X
The wonderful work which has here been imperfectly described was accomplished under a shadow. Maitland, who was never really a strong man, was, even before his marriage, not without warnings that he was overtaxing his physical resources. When he delivered his inaugural lecture he was already conscious that his days might be few. “I see again,” writes one who was present, “the dim room, the grey light and the shadowy but inspired fragileness of the lecturer who was then fighting a very serious illness.... It was no ordinary lecture, rather a sort of sermon, grave and beautiful with its solemn call to work, even though that work might lie in humble and obscure fields. And the impression that was perhaps most immediately insistent, seeming to underlie each word and sentence, was that the speaker felt the hours of his own work to be already numbered and but few.” In 1889, the year after his election to the Downing Chair, a doctor pronounced over him a sentence from which there is generally no successful appeal. “I very much want to see you again,” he wrote to a friend, March 12, 1889, “and I don’t know that I can wait for another year; this I say rather seriously and only to you; many things are telling me that I have not got unlimited time at my command and I have to take things very easily.”
Devoted nursing, great care in diet, and a resolute avoidance of many of the pleasant things of life enabled the work to proceed as buoyantly as ever. There were bouts of illness and pain, when the French novelist and especially the beloved and well-known Balzac had to be invoked, but there were also periods of revival and at one time an assurance that the alarming symptoms had disappeared. But in truth the malady was never dislodged. “Slowly it is doing for me; but quite slowly,” he wrote to a friend in 1899, “and it may cheer you to know that I have had ten happy and busy years under the ban.” In the summer and autumn of that tenth year there was a sudden change for the worse and it became clear that Maitland could no longer winter in England. “If I have to sing a Nunc Dimittis,” he wrote to Mr R. L. Poole, “it will run ‘Quia oculi mei viderunt originalem Actum de Uniformitate primi anni Reg. Eliz.’ Few can say as much.... I think of a voyage to S. America as S. Africa looks too warm for a man of peace.”
From 1898 the Maitlands were compelled to fly south with the approach of winter. Their regular resort was Grand Canary but once, in 1904, this was exchanged for Madeira. Like all other habits idleness requires cultivation and Maitland had never been idle. Under a tropical sky and with an exquisite sense of relief from physical pain he worked his writing muscles as busily as ever. In the first exile he translated that part of Otto Gierke’s Deutsche Genossenschaftrecht, which dealt with medieval political theory, and published it with a brilliant Introduction. Later he copied manuscripts of the Year Books lent to him by the wise generosity of the Cambridge University Library and collated or transcribed photographs of those manuscripts which it was impossible to export. The last two winters were divided between the Year Books and the composition of a biography of Leslie Stephen, and so far was exile from being a holiday that the fruit of each winter spent in the fortunate islands was never less than the substantial part of the volume. Some letters shall speak of the impressions and activities of these years.
To Leslie Stephen
Hotel Santa Catalina,
Las Palmas,
Gran Canaria.
5 Nov. 1898.
I am beginning Guy Fawkes’s day by sitting in the verandah before breakfast to write letters for a homeward-bound mail. Certainly it is enjoyable here and I mean to get good out of a delightful climate. Also I mean to convert your half promise of a visit into a whole, and without going beyond the truth I can say that there is a good deal here that should please you. At first sight I was repelled by the arid desolation of the island. I suppose that I ought to have been prepared for grasslessness, but somehow or another I was not. But then the wilderness is broken by patches of wonderful green—the green of banana fields. Wherever a little water can be induced to flow in artificial channels there are all manner of beautiful things to be seen. I have picked a date and mustered enough Spanish to buy me a pair of shoes in the “city” of Las Palmas—a dirty city it is with strange smells; but we are well outside of it. Between Las Palmas and its port there is a little English colony. This hotel is so English that they give me my bill in £ s. d. and my change in British ha’pence which have seen better days. Indeed now I know where our coppers go to when they have become too bad for use at home. Also the “library” of this hotel seems a sort of hades to which the bad three-voller is sent after its decease. But the proposition that all the worst books collect there is (as you must be aware) not convertible into the proposition that only bad books come there, and I see a copy of a certain Life of Henry Fawcett which you may have read. I laze away my time under verandahs and in gardens—but am not wholly inactive. Sometimes when it is cool I walk some miles and explore country that is well worth exploration. By the time you come I shall be ready for an ascent of our central range with you—it touches 6000 ft. I think, and by that time we shall be having cooler weather. Yesterday we were breathless: to-day is cloudy but would be September in England.
