Chapter VI: Front Matter (6)

Now the business of a novelist, or his art, is, as Joseph Conrad said, “a form of imagined life clearer than reality.” It is to show you something more plainly than life shows it you; a good novel is a beacon, not a bonfire. Thus in the new novel by Margaret Culkin Banning (the most ambitious work she has so far done), the heroine, after a life of vicissitudes, comes to realize that she is, in the Scriptural phrase of the title, but a “handmaid of the Lord.” Veronica is a sensitive girl brought up in depressing though scarcely unusual circumstances. She marries a man whose business career takes her to a social height, both in America and, for a time, in England. Her church, which should mean so much to her constantly, affects her life only at intervals. When the crash comes she finds herself separated from her husband by his struggle to keep afloat. She goes back to her home town. It seems as though she were back where she had started, with little difference except in the perplexity of an uncomprehended experience. So it is that finally she comes to a measure of understanding, to an unquiet peace. She sees that things will go on, though not in her way nor in any way of her choosing. _A Handmaid of the Lord_, like _High Fires_ and _Half Gods_, does something to get at the trouble that is in us.

To show what is, including what is wrong, is the novelist’s object; to show what came right is also sometimes possible. Dealing with the subject of religion, it has taken that very able novelist, Compton Mackenzie, three books in sequence to show the history of Mark Lidderdale. _The Altar Steps_ gave the young man’s background and the story of his life up to his ordination in the Church of England. In _The Parson’s Progress_ we see him as a priest of the English Church constantly beset by doubts and difficulties. These are by no means solved when the third novel of the trilogy, _The Heavenly Ladder_, opens; but they find their solution as it ends. Mark, as a convert in Rome, finds a happiness that Mr. Mackenzie has expressed with the utmost simplicity and with a restrained but lofty fervor.

With a simplicity different but equally honest, Ralph Connor writes his novels of men in a newer country. “Imagine,” he said, when asked to tell briefly about his new book, “a man of vitality and power who has given and taken heavy blows in the struggle of human life, who finds himself cornered by forces he cannot subdue. Suddenly he realizes that his back is against the wall, that no further retreat is possible. Spiritually, mentally, physically there is a last stand to be made—a hold on the essentials of life to be groped for and seized. It is this last stand, this fighting chance that I have made the theme of _Treading the Winepress_.” The scenes of the story are laid in Nova Scotia.

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If there is no single preoccupation common to the new fiction of other authors, readers will be highly content to find thoroughly characteristic new work by such favorites as Joseph C. Lincoln, Hugh Walpole, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Arnold Bennett, Bertrand W. Sinclair, Susan Ertz, Robert Hichens, and Ruth Comfort Mitchell.

Both Joseph C. Lincoln and Hugh Walpole—and different as they are—seem to me to have surpassed themselves. Mr. Lincoln’s _Rugged Water_ is not basically different from his other Cape Cod novels. Perhaps in the loose chronology of his stories it is more nearly contemporaneous with _Cap’n Eri_ than with his more recent books. It is a story of a Coast Guard Station in the days when the Coast Guard was the Life Saving Service. The chief character is Calvin Homer, Number One man of the crew, brave, honest, and shy of women. In temporary command of the Station, he does gallant rescue work which should place him in line for promotion to Keeper of the Station. But in the same storm, Benoni Bartlett, of a nearby Station, stands out more conspicuously as the sole survivor of a brave crew. Benoni is made Keeper over Homer.

These two men, Benoni Bartlett and Homer; Myra Fuller, to whom Homer became engaged before he quite knew what was happening; Norma Bartlett, daughter of the former Keeper and the young woman with whom Homer eventually discovers himself to be in love, are the main persons of the novel. It is difficult to regard them as Mr. Lincoln’s real subject, for the life of the Station and the drama of shipwreck asserts itself constantly in pages that teem with humor and with other qualities of human nature less easy of superficial exhibition.

In other words, the largeness of what he is essentially dealing with has seized upon Mr. Lincoln, and without the sacrifice of his lesser drama, or any of the picturesqueness that has made him so beloved, he has caught something of the loneliness of the Station, the whisper and thunder of the surf, the struggle of men in an “overmatched littleness” under a black sky in the tempest of waters. To me, these captures make _Rugged Water_ the best novel he has written.

As for Mr. Walpole in _The Old Ladies_, my verdict, arrived at on different grounds, is equally affirmative and emphatic. Here is a short novel to stand beside Edith Wharton’s _Ethan Frome_. There is bleakness as well as sunniness about the story; no haze; no sentimentality, though sentiment a-plenty and a deep, clear feeling. Three women, Lucy Amorest, May Beringer, and Agatha Payne, all seventy, live together in the top of a “rain-bitten” old house in Polchester. All are very poor. Lucy has a cousin who _may_ leave her money, and a son in America from whom she has not heard for a couple of years. May Beringer, close to penury, is a weak, stupid, kind creature always terrified of life. Agatha Payne is sensual and strong. There has never, in my knowledge, been a picture more honest or more terribly pathetic of what old age sometimes means. Mr. Walpole has not evaded an inch of the truth or the tragedy; and the measured happiness accorded at last to Lucy Amorest comes not in the least as a concession toward a “happy ending” but solely as a reprieve of pity for her—and for the reader also.

