Frederick William Maitland. Fisher Herbert Albert Laurens
in men's eyes before,
Twitched in their brow or quivered in their lip,
Waited the speech that called but would not come10.
Law was a product of human life, the expression of human needs, the declaration of the social will; and so a rational view of law would be won only from some height whence it would be possible to survey the great historic prospect which stretches from the Twelve Tables and the Leges Barbarorum to the German Civil Code and the judgments reported in the morning newspaper. Readers of Bracton's Note Book will remember Maitland's description of Azo as "the Savigny of the thirteenth century," as a principal source from which our greatest medieval jurist obtained a rational conception of the domain of law. Savigny did not write the same kind of book as Azo. He worked in a different medium and on a larger canvas but with analogous effects. He made the principles of legal development intelligible by exhibiting them in the vast framework of medieval Latin and Teutonic civilization and as part of the organic growth of the Western nations. Maitland's early enthusiasm for the German master took a characteristic form: he began a translation of the history.
The translation of Savigny was neither completed nor published. Maitland's first contribution to legal literature was an anonymous article which appeared in the Westminster Review in 1879. This was not primarily an historical disquisition though it displayed a width of historical knowledge surprising in so young a man, but a bold, eloquent, and humorous plea for a sweeping change in the English law of Real Property. "Let all Property be personal property. Abolish the heir at law." This alteration in the law of inheritance would lead to great simplification and would remove much ambiguity, injustice and cost. Nothing short of this would do anything worth doing. A few little changes had been made in the past, "for accidents will happen in the best regulated museums," but it was no use recommending timid subsidiary changes while the central anomaly, the source of all complexity and confusion, was permitted to continue. "It is not unlikely," remarked the author with grave irony, "that we are behind an age whose chief ambition is to be behind itself."
The article exhibits a quality of mind which is worth attention. Maitland never allowed his clear strong common sense to be influenced by that vague emotion which the conventional imagination of half-informed people readily draws from antiquity. He loved the past but never defended an institution because it was old. He saw antiquity too vividly for that. And so despite the ever increasing span of his knowledge he retained to the end the alert temper of a reformer, ready to consider every change upon its merits, and impelled by a natural proclivity of mind to desire a state of society in some important respects very different from that which he found existing. At the same time he is far too subtle a reasoner to acquiesce in the doctrinaire logic of Natural Rights or in some expositions of social philosophy which pretended to refinements superior to those provided by empirical utilitarianism. Two early articles contributed to the pages of Mind on Mr Herbert Spencer's Theory of Society contain a modest but very sufficient exposure of the shortcomings of that popular philosopher's a priori reasoning in politics.
With these serious pursuits there was mingled a great deal of pleasant recreation. Holidays were spent in adventurous walking and climbing in the Tyrol, in Switzerland, and among the rolling fir-clad hills of the Black Forest, for Maitland as a young man was a swift and enduring walker, with the true mountaineer's contempt for high roads and level places. We hear of boating expeditions on the Thames, of visits to burlesques and pantomimes, of amusing legal squibs and parodies poured out to order without any appearance of effort. From childhood upwards music had played a large part in Maitland's life and now that the shadow of the Tripos was removed he was able to gratify his musical taste to the full. In 1873 he spent some time alone in Munich, listening to opera night after night and then travelled to Bonn that he might join his sisters at the Schumann Commemoration. Those were the days when the star of Richard Wagner was fast rising above the horizon and though he was not prepared to burn all his incense at one shrine, Maitland was a good Wagnerian. In London musical taste was experiencing a revival, the origin of which dated back, perhaps, to the starting of the Saturday Concerts at the Crystal Palace by August Manns in 1855. The musical world made pilgrimages to the Crystal Palace to listen to the orchestral compositions of Schubert and Schumann or to the St James' Hall popular concerts, founded in 1859, to enjoy the best chamber music of the greatest composers. New developments followed, the first series of the Richter Concerts in 1876 and the first performance of Wagner's Ring in 1882. Maitland with his friend Cyprian Williams regularly attended concert and opera. Without claiming to be an expert he had a good knowledge of music and a deep delight in it. One of his chief Cambridge friends, Edmund Gurney, best known perhaps as one of the principal founders of the Society for Psychical Research, wrote a valuable book on The Power of Sound and interested Maitland in the philosophy of their favourite art. "I walked once with E. Gurney in the Tyrol," Maitland wrote long afterwards, "What moods he had! On a good day it was a joy to hear him laugh!" Gurney died prematurely in 1888 and the increasing stress of work came more and more between Maitland and the concert room; but problems of sound continued to exercise a certain fascination over his mind and his last paper contributed to the Eranos Club at Cambridge on May 8, 1906, and entitled with characteristic directness "Do Birds Sing?" was a speculation as to the conditions under which articulate sound passes into music.
