Cargoes for Crusoes

i

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.”

ii

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.

iii

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

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.