The stories in Mary Roberts Rinehart’s _Temperamental People_ represent her most recent work and have a unity as interesting as their wide range. Each shows the force of temperament—that quality in people which makes the drama of life. But who are the temperamental people? A queen, a cowboy, a famous singer, a wife, a great sculptor and a business man’s secretary are some of them. People as diverse as life; but all of them have temperament, and each story is a revelation of human emotion in action. As one of the characters says (it is the opening of the story of the sculptor, “Cynara”): “I suppose once in every creative life there comes the sublime moment, the consecrated hour when, not from within but from without there comes the onrush of true greatness.” These records of that moment and that hour are among the best things Mrs. Rinehart has done.

The title of Arnold Bennett’s new collection, _Elsie and the Child and Other Stories_, should be notice enough to the thousands who revelled in _Riceyman Steps_ that the new book is one they may not miss. Yes, it is Elsie, the humble but lovable heroine of Clerkenwell, who figures again in this volume. It will be remembered that at the close of _Riceyman Steps_, Elsie, about to marry Joe, weakly consented to go to work as a servant for Mrs. Raste, while Joe (it was arranged) should resume his rôle as Dr. Raste’s handy man. This was due to the pleading of young Miss Raste; Elsie was never one to resist children. And so “Elsie and the Child” begins approximately where _Riceyman Steps_ left off. It is a novelette in length, a most satisfactory morsel left over from the novel’s feast. With the very first page the feeling of _Riceyman Steps_ in its more blissful moments is restored to the reader. The dozen shorter tales in the book are all from Mr. Bennett’s most recent work.

Bertrand W. Sinclair’s _The Inverted Pyramid_ is work of such proportions and of a sufficient dignity to take him quite out of the group of “Western” writers. This is not to rate down the cowboy story, but it is to recognize that such work as Mr. Sinclair’s is something far more consequential. The inverted pyramid of the title is the social structure of a family set up by entailed wealth. Hawk’s Nest, on Big Dent, just off the coast of Vancouver Island, is the home of the Norquay family, founded in 1809 by a roving pioneer fur trader who obtained the immense tract of land from the Indians for a pittance. He held it intact and it has come down unspoiled to the fifth generation of Norquays—Dorothy, Roderick, Phil and Grove. Luck and ability has aggregated a huge fortune from the natural resources of the estate, which Roderick’s grandfather converted into a corporation, seventy per cent. of income going to the oldest son, the rest being divided among the others.

In the fifth generation various destinies open before the three brothers. Money, in the sense of finance (money plus power); love; the call of adventure; the quest of romance exert themselves on the three. The very structure of the family, however, makes it quite impossible that the destinies of one should not react in an exceptional degree upon the others. The responsibility for the maintenance of family standing, financial, social, moral, is interlocking. The old question: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” was never asked under a colder compulsion to return an affirmative answer: yes, because he is a fellow director on the board.

I have said nothing about the daughter, Dorothy, and will only say that her rôle in the novel is important. It is enough, I think, to indicate the largeness and the serious character of _The Inverted Pyramid_, and to hail it as a sign that Mr. Sinclair will give us other books as good or even better, to stand with this, his finest so far.

Susan Ertz’s _Nina_ is at once more brilliant and more profound than her _Madame Claire_ (a novel which sells better today than when it was first published). _Nina_ is the study of a girl whose love, once given, cannot be revoked by any act or will of her own. Brought up by her aunt, Nina Wadsworth falls in love with Morton Caldwell, adopted as a boy by that same aunt. Morton is extraordinarily handsome, good-hearted, and hopelessly susceptible to women. Tony Fielding has the qualities of fidelity and devotion which Morton lacks. Henri Bouvier, the son of a French family in England, is a playmate in childhood. Miss Ertz deals directly only with Nina and Morton after their marriage; what has gone before is cleverly reflected in the scenes put before the reader. As in _Madame Claire_, a delightful feature is the points of view from which the story is told. Much of it is seen through the eyes of Henri, grown to manhood, French in his ideas, sophisticated, and almost equally sympathetic and discreet. His comments, both spoken and unspoken, are delicious. They do much to enliven a situation at bottom profoundly tragic by reason of Morton’s limitations as a husband and Nina’s tenacious love.

The novel is as unusual as it is competent, and the unusualness springs from the author’s competence. And when I say competence, I am not thinking only of the writing, which is admirable, but of the wisdom in human nature which underlies the tale. Every woman will be charmed with this novel because it is veracious in its feminine psychology, as most novels by men are not—and as most novels by women would be if women could avoid sentimentality as cleanly as Miss Ertz does. Yes, women will be engrossed by _Nina_ because they will find in it those accents and indications which are their tests of the reality of men and women in intimate relation to each other, especially in the relations of love and marriage.

The depths of feminine psychology have been delicately sounded many times by Robert Hichens, whose new novel, _After the Verdict_, is of great length and painstaking detail. Here also we have an extremely dramatic story. Clive Baratrie, as the story opens, is on trial for the murder of Mrs. Sabine, a woman older than himself with whom he had a prolonged affair that began when Clive was a patient in her nursing home after the war. The young man is engaged to marry Vivian Denys, a girl of his own age, a splendid, fresh, outdoor person and one of the best tennis players in England. Miss Denys has stuck to Clive through his ordeal, and after his acquittal they are married. Clive’s mother, who lives to see him acquitted and for some time afterward, is the only other person of first importance in the 500-odd pages.

