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

by Morley Roberts

We talked of rhythm, and of Arsis or Ictus. Pyrrhics we spoke of, and trochees and spondees were familiar on our lips. Especially did he declare that he had a passion for anapæsts, and when it came to the actual metres, Choriambics and Galliambics were an infinite joy to him. He explained to me most seriously the differences between trimeter Iambics when they were catalectic, acatalectic, hypercatalectic. What he knew about comic tetrameter was at my service, and in a short time I knew, as I imagined, almost all that he did about Minor Ionic, Sapphic, and Alcaic verse. Once more these things are to me little more than words, and yet I never hear one of them mentioned—as one does occasionally when one comes across a characteristic enthusiast—but I think of Henry Maitland and his gravely joyous lectures to me on that vastly important subject. No doubt many people will think that such little details as these are worth nothing, but I shall have failed greatly in putting Maitland down if they do not seem something in the end. These trifles are, after all, touches in the portrait as I see the man, and that they all meant much to him I know very well. To get through the early days of literary poverty one must have ambition and enthusiasm of many kinds. Enthusiasm alone is nothing, and ambition by itself is too often barren, but the two together are something that the gods may fight against in vain. I know that this association with him, when I was his only friend, and he was my chief friend, was great for both of us, for he had much to endure, and I was not without my troubles. Yet we made fun together of our squalor, and rejoiced in our poverty, so long as it did not mean acute suffering; and when it did mean that, we often-times got something out of literature to help us to forget. On looking back, I know that many things happened which seem to me dreadful, but then they appeared but part of the day's work.

It rarely happened that I went to him without some story of the week's happenings, to be told again in return something which had occurred to him. For instance, there was that story of the lady who asked him his experience with regard to the management of butlers. In return I could tell him of going out to dinner at houses where people would have been horrified to learn that I had eaten nothing that day, and possibly nothing the day before. For us to consort with the comfortably situated sometimes seemed to both of us an intolerably fine jest, which was added to by the difference of these comfortable people from the others we knew. Here and there we came across some fatly rich person who, by accident, had once been deprived of his usual dinner. It seemed to give him a sympathetic feeling for the very poor. But, after all, though I did sometimes associate with such people, I was happier in my own room with Maitland, or in his flat, where we discussed our Æschylus, or wrought upon metres or figures of speech—always a great joy to us. Upon these, too, Maitland was really quite learned. He was full of examples of brachyology. Anacoluthon he was well acquainted with. Not even Farrar, in his "Greek Syntax," or some greater man, knew more examples of chiasmus, asyndeton, or hendiadys. In these byways he generally rejoiced, and we were never satisfied unless at each meeting, wherever it might be, we discovered some new phrase, or new word, or new quotation.

Once at 7K I quoted to him from Keats' "Endymion" the lines about those people who "unpen their baaing vanities to browse away the green and comfortable juicy hay of human pastures." All that evening he was denouncing various comfortable people who fed their baaing vanity on everything delightful. He declared they browsed away all that made life worth while, and in return for my gift to him of this noble quotation he produced something rather more astounding, and perhaps not quite so quotable, out of Zola's "Nana." We had been talking of realism, and of speaking the truth, of being direct, of not being mealy-mouthed; in fact, of not letting loose "baaing vanities," and suddenly he took down "Nana" and said, "Here Zola has put a phrase in her mouth which rejoices me exceedingly. It is a plain, straight-forward, absolutely characteristic sentiment, such as we in England are not allowed to represent. Nana, on being remonstrated with by her lover-in-chief for her infidelities, returns him the plain and direct reply, 'Quand je vois un homme qui me plait, je couche avec.' He went on to declare that writing any novels in England was indeed a very sickening business, but he added, "I really think we begin to get somewhat better in this. However, up to the last few years, it has been practically impossible to write anything more abnormal about a man's relations with women than a mere bigamy." Things have certainly altered, but I think he was one of those who helped to break down that undue sense of the value of current morality which has done so much harm to the study of life in general, and indeed to life itself. His general rage and quarrel with that current morality, for which he had not only a contempt, but a loathing which often made him speechless, comes out well in what he thought and expressed about the Harold Frederick affair. There was, of course, as everybody knows, a second illegitimate family. While the good and orthodox made a certain amount of effort to help the wife and the legal children, they did their very best to ignore the second family. However, to Maitland's great joy, there were certain people, notably Mrs. Stephens, who did their very best for the other children and for the poor mother. Maitland himself subscribed, before he knew the actual position, to both families, and betrayed extraordinary rage when he learnt how that second family had been treated, and heard of the endeavours of the "unco' guid" to ignore them wholly. But then such actions and such hypocrisy are characteristic of the middle class in this country and not in this country alone. He loathed their morals which became a system of cruelty; their greed and its concomitant selfishness: their timidity which grows brutal in defence of a position to which only chance and their rapacity have entitled them.