That by the natural workings of his enthusiastic genius Maitland would have been drawn to history whatever might have been the outward circumstances of his career, is as certain as anything can be in the realm of psychological conjecture. Men of the ordinary fibre are confronted by alternatives which are all the more real and painful by reason of their essential indifference. This career is open to them or that career, and they can adapt themselves with equal comfort to either. But the man of genius follows his star. His life acquires a unity of purpose which stands out in contrast to the confused and blurred strivings of lesser men. Other things he might do, other tastes he might gratify; but there is one thing that he can do supremely well, one taste which becomes a passion, which swallows up all other impulses, and for which he is prepared to sacrifice money and health and the pleasures of society and many other things which are prized among men.
When Maitland stood for the Trinity Fellowship he was already aware that success at the bar would mean the surrender of the reading which had "become very dear" to him, and yet his ambition desired success of one kind or another. The varied humours of his profession pleased him; he loved the law and all its ways; yet it is difficult to believe that the routine of a prosperous equity business would ever have satisfied so comprehensive and enquiring a mind. The young barrister had a soul for something beyond drafts; he lectured on political economy and political philosophy in manufacturing towns and in London11, wrote for the Pall Mall Gazette, then a liberal evening paper under the direction of Mr John Morley; but more and more he was drawn to feel the fascination and importance of legal history. Two friends helped to determine his course. Mr, now Sir Frederick, Pollock had preceded Maitland by six years at Eton and Trinity and was also a member of Lincoln's Inn. Coming of a famous legal family, and himself already rising to distinction as a scientific lawyer, Mr Pollock appreciated both the value of English legal history and the neglect into which it had been allowed to fall. He sought out Maitland and a friendship was formed between the two men which lasted in unbroken intimacy and frequent intellectual communion to the end. An historical note on the classification of the Forms of Personal Action, contributed to his friend's book on the Law of Torts, was the first overt evidence of the alliance.
The other friend was a Russian. Professor Paul Vinogradoff, of Moscow, who had received his historical education in Mommsen's Seminar in Berlin, happened in 1884 to be paying a visit in England. The Russian scholar, his superb instinct for history fortified by the advantages of a system of training such as no British University could offer, had, in a brief visit to London, learnt something about the resources of our Public Record Office which was hidden from the Inns of Court and from the lecture rooms of Oxford and Cambridge. On January 20, Maitland and Vinogradoff chanced to meet upon one of Leslie Stephen's Sunday tramps, concerning which there will be some words hereafter, and at once discovered a communion of tastes. The two men found that they were working side by side and brushing one another in their researches. Correspondence followed of a learned kind; then on Sunday, May 11, there was a decisive meeting
Browning,
An account of Maitland's "valuable" lectures "On the Cause of High and Low Wages," given to an average class of some twenty workmen in the Artizan's Institute, Upper St Martin's Lane, in 1874, and "followed by a very useful discussion in which the students asked and Mr Maitland answered many knotty questions" may be read in H. Solly,