FOREWORD
Only last year I was reminded of the episode. Lord Halifax was sitting for his portrait. Mr. Hamilton had just left the house; the picture was brought to Lord Halifax. He gazed at it. "Why, it's me!" he said, intense astonishment in his voice.
When Olive Schreiner, aged seventeen, wrote the South African Farm, some among her friends were disappointed she had not called more upon her imagination and described wild and thrilling adventures, as her country might have suggested. "Such works," she says in her Preface to this wonderful book, "are best written in Piccadilly or the Strand; there the gifts of creative imagination, untrammelled by contact with fact, may spread their wings. Those brilliant phases and shapes are not for her to portray. Sadly she must squeeze the colour from her brush. She must paint what lies before her." These words might have been written by Mr. Hamilton. He is intensely real. He is a true impressionist. He paints what he sees, and as he sees it, and not as he imagines it. He paints the real, though the ideal may unwittingly be sometimes included. It is the same with his book. I have only heard fragments of it, but enough to show me its chief characteristic. It bears the hall-mark of reality, of sincerity, of truth. The book is alive—it will live.
I feel it a privilege to have been asked to contribute this word.
Hawarden, 1921.
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