Is Clive guilty or innocent? He has been acquitted, true. And if innocent, of what avail to him? Must not his whole life be lived under the dark shadow of the crime? Must he not suffer as surely one way as the other? One goes four-fifths of the way through this novel in a state of tortured suspense. One does not know what to think as to Clive’s guilt or innocence, nor is there a definite clue in his uncertain behavior. The fact, when revealed, stuns by its impact. Mr. Hichens tells me that he had long had it in mind to study a man resting under the cloud of a murder charge; but he had another and greater thing in mind. “I wanted,” he says, “to show that in such a marriage as Clive’s and Vivian’s an absolute sincerity must exist between the two people.” But it is the studies of the women in _After the Verdict_ which will impress and entrance the reader.

Ruth Comfort Mitchell, whose popular novels have been of a light character, has also been led to a study of a woman capable of ordering her world and ruling it. The title of her new novel, _A White Stone_, is from the second half of the seventeenth verse in the Book of Revelation: “To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.” To Joyce Evers, the white stone at first was her diamond engagement ring. Later it is the great rock on the mountain where she takes her woes for quieting and consolation. It is long before she finds the unseen, intangible white stone of the mystical passage. A homely little girl, she had been the center of a marvelous romance when Duval, one of the world’s great pianists, asked her to marry him. In the chapters which show the gradual increase in Joyce of that power which is to be her salvation, Ruth Comfort Mitchell has done much abler work than in any story of hers before. Two somewhat unusual characters—Hannah Hills Blade, a novelist, and Chung, a Chinese servant—do a good deal to differentiate _A White Stone_ from the run of novels. Chung is picturesque and is an excellent example of a certain fresh invention which is felt throughout the book. There is a strongly-written love story.

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In an interesting article on the work of Concha Espina,[60] Mr. James Fletcher Smith speaks of _Dulce Nombre_ as “such a notable novel that it cried for instant translation.” The translation has been accomplished and under the title, _The Red Beacon_, this impressive story is now available to English readers. (The Spanish title is the name of the heroine, simply—Dulce Nombre de Maria, Sweet Name of Mary, which was shortened by use to Sweet Name.)

Who is Concha Espina? The question does us no credit, but our general lack of information about European writers makes a brief answer necessary. Concha Espina was born at Santander, Spain, in 1877. She is therefore of the Northern seaboard and the mountain country. _The Red Beacon_, for instance, is laid in the Cantabrian Mountains. Concha Espina’s title to be considered the foremost living woman novelist of her country seems to be undisputed. Possibly her two finest works are _The Red Beacon_ and an earlier novel, _La Esfinga Maragata_ (_The Maragatan Sphinx_; it was brought out in English as _Mariflor_). Although she has lived for some years in Madrid, Concha Espina remains unmistakably a Northerner. She married very young and went to South America (Chile) where affairs went badly and where she began writing as a newspaper correspondent to earn money.

_The Red Beacon_ is a dramatic and somewhat tragic story of the people of her native region. Dulce Nombre, the heroine, is the daughter of a miller and the godchild of an hidalgo or nobleman, Nicolas Hornedo. Nicolas’s interest serves to educate her above her own station but not up to his; yet when she falls in love with a countryman, a lad named Manuel, Nicolas, distressed, aids a rich man in buying the young fellow off and getting him out of the country. The rich man, much older than Dulce Nombre, succeeds in getting her in marriage. His hope is that she will come to love him, but she does not. The marriage is the beginning of a long ordeal for the girl, an ordeal of waiting which nothing can hasten nor prevent. The story proceeds with well-sustained interest to a crisis supervening some years later, when with her husband’s death Dulce Nombre is again confronted with a difficult choice and a situation provocative of final despair. But happiness is in her destiny; Concha Espina shows us how it is realized at last.

A story written with an intimate knowledge of the heroine and with great, though restrained, feeling. It will be of more than ordinary interest to watch its reception by American readers.

NEW AND VARIED FICTION

_A Conqueror Passes_, by Larry Barretto. An after the war story—perhaps the best of them all—showing the reactions in business and social life of the returned soldier, restless, discontented, missing the excitement and tension of war. Told without either hysterics or despairing cynicism. A noteworthy book and a first novel by a writer who deserves close attention.

_The Book of Blanche_, by Dorothy Richardson. The love story, half earthly, half spiritual, of a beautiful violinist and a hospital surgeon; unique for its word pictures of the psychic phenomena of anæsthesia, and introducing a new American novelist of brilliance.

_Blue Blood_, by Owen Johnson. The story of a reckless society girl who sold herself to save her father’s honor—then waited in suspense for the order to deliver herself.

_Pandora Lifts the Lid_, by Christopher Morley and Don Marquis. An extravagant, light romance which opens with the kidnapping of six daughters of the rich from a girl’s seminary on Long Island and continues with a dashing yacht.

_Semi-Attached_, by Anne Parrish. A more serious novel than _A Pocketful of Poses_, but told with the same lively sense of the humorous moments in life. The story of a delightful girl who had to be converted to the idea of marriage.

_The Show-Off_, by William Almon Wolff, from the play by George Kelly. Aubrey Piper, the show-off, with his wing collar and bow tie, flower in his button-hole and patent leather shoes, is a character who will appeal universally because we all know him and laugh at him in everyday life. A realistic American novel, a satire that is full of humor and pathos.

_Rôles_, by Elizabeth Alexander. What happened when a discontented wealthy young wife changed places with her double, a hard-working actress—the kind of story one reads at a sitting, anxious to find out “how it will all come out,” and very much surprised by the dénouement. Witty.

_Deep in the Hearts of Men_, by Mary E. Waller. A story of the deeper human interests, especially of a man’s coming into spiritual light out of darkness, its scenes laid chiefly in a New Hampshire manufacturing town and the coal fields of West Virginia.