It is breakfast time and the porridge is good.
To Leslie Stephen
Sta Brigida,
Monte,
G. Canary.
9 Jan. 1899.
I won’t pretend but that I am disappointed by your decision, the more so because my hopes of your advent stood higher than Florence’s and I had endeavoured to argue that your half-promise was a valuable security. However, I know that we are far from England, and that you are unwilling to leave your household for any long time. Also the two last boats that have come here suffered much in the Bay of Biscay and were very late. So I forgive, though I badly want someone to walk with. The time has come when I feel that walks are pleasant and do me good, but that I am very tired of the contents of my own head. But even a solitary tramp is better than a day in bed, and I am really grateful to this magnificent climate and to those who sent me here. To those who cannot speak Spanish, and I cannot and never shall, the remoter parts of this island are not very accessible. I sometimes find myself beset by a troop of boys who take a fiendish pleasure in dogging the steps of an Englishman who obviously is deaf, dumb and mad. Attempts to reason with them only lead to shouts of Penny! or Tilling!—I cannot even persuade them that Tilling is not an English word. Still at times they leave me in peace and then I can be happy until the next crowd assembles.
To Leslie Stephen
Hotel Sta Brigida,
Monte,
Grand Canary.
23 Jan. 1899.
I fear from your last letter that you may take too seriously what I said in play. No, there was no promise, only a certain hope that you might come here, and Reason (with a capital) tells me that your decision is wise and that you must not give up to Canarios what was meant for your home and the Utilitarians. I am really glad to think that you are booking them, and at times I envy you. However I cannot say that I am unhappy in my idleness. When I despaired of you for a companion, I took to myself the soundest looking man in a hotel full of invalids, and gat me up into the hills to accomplish the expedition that I had reserved for you, and we succeeded in mastering not indeed the highest, but the most prominent mountain of the island, if a mountain may be no more than 6000 feet high. This raised me in my own conceit and certainly I had a very enjoyable time. I doubt whether in any of your good ascents you can have seen so gorgeously coloured a view as that which I beheld. A great part of the island lay below me; many of the rocks are bright orange and crimson and these are diversified by patches of brilliant green; the whole was framed in the blue of sky and sea. It was like a raised map that had been over-coloured.
To Frederick Pollock
Casa Peñate,
Monte.
Dec. 4, 1899.
Dated in Timelessness, but with you it may be some such day as Dec. 4, and I fancy that cent. XIX may still be persisting. Dated also nominally at Hotel Quiney in Las Palmas where I preserve address for service, but de facto in the garden of a messuage or finca called or known by the name of Bateria in the pueblo of Sta Brigida—a fort-like structure which I hold as a monthly tenant—windows on four sides all with fine views—on ground floor lives major domo, a hard-worked peasant savouring of the soil—first and only other floor inhabited by me and mine, including our one servant, a Germano-Swiss treasure acquired as we left England—furniture a minimum and no more would be useful—small boy coatless comes to clean boots, run errands and the like, Pepé to wit—much bargaining at house door with women who bring victuals round and would rather have a chat than money. Madame’s mastery of their jargon surprises me daily—I can rarely catch a word. One might fall into vegetarianism here, such is the choice of vegetals.
Lies in the garden on a long chair mostly—has there written for Encyclop. Brit. article on Hist. Eng. Law—space assigned 8 only of their big pages: consequently tight packing of centuries: work of a bookless imagination—but dates were brought from England. Qu. whether editor will suffer the few lines given to J. Austin: they amount to j.a. = o°. Now turning to translate Gierke’s chapt. on “Publicistic Doctrine of M.A.25”—O.G. has given consent—will make lectures (if I return) and possibly book—but what to do with “Publicistic”? Am reading Creighton’s Papacy and Gardiner’s History—may be well-informed man some day. Harv. L. Rev. and King’s Peace came pleasantly—Alphabet not yet presented to babes but reserved for approaching birthday when it will delight. Meanwhile parents profit by it and are very grateful.
