Henry Maitland

“ This passage I never read; but, when Maitland told me of it, it struck me greatly and remained in my mind. These influences are one of the great uses of literary companionship among men of letters. As Henry Maitland used to say: "We come together and strike out sparks."
As I went north by train from St. Pée d'Ascain to Bordeaux, passing ancient Dax and all the sombre silences of the wounded serried rows of pines which have made an infertile soil yield something to commerce, Maitland's spirit, his wounded and often sickly spirit, was with me. ”

“ This book was dictated by J.H. mostly in my presence, and I consider it well worth publishing. No doubt Henry Maitland is not famous, though since his death much has been written of him. Most of it, however, outside of literary criticism, has been futile and uninstructed. But J.H. really knew the man, and here is what he has said of him. We shall be told, no doubt, that we have used Maitland's memory for our own ends. Let that be as it may; such an accusation can only be met by denial. When there is no proof of guilt, there may well be none of innocence. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Among the men of science at the college were Sir Henry Bissell; Schorstein, the great chemist; Hahn, also a chemist, and Balfour, the physicist. On the classical side were Professor Little and Professor Henry Parker, who were not by any means so eminent as their scientific colleagues. The eminence of our scientific professors did not matter very much from Henry Maitland's point of view, perhaps, for from the day of his birth to the day of his death, he took no interest whatever in science and loathed all forms of speculative thought with a peculiar and almost amusing horror. ”

“ Several people came to me with proposals about a book on Henry Maitland. One of the partners of a big publishing house made me a definite offer for it on behalf of his firm. On the other hand one of his executors, Miss Kingdon, a most kindly and amiable and very able woman employed in a great accountant's office in the city, who had done very much for Henry Maitland in his later life, begged me not to do the book, or if I did it to hold it over until her responsibilities as executrix and trustee for the sons were at an end. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I left Thérèse and Madame Espinel still at St. Christophe, and did not see them again before I started for England. They, I knew, would probably return to Paris, or perhaps would go to relatives of theirs in Spain. I could help them no more, and by now I discovered that my winter journey, or perhaps even my short visit to the death-chamber of Henry Maitland, had given me some kind of pulmonary catarrh which in my overwrought and nervous state seemed likely, perhaps, to result in something more serious. ”

“ There is in several things a curious likeness between Dickens and Maitland, though it lies not on the surface. He says that Dickens never had any command of a situation although he was so very strong in incident. This was also a great weakness of Henry Maitland. It rarely happens that he works out a powerful and dramatic situation to its final limits, though sometimes he does succeed in doing so. This failure in dealing with great situations is peculiarly characteristic of most English novelists. ”

“ He who desired to be a Bentley or a Porson wrote bitterly about the slums of Tottenham Court Road. With Porson he damned the nature of things, and wrote beautifully about them. I remember on one occasion telling him of a piece of script in the handwriting of the great surgeon, John Hunter, which ran: "Damn civilisation! It makes cats eat their kittens, sows eat their young, and women send their children out to nurse." I think that gave him more appreciation of science than anything he had ever heard. For it looked back into the past, and for Henry Maitland the past was the age of gold. ”

“ At any rate here we have a portrait emerging which is real. Henry Maitland stands on his feet, and on his living feet. He is not a British statue done in the best mortuary manner. There is far too little sincere biography in English. We are a mealy-mouthed race, hypocrites by the grave and the monument. ”

“ We know very little of each other, and after all it is perhaps in biography that one is most acutely conscious of the truth in the pragmatic view of truth. Those things are true in Henry Maitland's life and character which fit in wholly with all my experience of him and make a coherent and likely theory. ”

“ The motto on the original title-page of "The Under World" was a quotation from a speech by Renan delivered at the Académie Française in 1889: "La peinture d'un fumier peut être justifiée pourvu qu'il y pousse une belle fleur; sans cela, le fumier n'est que repoussant." The few beautiful flowers of the world for Henry Maitland were those who hated their surroundings and desired vainly to grow out of them. ”