_Tomorrow and Tomorrow_, by Stephen McKenna. A novel of English inner political circles after the war, in which some of the characters of the author’s famous novel, _Sonia_, make their final appearance.

_Humdrum House?_ by Maximilian Foster. An exciting mystery story with both serious and farcical complications. You won’t, however, for a considerable time know which is which!

_The Brute_, by W. Douglas Newton. A mystery-adventure story of rapid movement with scenes in South America and a beautiful and wealthy English girl as the heroine. By a novelist who writes with more than ordinary skill in characterization.

_The Thirteenth Letter_, by Natalie Sumner Lincoln. Opens with a strange midnight marriage followed soon by a mysterious murder, and centers around the disappearance of a famous diamond worth $250,000. The author is an experienced hand in stories of this type, and the final solution depends upon a remarkable cipher.

_The Laughing Rider_, by Laurie Yorke Erskine. William O’Brien Argent, otherwise Smiling Billy Argent, is the central figure of this romantic adventure story which runs from the Texas plains to the Canadian Northwest.

_A City Out of the Sea_, by Alfred Stanford. The story of Michael Ballard, who is a lawyer for the people of New York’s waterfront, and who is attached to them because he finds them “hard and fair and wild.” His growth through certain violent episodes until the love of a beautiful woman matures his personality and power as an artist is the theme. The novel is the work of a young writer whose work is stamped with distinction. The story suggests Jack London, but is written with more finesse if with no less power.

_Cuddy of the White Tops_, by Earl Chapin May. An exhilarating tale of a college boy who discovers, on his father’s death, that the family fortune is all invested in a circus. He quits college and takes charge of the show—and finds he has a three-ring performance on his hands. Good love story.

_After Harvest_, by Charles Fielding Marsh. An English love story of the wind-swept Norfolk country, contrasting with, but of the same type as, Sheila Kaye-Smith’s Sussex stories. In Priscilla, John Thirtle of Brent Fen Farm, and the shepherd, Reuben Gladden, the author exhibits something common to all humanity and clearly expressed in the simple lives and deep passions of country folk.

_Many Waters_, by Elinor Chipp. A love story of present-day New England which begins when Marian Pritchard, Mark Wetherell, and Donald Callender are playmates. Marian, however, and Mark as well have a great ordeal to undergo before achieving mutual happiness.

_The Quenchless Light_, by Agnes C. Laut. A novel based on the lives of the Christian Apostles, vividly written, and of the general type of Sienkiewicz’s _Quo Vadis_ and F. Marion Crawford’s _Via Crucis_.

_Low Bridge and Punk Pungs_, by Sam Hellman. Mirth-provoking stories for bridge fiends and mah-jongg fans by the newest popular American humorist. With pictures by Tony Sarg.

11. Cosmo Hamilton’s Unwritten History

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Cosmo! He meets ’em one and all,
The Douglas Fairbanks in his hall,
The Lloyd George in his den!
Cosmo! He meets ’em low and high;
He holds ’em with his glittering eye
And draws ’em with his pen.

...

Cosmo! He meets ’em in the flesh!
All his celebrities are fresh!
No has-been like Frank Harris!
He keeps his contacts up to date!
Cosmo! The great and the near-great
From Hollywood to Paris!

_—Keith Preston in the Chicago Daily News._

He was the brother to whose early literary success Philip Gibbs looked up with admiration; while Philip Gibbs grew more and more to look like an ascetic, “a tired Savonarola,” Cosmo Hamilton (Gibbs) continued to be impressively good-looking, so that today he is not infrequently called the handsomest of male authors. And his looks are no deception, for in ease, urbanity, savoir faire few authors excel him—perhaps none. He can make an agreeable speech, talk interestingly, write a play or a novel with dexterity and a finished effect. It is true that in his lively memoirs, _Unwritten History_, he has embedded an occasional groan about the labors of authorship, and tells of one instance in which an indolent writer was led back to the paths of virtuous industry. But for all that, in his own case, it has probably never been as hard work as sometimes it seemed to himself; while as for anyone else, the association of Cosmo Hamilton with toil must forever be an act of mental violence.

No! No photograph exists showing him with the dampened towel binding his brows, the cup of strong black coffee at his lips. It is even doubtful if, were one produced, any but Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would accept its authenticity.

The fact that he made a success so young—he was scarcely twenty-one when his first novel was published—and the fact that this success was immediately followed by others more marked is, no doubt, as much responsible as anything. But the feeling that he managed easily what most men contrive with the most desperate struggle is not lessened by such words as these of his brother’s:

“Among my literary friends as a young man,” writes Philip Gibbs in his _Adventurers in Journalism_,[61] “was, first and foremost—after my father, who was always inspiring and encouraging—my own brother, who reached the heights of success (dazzling and marvelous to my youthful eyes) under the name of Cosmo Hamilton.[62] After various flights and adventures, including a brief career on the stage, he wrote a book called _Which Is Absurd_, and after it had been rejected by many publishers, placed it on the worst possible terms with Fisher Unwin. It made an immediate hit, and refused to stop selling. After that success he went straight on without a check, writing novels, short stories, and dramatic sketches which established him as a new humorist, and then, achieving fortune as well as fame, entered the musical comedy world with ‘The Catch of the Season,’ ‘The Beauty of Bath,’ and other great successes, which he is still maintaining with unabated industry and invention. He and I were close ‘pals,’ as we still remain, and, bad form as it may seem to write about my brother, I honestly think there are few men who have his prodigality of imagination, his overflowing storehouse of plots, ideas, and dramatic situations, his eternal boyishness of heart—which has led him into many scrapes, given him hard knocks, but never taught him the caution of age, or moderated his sense of humor—his wildness of exaggeration, his generous good nature, or the sentiment and romance which he hides under the laughing mask of a cynic. In character he and I are poles apart, but I owe him much in the way of encouragement, and his praise has always been first and overwhelming when I have made any small success. As a young man I used to think him the handsomest fellow in England, and I fancy I was not far wrong.”

