-scuttle, a dust-bin, and blacking brushes. He found me one day shaving by the aid of my own dim reflection in the glass of an etching which I had brought from home, because I had no looking-glass and no money to spare to buy one. I remember we frequently went together over the question of finance. Incidentally I found his own habit of buying cooked meat peculiarly extravagant. I have a book somewhere among my papers in which I kept accounts for my first three months in Chelsea to see how I was going to live on ten shillings a week, which Maitland assured me was preposterous riches, even if I managed to make no more.
Naturally enough, seeing that we had been friends for so long, and seeing that he had encouraged me so greatly to write my first book, he took a vast interest in all my proceedings, and was very joyous, as he would have said, to observe that I could not afford sheets but slept in the blankets which I had carried all over America. I seek no sympathy on this point, for after all it was not a matter of my being unable to afford linen; it is impossible for the average comfortable citizen to understand how disagreeable sheets become after some thousands of nights spent camping in mere wool, even of the cheapest. It took me years to learn to resign myself to cold linen, or even more sympathetic cotton, when I became a respectable householder.
In the neighbourhood where I lived there was, of course, a great artistic colony, and as I knew one or two artists already, I soon became acquainted with all the others. Many of them were no richer than myself, and as Bohemia and the belief that there was still a Bohemia formed one of Maitland's greatest joys, he was always delighted to hear of any of our remarkable shifts to live. It is an odd thing to reflect that A. D. Mack, Frank Wynne, Albert Croft, and three other artists whose names I now forget, and I once had a glorious supper of fried fish served in a newspaper on the floor of an empty studio. The only thing I missed on that particular occasion was Maitland's presence, but, of course, the trouble was that Maitland would seldom associate with anybody whom he did not know already, and I could rarely get him to make the acquaintance of my own friends. Yet such experiences as we were sometimes reduced to more than proved to him that his dear Bohemia existed, though later in his life, as one sees in "Mark Sumner," he often seemed to doubt whether it was still extant. On this point I used to console him, saying that where any two artists butted their foolish heads against the economic system, there was Bohemia; Bohemia, in fact, was living on a course of high ideals, whatever the world said of them. At this hour there are writers learning their business on a little oatmeal, as George Meredith did, or destroying their digestions, as I did mine and Henry Maitland's, on canned corn beef. Even yet, perhaps, some writers and artists are making their one big meal a day on fried fish.
One Sunday when I missed going to Maitland's, because he was then out of town visiting his family, I had a tale for him on his return. It appeared that I had been writing, and had got so disgusted with the result of it that I found I could not possibly stay in my room, and so determined to go round to my friend Mack. No sooner had I made up my mind on this subject than there was a knock at the door, and presently in came Mack himself. I said promptly, "It is no good your coming here, for I was just going round to you." Whereupon he replied, "It is no good your coming to me because I have no coal, no coke, and nobody will give me any more because I owe for so much already." I replied that I was not going to stay in my room in any case, and affirmed that I would rather be in his studio in the cold than the room where I was. Whereupon he suddenly discovered that my scuttle was actually full of coal, and proposed to take it round to the studio. This seemed a really brilliant idea, and after much discussion of ways and means my inventive faculty produced an old portmanteau and several newspapers, and after wrapping up lumps of coal in separate pieces of paper we packed the portmanteau with the coal and carried it round to the studio in Manresa Road. This seemed to Maitland so characteristic of an artist's life that he was very much delighted when I told him.
It is an odd thing that in one matter Maitland and I were at that time much alike. From most points of view there can hardly have been two more different men, for he was essentially a man of the study and the cloister, while I was far more naturally a man of the open air. Nevertheless, when it came to journalism we were both of the same mind. While I was away from England and he was teaching Harold Edgeworth's sons, Edgeworth introduced him to John Harley, then editing the Piccadilly Gazette, who offered, and would no doubt have kept to it, to use as much matter as possible if Maitland would supply him with something in the journalistic form. Apparently he found it too much against his natural grain to do this work, and I was now in the same predicament. It is true that I had something of a natural journalistic flair which he lacked, but my nose for a likely article was rendered entirely useless to me by the fact that I never could write anything until I had thought about it for several days, by which time it was stale, and much too late from the newspaper point of view. Nevertheless Maitland did occasionally do a little odd journalism, for I remember once, before I went to America, being with him when he received the proofs of an article from the St. James' Gazette, and picking up "Mark Sumner" one may read: "I thought of this as I sat yesterday watching a noble sunset, which brought back to my memory the sunsets of a London autumn, thirty years ago. It happened that, on one such evening, I was by the river at Chelsea, with nothing to do except to feel that I was hungry, and to reflect that, before morning, I should be hungrier still. I loitered upon Battersea Bridge—the old picturesque wooden bridge, and there the western sky took hold upon me. Half an hour later I was speeding home. I sat down, and wrote a description of what I had seen, and straightway sent it to an evening paper, which, to my astonishment, published the thing next day—'On Battersea Bridge.' I have never seen that article since I saw the proof of it, but there was something so characteristic in it that I think it would be worth some one's while to hunt up the files of the St. James' Gazette in order to find it. It appears that while he was leaning over the bridge, enjoying the sunset, there was also a workman looking at it. The river was at a low stage, for it was at least three-quarters-ebb, and on each side of the river there were great patches of shining mud, in which the glorious western sky was reflected, turning the ooze into a mass of most wonderful colour. Maitland said to me, "Of course I was pleased to see somebody else, especially a poor fellow like that, enjoying the beauty of the sunset. But presently my companion edged a little closer to me, and seeing my eyes directed towards the mud which showed such heavenly colouring, he remarked to me, with an air of the deepest interest, 'Throws up an 'eap of mud, don't she?'"
Sometimes when Maitland came down to me in Danvers Street he used to go over my accounts and discuss means of making them less. I think his chief joy in them was the feeling that some of his more respectable friends, such as Harold Edgeworth, would have been horrified at my peculiarly squalid existence. In a sense it was, no doubt, squalid, and yet in another it was perhaps the greatest time in my life, and Maitland knew it. In the little book in which I kept my expenses he came across one day on which I had absolutely spent nothing. This was a great joy to him. On another day he found a penny put down as "charity." On looking up the book I find that a note still declares that this penny was given to a little girl to pay her fare in the bus. I remember quite well that this beneficence on my part necessitated my walking all the way to Chelsea from Hyde Park Corner. Yet Maitland assured me that, compared with himself at times, I was practically a millionaire, although he owned that he had very rarely beaten my record for some weeks when all expenditure on food was but three-and-six-pence. One week it actually totalled no more than one-and-elevenpence, but I have no doubt that I went out to eat with somebody else on those days—unless it was at the time my liver protested, and gave me such an attack of gloom that I went to bed and lay there for three days without eating, firmly determined to die and have done with the literary struggle. This fast did me a great deal of good. On the fourth day I got up and rustled vigorously for a meal, and did some financing with the admirable result of producing a whole half-crown.