Morley Roberts

“ Good old Schmidt is mentioned later. But the thing is a curious blend, of course, of truth and fiction. Why, it's just because the world is 'inexplicable' that I feel my interest in it and its future grows less and less. I am a little oppressed by 'the burden of the mystery'; not seldom I think with deep content of the time when speculation will be at an end. But my delight in the beauty of the visible world, and my enjoyment of the great things of literature, grow stronger. My one desire now is to utter this passion—yet the result of one's attempt is rather a poor culmination for Life. ”

“ I have declared that his greatest book is "The Exile"—I mean his greatest book among his novels. To say it is a masterpiece is for once not to abuse the word; for it is intense, deeply psychological, moving, true. "L'anatomia presuppone il cadavere," says Gabriele D'Annunzio, but "The Exile" is intolerable and wonderful vivisection. Yet men do bleed and live, and the protagonist in this book—in much, in very much, Henry Maitland—bleeds but will not die. He was born out of the leisured classes and resented it with an incredible bitterness, with a bitterness unparalleled in literature. ”

“ Ten words of natural eulogy, and another ten of curious and sympathetic comment, may be better than tons of marble built up by a hired liar with his tongue in his cheek. In the whole book, which cannot be published now, there are things worth waiting for. I have cut and retrenched with pain, for I wanted to risk the whole, but no writer or editor is his own master in England. I am content to have omitted some truth if I have permitted nothing false. The reader who can say truly, "I should not have liked to meet Henry Maitland," is a fool or a fanatic, or more probably both. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What he wanted in literature was emotion, feeling, and humour—literature that affected him sensuously, and made him happy, and made him forget. For it is strange when one looks back at his books to think how much he loved pure beauty, though he found himself compelled to write, only too often, of the sheer brutality of modern civilisation and the foulest life of London. Of course he loved satire, and his own mind was essentially in some ways satiric. His greatest gift was perhaps that of irony, which he frequently exercised at the expense of his public. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is my firm conviction that if he had possessed the smallest means he would never have thought himself completely master of the medium in which he worked. He often spoke of poor Flaubert saying: "What an accursed language is French!" He was for ever dissatisfied with his work, as an artist should be, and I think he attained seldom, if ever, the rare and infrequent joy that an artist has in accomplishment. It was not only his desire of infinite perfection as a writer pure and simple, which affected and afflicted him. It was the fact that he should never have written fiction at all. ”

“ But this solitude, this enforced and appalling loneliness, which seemed to him necessary for work if he was to live, ate into him deeply. It destroyed his nerve and what judgment he ever had which, heaven knows, was little enough. What it means to some men to live in such solitude only those who know can tell, and they never tell. To Maitland, with his sensual and sensuous nature, it was most utter damnation. ”

“ The house itself, or their apartment, was—from the foreign point of view—quite comfortable, but it did not suggest the kind of surroundings which I knew Maitland loved. There is, save in the best, a certain air of cold barrenness about so many foreign houses. The absence of rugs or carpets and curtains, the polish and exiguity of the furniture, the general air of having no more in the rooms than that which will just serve the purposes of life did not suit his sense of abundance and luxury. ”

“ Not even Demetri Roudine, that futile essence of futility, equals this, Maitland's literary child of bitter, unable ambitions. These Russians indeed were the writers with whom Maitland had most sympathy. They moved what Zola had never been able to stir in him, for he was never a Zolaist, either in mind or method. No man without a style could really influence him for more than a moment. Even his beloved Balzac, fecund and insatiable, had no lasting hold upon him, much as he admired the man's ambitions, his unparalleled industry, his mighty construction. ”

“ To write, and yet not to give oneself away, seems to be the aim of too many writers, though the great aim of all great writing is to do, or to try to do, what they avoid. The final analysis of dreadful passion and pain comes, perhaps, too close to them. They feel the glow but also a sensation of shame in the great emotions. There are times that Maitland felt this, though perhaps unconsciously. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For one who loved his Rabelais and the free-spoken classics of our own tongue, Maitland had an extreme purity of thought and speech, a thing which one might not, in some ways, have looked for. No one, I think, would have dared to tell him a gross story, which did not possess remarkable wit or literary merit, more than once. His reception of such tales was never cordial, and I remember his peculiar and astounding indignation at one incident. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For a long time after discovering the almost impossibility of making more than a mere living out of fiction, I had in a sense given up writing for the public, as every man is more or less bound to do at last if he be not gratified with commercial success. Indeed for many years I wrote for some three people: for my wife; for Rawson, the naturalist, my almost lifelong friend; and for Maitland, the only man I had known longer than Rawson. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Such as are interested in the art of letters, and in those who practise in the High Court of Literature, will perceive what we had in our minds. Here is life, not a story or a constructed diary, and the art with which it is done is a secondary matter. If Henry Maitland bleeds and howls, so did Philoctetes, and the outcry of Henry Maitland is more pertinent to our lives. For all life, even at its best, is tragic; and there is much in Maitland's which is dramatically common to our world as we see it and live in it. ”

“ In life, as he had to live it, it was impossible to ignore the horrors of the present time. He found it easier to ignore the horrors of the past, and out of ancient history he made his great romance, which, truly, he never wrote.
It is a curious thing that a man who was thus so essentially romantic should have been mistaken, not without great reason, for a realist. In one sense he was a realist, but this was the fatal result of his nature and his circumstances. Had he lived in happier surroundings, still writing fiction, I am assured it would have been romance. ”

“ Life, as I know well, is hard and bitter enough to break any man's spirit, and I knew that Maitland had been through a fire that not many men had known, yet as I read I thought, and still think, that in this book he showed an undue failure of courage. If he had been through so many disasters yet there was still much left for him, or should have been. He had not suffered the greatest disaster of all, for since the death of his father in his early youth he had lost none that he loved. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In spite of my desire, which is sincere, to say as little as possible about myself, I find I have to speak sometimes of things primarily my own. There is no doubt it did Maitland a great deal of good to have somebody to interest himself in, even if it were no one of more importance than myself. Although he was so singularly a lonely man, he could not always bury himself in the classics, or even in his work, done laboriously in eight prodigious hours. ”