But, all along, a surprise has been in store and the time is now here to disclose it! The talent for this delightful species of memoirising runs through the family; and Sir Frederic Hamilton’s brother, Lord Ernest Hamilton, proves it. Lord Ernest is the author of Forty Years On, a new book quite as engaging as Here, There and Everywhere, and the rest of Sir Frederic’s. Word from London is that Sir Frederic will have no new book this year; he steps aside with a gallant bow for Lord Ernest. I have been turning pages in Forty Years On and reading about such matters as the Copley curse, school life at Harrow where Shifner and others bowed the knee to Baal, bull fights in Peru and adventures in the Klondike. Personally the most amusing moments of the book I find to be those in which Lord Ernest describes his experiments in speaking ancient Greek in modern Greece. But this is perhaps because I, too, have tried to speak syllables of Xenophon while being rapidly driven (in a barouche) about Patras—with the same lamentable results. It is enough to unhinge the reason, the pronunciation of modern Greek, I mean. But maybe your hobby is bathing? Lord Ernest has a word in praise of Port Antonio, Jamaica, as a bathing ground.
What he says about hummingbirds—but I mustn’t! Forty Years On is a mine of interest and each reader ought to be pretty well left to work it for himself.
Chapter IX
AUDACIOUS MR. BENNETT
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Mr. Bennett’s audacity has always been evident. One might say that he began by daring to tell the truth about an author, continued by daring to tell the truth about the Five Towns, and has now reached the incredible stage where he dares to tell the truth about marriage. This is affronting Fate indeed. It was all very well for Arnold Bennett to write a play called Cupid and Commonsense. Perhaps, in view of the fact that it is one of the great novels of the twentieth century, it was all right for him to create The Old Wives’ Tale; but it cannot be all right for him to compose such novels as Mr. Prohack and his still newer story, Lilian.
Think of the writers who have stumbled and fallen over the theme of marriage. There is W. L. George ... but I cannot bring myself to name other names and discuss their tragic fates. There are those who have sought to make the picture of marriage a picture of horror; but that was because they did not dare to tell the truth. That marriage is all, no one but Mr. Bennett seems to realise. No one but Mr. Bennett seems to realise that, as between husband and wife, there are no such things as moral standards, there can be no such thing as an ethical code, there can be no interposition of lofty abstractions which Men call principles and appeal to as they would appeal to a just God, Himself. No one but Mr. Bennett seems to realise that the relation between a man and his wife necessarily transcends every abstraction, brushes aside every ideal of “right” and “wrong.” Mr. Bennett, in the course of the amazing discoveries of an amazing lifetime, has made the greatest discovery possible to mortals of this planet. He has discovered that marriage occurs when a man and a woman take the law into their own hands, and not only the human law, but the divine.
It would be impossible for the hero of a Bennett novel of recent years to be a character like Mark Sabre in If Winter Comes. Arnold Bennett’s married hero would realise that the health, comfort, wishes, doubts, dissimulations; the jealousies, the happiness or the fancied happiness, and the exterior appearances of the woman who was his wife abolish, for practical purposes, everything else. It is due to Mr. Bennett more than to anyone else that we now understand that while “husband” may be a correct legal designation, “lover” is the only possible æsthetic appellation of the man who is married. If he is not a lover he is not a husband except for statutory purposes—that is all.