Influence of climate on epistolary style—a certain disjointedness. Can live here or rather can be content to vegetate. A tolerable course for the Lea Francis—some 5 miles long—lies not far away, but must shoulder her and climb a rocky path to reach it. No puncture yet. The alarums and the excursions of horrid war are but little heard here. Interesting talk last night at hotel with German Consul in Liberia much travelled in Africa—very unboerish but thinks we are in for a large affair—all good (says he) for (German) trade. Much that we buy here made in Germany,—they spread apace.
To Frederick Pollock
Casa Peñate, Monte,
Las Palmas.
5 Jan. 1900.
I have been wasting too many of my hours in bed—and such hours too—and have consequently written few letters. Somehow or another I was chilled in the course of my voyage: I think it was on board the little Spanish steamer that brought me here from Teneriffe: and after a few days, during which I improvidently cycled to Las Palmas and found that I had to trudge back, I collapsed. However that episode I hope is over, and certainly we are in luck this year. For three weeks the weather has been magnificent; no drop of rain has fallen and day after day the sun has shone. It is like the best English June and there is nothing that tells of midwinter except some leafless poplars and chestnuts. I brought out a minimum thermometer which has refused to register anything less than 54°.
I have been devouring too rapidly my small store of books since I have been cut off from the writing which I projected. What I have seen of my two MSS of the Year Books of Edward II tells me that there is a solid piece of work to be done. One of these MSS is much fuller than the printed book. I cannot understand what demand there can have been for that printed book: it is so very unintelligible—mere nonsense much of it.
The B.G.B. will have to wait—at least so I think at present—as I shall give all my working time to the Y.B.B.—but the volumes of Materialien are very interesting—especially so much as consists of the debates in the Reichstag26. By far the keenest debate was about damage done by hares and pheasants: the sportsmen of the Right were very keen about this matter.
... You will gather from this scrawl that I am recumbent in a garden—the fact is so and I won’t deny it.
To Leslie Stephen
22 Jan. 1900.
I can well believe that England is a gloomy place just now. Even here where I see few papers and few English folk, except the family, this ghastly affair sits heavily upon me and is always coming between me and my book: at the moment Gardiners History: from which my thoughts flit off to England and the Transvaal. It don’t make things better to doubt profoundly whether we have any business to be at war at all. I remember telling you at Warboys (what a good day that was!) that I deeply mistrusted Chamberlain. Since then I have been thinking worse and worse of him: I hope that I am in the wrong, but only hope.
... Then I feel a beast for lazing here in the sunshine among the Spaniards who heartily enjoy all our misfortunes. And the worst of it is that lazing is obviously and visibly doing me good. Really and truly the temptation comes to me, when the sky is at its bluest, to resign my professorship, realise my small fortune and become a Canario for the days that remain. On the other hand three or four projects occasionally twitch my sleeve—connected with the Selden Society, which has behaved more than handsomely by me. But both sets of motives conspire to keep me lying in the sun and saying with the Apostles “Lord! it is good for us to be here.”
Well you don’t laze. I congratulate you heartily on coming out at the other end of the Utilitarians. You would not give me the pleasure of proof sheets—I regret it, but shall have the whole book soon and enjoyable it will be. Especially I want to see what you say of Austin. Since I was here I wrote an article “Hist. Engl. Law” for the Encyclop. Britan. and risked about Austin a couple of sentences which are not in accordance with common repute—and now I feel a little frightened. I don’t want to be unjust, but I cannot see exactly where the greatness comes in. So I am curious to know your judgment about this—and many other things. I should like a long talk with you in these prehistoric surroundings.
To Frederick Pollock
Casa Peñate, Monte,
Les Palmas.
5/2/00.
My opinions about the origin of this wretched war are not worth stating and are extremely distressing to one who holds them. It will be enough to tell you that this summer John Morley seemed to me the one English statesman who was keeping his head cool, and I have not read anything that has changed my mind. I fear that the whole affair will look bad in history. And the worst of it is that the cold fit will come with a vengeance.
We have no good news yet. I hope for some this afternoon. Your letter came by Marseilles—to my surprise, for we rarely get a mail that way. Our last tidings are of speeches made by generals and these do not cheer me. Last night I had a talk with a man who knew the Transvaal and who fears that our volunteer marksmen will not hit much until they have had two months of South African atmosphere: the unaccustomed eye makes wildly incorrect estimates of distance.