_Photograph by Lewis Smith, Chicago._]

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When Cosmo Hamilton was eighteen, he hid himself in Dieppe, France, for a month. It was necessary to convince his family, and most particularly his father, that he meant to write and could make some kind of figure at writing. There, in the Hotel of the Chariot of Gold, he did the story, _Which Is Absurd_, and saw occasionally Edward VII., then Prince of Wales, who was enjoying a vacation as plain Mr. Smith. After he had lost money he could ill spare one night, a dazzling person with large violet eyes told him to follow her, and he did with a five-franc piece, winning back all he had lost and 100 francs besides. She was Lily Langtry. Back in London and waiting for the publication of his story, he seized on a novel of Robert Barr’s and made it into a four-act play. Compton Mackenzie’s father, the actor, Edward Compton, played it in the English provinces for a year (after drastic alterations) and it made enough money to enable Hamilton to take rooms in London. Whereupon, for a while, everything he wrote came back with a rejection slip.

_Which Is Absurd_, whatever its demerits, had the quality of provocation. An evening paper, reviewing it, asked: “Who is Cosmo Hamilton?” and answered: “Either a very bitter old man who is bankrupt of every hope, or an unkissed girl in a boarding school who ought to be spanked with a brush.” Now with the fewest exceptions, book reviews do not sell books; but this is the type of review that infallibly sells a book. And shortly Mr. Hamilton found himself writing for the Pall Mall Gazette, along with Mrs. Humphry Ward, Alice Meynell, and others well-known and doing a syndicated London letter which required his presence in the high places.

His play, “The Wisdom of Folly,” lived two weeks, and after a spell as editor of a short-lived weekly paper he became one of a brilliant company of contributors to the World. William Archer as dramatic critic, Richard Dehan as fictionist, Robert Hichens as dialogist, Gilbert Frankau, Philip Gibbs and Max Beerbohm were some of the staff. Before Cosmo Hamilton was thirty he was to become editor of this paper. But meanwhile a variety of fates awaited him. He dramatized Kipling’s _The Story of the Gadsbys_ in a fashion satisfactory to the author; had a close shave from dishonor as one of the directors of a speculative mineral exploration enterprise which had trapped various well-known names to aid it; and faced bankruptcy. This last adventure resulted from the failure of his first wife, the actress, Beryl Faber, in a theatrical season; and after Mr. Hamilton had taken on the debts he retired to the country to cope with them by writing.

What then occurred was dramatic enough, as life has a fashion of being. A telegram came from a man Hamilton didn’t know. It read: “Kindly see me tomorrow twelve o’clock Savoy Hotel Charles Frohman.” Mr. Hamilton kept the appointment, which marked the beginning of a long association with the famous American theatrical manager. In five consecutive years there was no time when one or more of his plays was not running in London. Probably the best-remembered is “The Belle of Mayfair,” in which Edna May was succeeded by Billie Burke, and which ran for three years.

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At a time when he most urgently needed money, Mr. Hamilton had had a series of conversations with an actor manager known on both sides of the Atlantic. This man needed a new play and Hamilton had the necessary idea, but there was a difficulty. “If I were prepared to give him all the best scenes, all the best lines and build the play not round the boy and girl but all about himself, make him suffer as the boy was to suffer, love as the girl was to love, and, as he was to be a clergyman, undergo a momentary shattering of faith which would give him a first-class opportunity to show how supremely he could touch the tragic note, a check on account of royalties would be paid at once and a contract signed.” Mr. Hamilton refused, thereby sacrificing all future chances in this quarter, but “when that play was offered to the public in 1911 word for word as I had described it to the man who subsequently forgot my face, it was called ‘The Blindness of Virtue.’ Can’t you imagine how I love to say that it has been running ever since?”[63]

It was first written as a novel, however, under that title. The novel was well-received and when Mr. Hamilton’s younger brother, Arthur Hamilton Gibbs, came down from Oxford for some golf he suggested that a play be done from the novel. Cosmo’s reply can be imagined, but the old idea took instant hold, and the manuscript of the play was ready precisely when an actor who had taken the lease of the Adelphi Theatre, meeting Hamilton on the street, asked: “Why don’t you make a play of _The Blindness of Virtue_?” C. H.’s reply was to hand him the typed play.

This novel and play mark a decisive point in the author’s career. It appeared in 1911 and the following year Mr. Hamilton made his first visit to America. On his return he was inevitably asked: “Are you going to use your novels for the ventilation of vital questions or are you going to revert to the entertaining novel of society life?” He answered: “I believe that I have now lived long enough, suffered enough, observed enough and studied enough to try and rise a little above the level of a merely entertaining writer,—one content to give his readers satirical pictures of men and women of the world, their surroundings, their little quarrels and their little love affairs. I believe that I have it in me to put into my work something that is of value apart from any pretensions to literary merit that it may have; that will cause the people who read it to ask themselves whether the world and the social system is as perfect as they imagined it to be, if they ever thought about these things. I don’t think I can better describe my intentions than by saying that I am going to write human stories for human beings and no longer light sketches of people who are afraid to think and do not desire to remember their great and grave responsibilities.”

