A Magdalen's Husband
The Speaker, March 5, 1904


That an increasing number of our modern novels should deal with aspects of the married state is natural and inevitable. This great human ideal has, like all human ideals, made terrible demands on human nature, and, like all things which men have at any time loved, has surrounded itself with mystery and peril. And it is particularly desirable to encourage the treatment of this problem in novels chiefly because it may serve to discourage the preposterous habit of discussing it in plays. For the last ten years nearly every play that called itself serious has revolved in some degree round the question of the safety or danger of the institution of marriage. And it would be difficult to find a more ridiculous way of discussing marriage than by means of the drama. It would be difficult to imagine a more ridiculous way of improving marriage than by discussing it. The things are totally unsuited to each other. Of all human institutions marriage is the one which most depends upon slow development, upon patience, upon long reaches of time, upon magnanimous compromise, upon kindly habit; in short, upon precisely those things which cannot be put in a play. Of all forms of art the drama most depends upon rapid alterations and outspoken crises; that is to say, upon the very things upon which marriage does not depend. The old poets, who dramatised men and women only in the relations of fighting and first love, were perfectly sensible. To put the problem of marriage into a play is like putting the problem of transubstantiation into a triolet; they are both excellent things, but they do not express each other.

Of how much more suited is the form of the novel for the discussion of such a matter scarcely a better example could be found than Mr. Vincent Brown's novel, A Magdalen's Husband (Duckworth. and Co.). This is not merely because the enigma of the psychological relations of husband and wife is, as I have said, an affair of slow and subtle adaptation; it is in this case something more than that. For A Magdalen's Husband is not, as modern stories go, a diary of mental transformation. It is a very bold and direct and catastrophic tale, a tale with a murder in it and a hanging. That is to say, it is just the kind of tale that the modern enthusiast (anxious to elevate the drama) would seize hold of, saying, "Come, this is dramatic if anything is dramatic- seduction, murder, execution. What more could the oldest idealist demand? Let us produce it at the Stage Society." But he would be wrong. For the power and vivacity of A Magdalen's Husband do depend upon those silent and spiritual transitions with which only a novel can exhaustively deal. In a Stage Society play founded on this story we should have the incidents as they occur. We should have the adoring husband brutally flinging his wife on the streets. We should have the highminded lover assassinating a sleeping man. But in the problem play these events would be incredible. Their  inevitable abruptness would make them so. It is the highest possible tribute, first to the novel in general, and, second, to this novel in particular, that in A Magdalen's Husband these events are not incredible.

The story deals with a woman who has fallen from innocence without losing a wholesome instinct for morals, and who marries a man who loves her, but whom she does not love, from a desire to resume a normal and reputable social state. The best thing in the book is, of course, the tragedy of the husband, who learns that generosity is as powerless as justice to win the wild reward of the lover. He has stooped to something apparently fathoms below him, and when he has got it he cannot reach it because it is fathoms above him. The scene of his broken prayer before his last sleep reaches a genuine elevation of pathos, of bold and bitter poetry. It is characteristic of the conventionalism of the unconventional critics of today that several reviewers have spoken of the book as analysing primarily the agony of the woman. This is simply the result of the new fad of women dissection which appears to assume that heroes and passions belong peculiarly to women, as beards do to men. Most married women, at any rate, are aware that there are many kinds of morbidity which men have to a degree which women would find fantastic and impossible. Mr. Vincent Brown has sufficiently indicated the centre point of his tragedy in the very title of his book. It is the Magdalen's Husband, and not the Magdalen, who is here the crucified. And, with the paradox of all fine tragedy, it ends on a note of resignation and even of thankfulness: "She rose, drew up the blind, and gazed out upon the morning. And there was a great hope in her soul, a great calm in her eyes." For it is one of those splendid and satisfying contradictions which are in the very entrails of the mystery of art. The sorrow which we are contemplating is one that is involved in the nature of human life; it does not demoralise us with depression. About the irremediable sorrows we can all be cheerful- of the eternal evils we never despair.