You speak of dragoons. “My period,” a very short one 1558-63 is full of the “swart-rutter.” The English government’s one idea of carrying on a big war, if war there was to be, was that of hiring German “swart-rutters.” They did much pistolling, and I suppose that you know, I don’t, how big a machine was the pistol of those days. Well, the War Office temp. Mary (only there was not one) was open to criticism. Every ounce of powder that England had was imported from the Netherlands. This had to go on for a while under Elizabeth—there are amusing letters from English agents wherein “bales of cloth,” and so on, have an esoteric meaning.
A starved Canarian hound has attached itself to us—of the grey-hound type, and sundry small additions are made to the menagerie as occasion serves. A parrot died yesterday—had drunk too much water, so an expert says—was called José—his fellow Juan still screams. In the neighbouring hotel is another with atrocious German habits acquired from the head waiter—will drink himself drunk with beer and swear terribly. I hear rumours of an additional monkey whose name is to be Loango.
I play schoolmaster—How they have turned the Latin grammar inside out!—and I miss my Rule of Three. In a Spanish Census paper I for once made myself “doctor iuris”: Glasgow allows me to say “utriusque.” I added to the population capable of reading and writing no less than five names—for our trilingual Switzer was to be included—and this will seriously affect Canarian statistics.
But I like this illiterate folk.
To Henry Jackson
Casa Peñate, Monte,
Las Palmas.
18 Feb. 1900.
It is downright wickedly pleasant here. By here I do not mean in Las Palmas—which stinketh—but some seven miles out of it and some 1300 feet above it, in a “finca” that we were lucky enough to hire: that is something between a farm house and a villa. The Spaniard of the middle class is a town-loving animal. He likes to have up country a house to which he can go for six weeks or so in the year and where he keeps a major domo (= bailiff) who supplies the town house with country produce. Such a finca we hired for £1 a week, and there we live very comfortably and very cheaply among vines and oranges and so forth. Life here would have been impossible if my wife had not acquired the Spanish, or rather the Canario, tongue with wonderful rapidity. I fancy that some of her language is strong; but if you want anything here you must shout.
I am right glad to hear that it is no worse with you. But just you be careful about cold. I know it is the worst enemy that I have, and I suspect that you will find the same. I have often wondered how you contrived to live in “a thorough draught.” The time comes when one cannot do it, and that time came to me early. In the sunshine I begin to make some flesh, the wind no longer whistles through my ribs and I have not had ache or pain these two months. (Interval during which the writer gets himself out of the aforesaid sunshine which to-day has an African quality.) I wish you could be here, but wonder whether you could be demoralized; some demoralization would do you good, but I cannot imagine you as lazy as I am. Still you might try. And really though I am lazy I have managed to do some things that I should not have done at home and hope to have something to offer the Press when I return. The subject of my meditations is the damnability of corporations. I rather think that they must be damned: the Chartered for example.
News as you suppose comes here fitfully. Sometimes a telegram reaches Las Palmas, and occasionally it is not contradicted. But in the main we depend upon newspapers. I feel somewhat of a beast for being outside all this war trouble, more especially as I went abroad with a very low opinion of the Government’s South African policy. That opinion I should like to change but I cannot. Your amateur strategist must be pretty intolerable. I have met a few people here who knew something of the Transvaal and they have none of them been cheerful. The puzzle to me “after the event” is why more was not known in Downing Street. I can’t help fearing that when all comes out the whole affair will look very bad....
It will be a very strange book that History of ours27. I am extremely curious to see whether Acton will be able to maintain a decent amount of harmony among the chapters. Some chapters that I saw did not look much like parts of one and the same book Before I went off I put my chapter into his lordship’s hands. I never was more relieved than when I got rid of it. His lordship’s lordship was considerate to an invalid and only excepted to a few new words that I had made, but I daresay he swore—if he ever swears—in private.... I never knew time run as it runs here. Soon I shall have to be thinking of my return with the mixedest feelings. I am going to give Cambridge a last chance. If it cannot keep me at about 9 stone, I shall “realise” such patrimony as I have and buy a finca. Then for the great treatise De Damnabilitate Universitatis.
To Henry Jackson
Casa Peñate, Monte,
Las Palmas.
12th January, 1901.