Book, play and motion picture must have made everyone familiar with _The Blindness of Virtue_ as a sermon on sex education powerfully implied by the engrossing story of an innocence that was merely ignorance. A glance at Mr. Hamilton’s succeeding novels will show how consistently he has stuck to his determination not to write mere light fiction.

_The Door That Has No Key_ (1913) is a story of married life. A man has given a woman his name but has never found the key to her mind. _The Miracle of Love_ (1915) is the story of an English duke with a conscience and a sense of duty. He faces the necessity of marrying for money in order to restore family fortunes, although he is already in love with a girl whom it is quite impossible for him to marry, even though he sacrifice, for her sake, title and estates. _The Sins of the Children_ (1916) is more strictly in succession to _The Blindness of Virtue_. This is a novel of American family life illustrating the danger to young people coming from ignorance of sex truths, and showing that the children’s sins are principally due to the failure of parents to tell them what they should know.

_Scandal_ (1917) is an exceptionally good illustration of Cosmo Hamilton’s ability to write a dramatically interesting story, freighted with moral and ethical teachings, but fictionally buoyant, and with the story uppermost all the time. Beatrix Vanderdyke is the beautiful daughter of wealthy parents. She is also the typical American spoiled child. A flirtation in which she throws conventions aside gives the occasion for scandalous talk; and to enable her to cope with the situation she asks Pelham Franklin, an acquaintance, not to show her up when she announces that he and she have been secretly married. Franklin has his own idea as to the lesson she needs; he at once acknowledges her as his wife and proceeds to treat her as if she were. It is the way, with such a girl, to a happy ending.

_Who Cares_ (1919) is the story of a boy and girl, high-spirited, healthy, normal and imaginative, flung suddenly upon their own resources, buying their own experiences, and coming finally out of a serious adventure hurt and with a price to pay, but not damaged because of the inherent sense of cleanness that belongs to both. _His Friend and His Wife_ (1920) describes the tragic repercussions in tranquil homes of one moral misstep. _The Blue Room_ (1920) is the story of a young man whose reformation took place too late to avoid giving a shock of keen mental anguish to his prospective bride on the eve of their marriage. These two people achieve happiness not without scars, and the novel is a sharp stroke at the double standard of morality or sex ethics.

_The Rustle of Silk_ (1922) is a presentation of political and social life in after-war London. Lola Breezy, a reincarnation in a shabby, lower middle class environment of the famous and alluring Madame de Breze of eighteenth century France, lifts herself out of her surroundings by sheer force of personality and becomes the friend and confidante of England’s Home Secretary, the “coming” statesman.

_Another Scandal_ (1923) is an extension of _Scandal_ and deals with Beatrix Vanderdyke and Pelham Franklin after their marriage. Mr. Hamilton, describing the genesis of the novel, explains: “Here was this astounding creature, Beatrix, not only married but about to have a baby. Sentimental cynic that I am, I hoped that she had settled down. At the same time, I dreaded a tangent. I hadn’t long to wait. Hardly had Franklin II. time enough to open his eyes when Beatrix suffered the inevitable reaction, finding that the ‘girl stuff,’ as she had an irritating way of calling that pathetic-tragic-romantic thing in her, had not worked itself out.” There is some extremely sound philosophy on the whole subject of marriage in this novel.

iv

_Scandal_, like _The Blindness of Virtue_, made an effective play; the number who will recall Francine Larrimore in the rôle of Beatrix Vanderdyke is large. Rather better, except for those who have the empty prejudice against reading plays, than any of Mr. Hamilton’s novels is his _Four Plays_ (1924), containing “The New Poor,” “Scandal,” “The Silver Fox,” and “The Mother Woman.” It is amusing to read the note in connection with “The Mother Woman”: “Misproduced in New York under the title of ‘Danger’ in 1922.” Mr. Hamilton, in a long experience with the theater, has suffered much and most of it with sportsmanship and cheerfulness; he is entitled to this calm and rather deadly comment.

“The New Poor” is social satire, a comedy in which actors impersonate the servants; but the other three plays are in line with Mr. Hamilton’s recent novels. “The Silver Fox” is a comedy of marriage and divorce; but unquestionably the most powerful play of the collection is “The Mother Woman.” Dealing with the question of children in a marriage which is a social contract rather than a sacrament, at least, from the wife’s viewpoint, its strength lies in the hardness and the consistency with which the wife is characterized. In its thesis the play bears wholly in one direction—not a weakness in the theatre, of course; but Mr. Hamilton has the wisdom to give Violet Scorrier good speeches and to let her walk off the stage, at the end of the last act, unchanged, unchanging, and satisfied with her unshared ego.

The history of these plays and various others, together with much of the history of his novels will be found in Mr. Hamilton’s extremely readable _Unwritten History_. This, if it must be classed, can only be put into the list of informal and anecdotal autobiographies. It has all the good humor, the respect for human interest and the relative disregard for the claims of mere importance which should pervade a book of its sort. In other words, it has the exhilaration of talk devoted to one’s liveliest recollections, with no special regard for chronology and with only the spur of mood. And the mood? It is throughout humorous, even self-humorous, democratic and impartial. Mr. Hamilton does not go out of his way to express his opinions, but neither does he dodge a natural comment when the occasion comes. You gather, for example, his very definite and not favorable view of David Lloyd George. The book is exceptional for its range of portraits. In anything from a sentence or two to several pages there is something about Kipling, Barrie, Conrad, Sinclair Lewis, Coningsby Dawson, Gilbert K. Chesterton, Heywood Broun and W. J. Locke among writers; the King and Queen, Lord Roberts, Colonel E. M. House, Mr. Asquith, Admiral Beatty, J. Pierpont Morgan, Lord Balfour, Melville Stone and the Prince of Wales among the figures of public life; John Drew, Owen Davis, Pinero, Augustus Thomas, George Arliss, William Archer, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin and Granville Barker among the people of the theater. The twelve caricatures, particularly those of Bernard Shaw, Charles Frohman, George Grossmith, Sir Martin Harvey, Mr. Lloyd George and Lytton Strachey are the first public disclosure of Cosmo Hamilton’s decided talent as an artist.