Apropos of his hatred of current morality, it is a curious thing that the only quarrel I ever had with him showed his early point of view rather oddly. Among the few men he knew there was one, with whom I was a little acquainted, who had picked up a young girl in a tavern and taken her to live with him. My own acquaintance with her led to some jealousy between me and the man who was keeping her, and he wrote to Maitland complaining of me, and telling him many things which were certainly untrue. Maitland when he considered the fact of his having ruined his own life for ever and ever by his relations with a woman of this order, had naturally built up a kind of theory of these things as a justification for himself. This may seem a piece of extravagant psychology, but I have not the least doubt that it is true. Without asking my view of the affair he wrote to me very angrily, and declared that I had behaved badly. He added that he wished me to understand that he considered an affair of that description as sacred as any marriage. Though he was young, and in these matters no little of a prig, I was also young, and of a hot temper. That he had not made any inquiries of me, or even asked my version of the circumstances, so angered me that I wrote back to him saying that if he spoke to me in that way I should decline to have anything more to do with him. As he was convinced, most unjustly, that his view was entirely sound, this naturally enough led to an estrangement which lasted for the best part of a year, but I am glad to remember that I myself made it up by writing to him about one of his books. This was before I went to America, and although I was working, it was a great grief to me that we did not meet during this estrangement for any of our great talks, which, both then and afterwards, were part of my life, and no little part of it. Often when I think of him I recollect those lines of Callimachus to Heracleitus in Corey's "Ionica":

"They told me, Heracleitus, they told me you were dead;
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.
I wept as I remembered how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking, and sent him down the sky."

CHAPTER IV

In the last chapter I quoted from Boswell, always a favourite of Maitland's, as he is of all true men of letters. But there is yet another quotation from the same work which might stand as a motto for this book, as it might for the final and authoritative biography of Maitland which perhaps will some day be done: "He asked me whether he had mentioned, in any of the papers of the 'Rambler,' the description in Virgil of the entrance into Hell, with an application to the Press; 'for,' said he, 'I do not much remember them.' I told him, 'No.' Upon which he repeated it:

'Vestlbulum ante ipsum primisque in faucibus Orci,
Lucius et ultrices posuere cubilia Curæ;
Pallentesque habitant Morbi, tristisque Senectus,
Et Metus, et malesuada Fames, ac turpis Egestas;
Terribiles vis formæ: Letumque, Labosque.'

'Now,' said he, 'almost all these apply exactly to an author; all these are the concomitants of a printing-house.'" Nevertheless, although cares, and sometimes sullen sorrows, want and fear, still dwelt with Maitland, a little time now began for him in which he had some peace of mind, if not happiness. That was a plant he never cultivated. One of his favourite passages from Charlotte Brontë, whose work was in many ways a passion to him, is that in which she exclaims: "Cultivate happiness! Happiness is not a potato," and indeed he never grew it. Still there were two periods in his life in which he had some peace, and the first period now began. I speak of the time after the death of his first wife. The drain of ten shillings a week—which must seem so absurdly little to many—had been far more than he could stand, and many times he had gone without the merest necessities of life so that the poor alien in the New Cut should have money, even though he knew that she spent it at once upon drink and forgetfulness. Ten shillings a week was very much to him. For one thing it might mean a little more food and better food. It meant following up his one great hobby of buying books. Those who know "The Meditations," know what he thought of books, for in that respect this record is a true guide, even if it should be read with caution in most things. Nevertheless although he was happier and easier, it is curious that his most unhappy and despairing books were written during this particular period. "In the Morning," it is true, was done before his wife died, and some people who do not know the inner history of the book may not regard it as a tragedy. In one sense, however, it was one of the greatest literary tragedies of Henry Maitland's life, according to his own statement to me.