It was very good of you to give me a piece of your New Year’s Eve and to tell me much that I wanted to know. For my part I am practising the art of writing while lying flat on my back and am flattering myself that I make some progress, though the management of a pipe complicates the matter. The result of lying abed is that I am getting through much too quickly the small store of books that I brought with me and am falling back on the resources of the one bookshop that the island contains. If this sort of thing goes on I shall be driven to Spanish translations of Zola. I have just finished Feuillet’s La Muerta—but then I knew the French original. After what you say I must see whether Erckmann-Chatrian has been done into Spanish. In a list that I have before me I see Dickens down for “Dias penosos” and some Wilkie Collins—but apparently the novel-reading Spaniard lives for the most part on Frenchmen, especially Zola. I shall never talk Spanish. I believe that what is or used to be called a classical education makes many cowards: the dread of “howlers” keeps me silent when I ought to plunge regardless of consequences.
I fancy that the comparison that you instituted between the life of the Roman and the life of the Spaniard as seen by me in these islands might be extended to a good many particulars. When, as happens for about eleven months in the year, you are not living at your finca, you occasionally pay it visits with a party of friends—male friends only—whom you entertain there. You eat a great deal and drink until you are merry—then late in the evening you drive back to town twanging a guitar, and, if you can, you sing inane verses made impromptu. Our landlord had one of these carouses the day before he handed over the house to us, and my wife’s account of the state in which the house was when she entered and set some servants to scrub it is not for publication.... Is not this rather classical?
To Frederick Pollock
Casa Peñate, Monte.
21 Jan. 1901.
Also I wonder what has gone wrong with the mails—we might be at the other end of the earth, so slow is news to reach us. A rumour came up yesterday from the ciudad which makes me reflect that I don’t know for certain whether you have a queen in England or a king. And I can’t go and see how all this is, for if I leave my bed, I am soon sent back there again by this blameworthy neuralgia which threatens to become what Glanvill calls morbus reseantisae. Et sic iaceo discinctus discalciatus et sine braccis ut patuit militibus comitatus qui missi fuerunt ad me videndum et qui michi dederunt diem apud Turrim Lundoniae in quindena Pasche.
So I make some progress through Spanish novels—or rather novels that have been translated into Spanish. At present I am in Resurreccion by the Conde Leon Tolstoy—which is easy. I find Perez Galdos a little too hard for my recumbent position, and dictionaries are bad bed-fellows. I have been indolently making for subsequent use a sort of Year Book grammar. I have got a pretty complete être and avoir—and really I think that the lawyers had a fair command of all the tenses—I have seen some well sustained subjunctives.
You spoke of Maine. Well, I always talk of him with reluctance, for on the few occasions on which I sought to verify his statements of fact I came to the conclusion that he trusted much to a memory that played him tricks and rarely looked back at a book that he had once read: e.g. his story about the position of the half-blood in the Law of Normandy seems to me a mere dream that is contradicted by every version of the custumal.
By the way, when you discoursed of the term “comparative Jurisprudence,” had you noticed that Austin used it? I was surprised by seeing it in his book the other day. Burgenses de Cantebrige dederunt michi libertatem burgi sui honoris causa quia edidi cartas suas. Gratificatus Sum.
To John C. Gray
Professor of Law in the University of Harvard.
Downing College, Cambridge.
21 April, 1901.
My best thanks for Future Interests in Personal Property, which has just come to my hands on my return from the Canaries. For a few days my interest in it must be future, but will be vested, indefeasible, real and not impersonal.
Yours in perpetuity,
(Signed) F. W. Maitland.
To Henry Jackson
5 Leon y Castillo,
Telde,
Gran Canaria.
30 December, 1901.
Here I am lying in the sun which shines as if it were June and not December. This year our “finca” is in the midst of a “pueblo.” The front of our house faces a high street which is none too clean—but then you keep the front of your house so shut up that you see nothing of the street and at the back all is orange and coffee and banana and so forth. Telde is the centre of an important trade in tomatos—the whole village is employed in the work of packing them for the English market and sending them off to the shops in Las Palmas. Really it has become a very big industry in these last years and if English people gave up eating tomatos, hundreds of Canarios would be in a bad way. But there! You don’t want to hear of foreign parts, and if we could meet our talk would be of Cambridge....
I am told that I have been put back into the Press Syndicate. I do not refuse and shall be very glad if in any way I can further the interests of the big history. The first volume is with me and I enjoy it.