But perhaps the interest and engaging quality of _Unwritten History_ can best be shown by quoting, not an anecdote of some personage, but some such incident as that of the first trip Mr. Hamilton made to this side:

“Before the ship had left Southampton I was flattered by the attention of an extremely good-looking, athletic, well-groomed youngish man, who insisted on walking the deck with me. He took the trouble to let me know, very shortly after we had broken the ice, that although that trip was not his maiden one he had only made the Western crossing once. But when, an hour before the bugle sounded for dinner, the purser touched me on the arm as I was following him into the smoking-room and murmured the one word ‘card-sharp,’ I still went on utterly disbelieving this brutal summing up of a delightful man’s profession. Those were the old bad days when America was free, and never dreamed of interfering with the rights of foreign vessels, and so we had a sherry and bitters together in what is now an easy though a criminal way of encouraging an appetite. After which, his hand closing familiarly on a box of dice, he suggested with a naïve smile that we should kill an awkward half an hour by throwing for five pound notes, and I saw, in a disappointed flash, the reason of his flattery. The purser was right, as pursers have a knack of being. And so as much to retrieve myself from his obvious assumption that I was an ‘easy mark,’ as to be able to continue a pleasant acquaintanceship without having again to back out of future invitations of the same expensive sort, I made ready to dodge a knockout blow and told him that I not only had no spare fivers to lose but had a peculiar aversion to losing them to a card-sharp. After a second or two of extreme surprise at my character reading and temerity he burst out laughing, and we walked the deck together with perfect affability during the whole of the rest of the voyage. He was one of the most interesting men that I have ever met, a student of Dickens and Thackeray with a strong penchant for the Brontës, and as devoted a lover of Italy as Lucas is, with much of the same feeling for its beauty and its treasures. At no cost at all I greatly enjoyed his company and when, six months later, I met him by accident in Delmonico’s, with the ruddy color that comes from sea air and shuffleboard, I was charmed by his eager acceptance of my invitation to dine. In the meantime he had read _Duke’s Son_ and although he liked my story very much and said so generously enough, at the same time assuring me that he was not much of a hand at modern books, he wound up by regretting that I had not met him before I wrote about cheating at cards, because he could have put me right on several points. He died fighting gallantly, and probably as humorously, in the war.”

v

Readers of _Unwritten History_ may look upon a photograph of Mr. Hamilton’s home, an English cottage of that idyllic air which seems to be the special property of all English cottages belonging to all English authors. Mr. Hamilton and a young son (now somewhat older) are on the brick steps that lead to the house, for the cottage is on a hill. Beside the steps and in front of the house is what we call an “old-fashioned garden”—flowers and plants in a profuse, unordered growth, with the tall spikes of flowering hollyhocks making the garden three-dimensional. Mr. Hamilton’s second marriage, after the death of Beryl Faber, was with a Californian; and he now resides here rather more than abroad, although he endeavors to spend his summers in England and on the Continent. In the war, of course, he was in service, first with the anti-aircraft corps (when he was finally detailed to Sandringham, for the protection of the King and Queen during their stay) and then as a British publicist and propagandist in America. American audiences like him, and he reciprocates.

There is, indeed, about him personally a simplicity, directness and fundamental unsophistication that may be perceived in his fiction but which is missed by the casual reader and auditor and observer and acquaintance. Accident, marked talents and a variety of surface tastes and social interests have constantly brought him into what has been well described as “the world where one bores oneself to death unless one is in mischief.” But both boredom and mischief are impossible if one continues, as C. H. has continued, to care only for the same handful of essentials. One thinks of him, for example, as the very antithesis of W. L. George. Less poetic than his brother, Philip Gibbs, he has his share of the same moral earnestness (a family trait) and gifts as great or greater as a storyteller, especially a story of drama all compact.

BOOKS BY COSMO HAMILTON

_Which Is Absurd_
_Adam’s Clay_
_Brummell_
_Duke’s Son_ (also adapted as a play in French, written with
Mme. Pierre Burton, and produced in Paris under the title,
“Bridge”)
_Plain Brown—A Summer Story_
_The Infinite Capacity_
_Keepers of the House_
1911 _The Blindness of Virtue_
1912 _The Outpost of Eternity_
1912 _A Plea for the Younger Generation_
1913 _The Door That Has No Key_
1915 _The Miracle of Love_
1916 _The Sins of the Children_
1917 _Scandal_
1919 _Who Cares?_
1920 _His Friend and His Wife_
1920 _The Blue Room_
1922 _The Rustle of Silk_
1923 _Another Scandal_
1924 _Unwritten History_ (autobiographical)
1924 _Four Plays: The New Poor, Scandal, The Silver Fox, and The
Mother Woman_

SOURCES ON COSMO HAMILTON

_Unwritten History_, by Cosmo Hamilton. Autobiographical throughout. A list of Mr. Hamilton’s plays will be found on page 351 of his _Four Plays_, to which the plays in the volume must be added. The history of most of them is given in _Unwritten History_.