“ Many of the boys actually left the Grammar School at Mirefields to attend it. Henry Maitland always owned that Hinkson took great pains with his scholars, and affirmed that many owed him much. As I said, the general religious air of Maitland's home at that time was one of free thought. I believe the feminine members of the family attended a Unitarian Church, but the father did not go to church at all. ”

“ He gives us life and we cannot bear it."
Maitland's family came, I think, from Worcester, but something led the elder Maitland to Mirefield's, and there he came in contact with a chemist called Lake, whose business he presently bought. Perhaps the elder Maitland was not a wholly happy man. He was very gentle, but not a person of marked religious feeling. Indeed I think the attitude of the family at that time was that of free thought. From everything that Henry said of his father it always seemed to me that the man had been an alien in the cold Yorkshire town where his son was born. ”

“ 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. ”

“ My room was red and yellow and scarlet, while his were a dingy monochrome, as if they sympathised with the outlook at the back of his flat, which stared down upon the inferno of the Metropolitan Railway. But to return to Grant Allen. Maitland now wrote: "However, I like him very much. He is quite a simple, and very gentle fellow, crammed with multifarious knowledge, enthusiastic in scientific pursuits. With fiction and that kind of thing he ought never to have meddled; it is the merest pot-boiling. He reads nothing whatever but books of scientific interest." ”

“ It is never an easy thing to write the life, or even such a sketch as I propose making, of a friend whom one knew well, and in Henry Maitland's case it is most uncommonly difficult. The usual biographer is content with writing panegyric, and as he must depend for his material, and even sometimes for his eventual remuneration, on the relatives of his subject, he is from the start in a hopeless position, except, it may be, as regards the public side of the life in question. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Maitland had cried "Wolf!" so often, that I had almost ceased to believe that there were wolves, even in the Pyrenees. All things had gradually become appalling crises and dreadful disasters. A mere disturbance and an actual catastrophe were alike dire and irremediable calamities. And yet, alas, there was more truth underlying his words than even he knew. If a man lives for ever in shadow the hour comes at last when there is no more light; and even for those who look forward, one would think with a certain relief, to the workhouse, there comes a day that they shall work no more. ”

“ We are always being reminded of that wise saying in the Fellowship Dissertation, that English political philosophy has suffered by overmuch simplicity.
A mind so exact and disinterested and endowed with so rare a capacity for divesting itself of the intellectual accretions of its own age was naturally full of dissolvents for ambitious theories. Maitland [Pg 79] expressed in his Inaugural lecture his high respect for the genius and learning of Henry Maine, and nothing which was then written would have been afterwards retracted. ”

“ As I have said, I think that Maitland was really incapable of a great passion, and I am sure that he would have put up with the merest haus-frau, if she had known her work and possessed her patient soul in quiet without any lamentations. If there was any lamenting to be done Maitland himself might have done it in choice terms not without humour. And indeed he did lament, and not without cause. On my first visit to Ewell after his return from Devon I again met Mrs. Maitland. ”

“ Maitland knew, and none knew better, that in a triumphant passage there is triumphant rhythm, and in a passage full of mourning or melancholy the accompanying and native rhythm is both melancholy and mournful. How many times, too, I have heard him quote, again from Landor, "Many flowers must perish ere a grain of corn be ripened."
All this time the wife was I know not where, nor did I trouble much to inquire. Miss Kingdon and Miss Greathead looked after her very patiently, and did good work for their friend Maitland, as he well knew. ”

“ He was perfectly conscious after these experiences at Folkestone, and the east of England, that he owed very much both to Lake and Rivers. In fact he wrote to the doctor afterwards, saying that he and Rivers had picked him out of a very swampy place. He had always a great admiration for Rivers as a writer, and used to marvel wonderfully at his success. It seemed an extraordinary thing to Maitland that a man could do good work and succeed by it in England.
It was in 1902 that Maitland and Thérèse took up their abode in St. Pée d'Ascain, under the shadow of the Pyrenees. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Through the whole story of Maitland one feels that everything that was in any way hostile to his own views of life did essentially embarrass, and almost make impossible, anything that was in him. He had no strength to draw nutriment by main force from everything around him, as a strong man does. ”