“Cosmo Hamilton, the Man.” Booklet published (1923) by Little, Brown and Company.

“Cosmo Hamilton: His Ambitions and His Achievements.” Booklet published (1916) by Little, Brown and Company.

Reference is made in a footnote to the text of this chapter to Philip Gibbs’s _Adventures in Journalism_.

12. Lest They Forget

i

In the short preface to his _Eminent Victorians_, Mr. Lytton Strachey speaks of the great biological tradition of the French, of “their incomparable _éloges_, compressing into a few shining pages the manifold existences of men.” And he speaks of biography as “the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing.” The tribute of a distinguished master of biographical literature was recalled to me as I read André Maurois’s _Ariel, The Life of Shelley_, so ably translated by Ella D’Arcy. Here are a comparatively few, but gloriously shining pages. This biography has burst upon us with an effect as surprising and luminous as Shelley himself. It is written on gauze and its transparency shows opaline colors. The picture it gives us is of Matthew Arnold’s “beautiful and ineffectual angel beating his wings in a luminous void”; but I should delete the word “ineffectual.” If Shelley was ineffectual, then the soul goes out of the world.

It needed a Frenchman, perhaps, to do the subject justice. Mr. Strachey, as Aldous Huxley has remarked, is congenitally incapable of penetrating the mystical mind. André Maurois was already known to some English and American readers by the humorous and profound novels studying an inarticulate English army officer. No one who read _The Silences of Colonel Bramble_ can have forgotten its delicate portraiture. But such fiction was a pastime beside _Ariel_.

I could, of course, quote the praise of Arnold Bennett and other acute judges, but it seems to me a lame thing to do. Nor is there space to quote from Maurois’s book, and it hurts me not to be able to transcribe some things he has written. Any attempt to convey the quality of his book reduces me to despair; and yet I am used—perhaps too well used—to such attempts. Maurois is gleeful, tender, ironical; he recalls in his delicate but firm art Mr. Strachey more than anyone else, but he is more sympathetic, and so more just, than Strachey. This perhaps is because he has that side which Strachey, with his Voltaire-like intellect, quite lacks. Shelley’s pathetic youth, his three-cornered marriage, his elopement with Mary Godwin, his few life-long friendships, his strange contacts with Byron, the brief happiness in Italy and the ultimate, tragic release of the captive soul to its flight in immortality—all these are told with a sense of proportion and an effect unsurpassable. The incidental portrait of Byron is more clear than any—yes, any!—of the ponderous biographies that have saluted his centenary.

ii

Besides the large number of sketches and impressions of Woodrow Wilson embedded in various recent books, there have already been published several biographies; but _The True Story of Woodrow Wilson_, by David Lawrence, seems to me distinctly the best of these, and probably the best immediate life of Wilson we shall have. Mr. Lawrence sat under Mr. Wilson when Wilson was professor of jurisprudence and politics at Princeton; he was with him at the time of nomination for Governor of New Jersey; he knew intimately the dissension at Princeton over the Wilson policies as President of the University; and from the time of Mr. Wilson’s nomination for the Presidency of the United States, Mr. Lawrence saw him continuously and at close range. For the younger man had quickly become one of the most brilliant of the Washington correspondents. His daily despatches then, as now, appeared in newspapers throughout America. He was in Washington, covering the White House, during Mr. Wilson’s terms; went with him on his campaign tours; went with him through Europe and watched him at Versailles; and finally was with him on the tour on which Mr. Wilson suffered the physical collapse leading to his death. The result of this prolonged contact is a book in which nothing relevant is omitted or evaded. Mr. Lawrence begins with a striking chapter summarizing the paradoxical qualities of the war President—in some respects the most satisfactory portrait yet painted. He continues with the same impartiality and a frankness which no one else has ventured; and not the least valuable feature is the correspondent’s ability to throw light on certain public acts of Wilson which have heretofore gone unexplained.

One or two other volumes in which the political interest is predominant deserve mention while our minds are on recent history. Maurice Paleologue was the last French ambassador to the Russian Court, serving about two years, from 3 July 1914 to mid-1916. The three volumes of his _An Ambassador’s Memoirs_ constitute the most interesting account we have had of the imperial decline, chiefly because M. Paleologue, with all the genius of French writing, pictures the slow downfall with a kind of terrible fidelity. The despairing vividness of this history is mitigated by many delightful asides on aspects of Russian character and psychology, art and life, written with an equal brilliance and a keen enjoyment.

_Twelve Years at the German Imperial Court_, by Count Robert Zedlitz-Trützschler, is by the former controller of the household of William II., then German Emperor. Its predominant interest is its gradually built up character portrait of the ex-Emperor in the days of his power. I say “gradually built up,” for the book consists simply of private memoranda made by Zedlitz-Trützschler through the years of his service. It seems that the unhappy Count felt keenly the inability to say what he thought or to express his real feelings with safety to anybody. At first, like every one else, he was fascinated by his royal and imperial master. As he says in his preface: “There is a tendency today to underrate the intellect of the Emperor very seriously. There can be no dispute that his personality was a dazzling one.... He could, whenever it seemed to him worth while, completely bewitch not only foreign princes and diplomats, but even sober men of business.” The spell waned because William lost interest. Zedlitz-Trützschler’s book is the soberest and in some respects the frankest book about William that I have seen. Its publication has put the author in hot water with his family and all his class.