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.
Charles Hitchcock Sherrill’s _The Purple or the Red_, based on personal
interviews with Mussolini of Italy, Horthy of Hungary, Primo de Riveira
of Spain and other statesmen, as well as most of the surviving European
monarchs, contains much interesting material about after-war Europe. It
is ultra-conservative in its political attitude, but General Sherrill
makes an effective case for his idea that the Crown, in European
countries, has served as a rallying point for patriotism and by its place
above factions has been a bulwark against revolution with bloodshed.
iii
Two very exceptional autobiographies are Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s
_Memories and Adventures_ and Constantin Stanislavsky’s _My Life in Art_.
Both are ample, lavishly illustrated volumes; and far apart as are the
lives they record, I hesitate to say that either exceeds the other in
charm.
The creator of Sherlock Holmes is a big, amiable man, a person of great
simplicity of manner and almost naïve in his enjoyment of people, places
and events. His book is inevitably one of a very wide popular appeal,
the more so as Sir Arthur is entirely without conceit. In _Memories and
Adventures_ he tells of his education at Stoneyhurst, in Germany, and in
Edinburgh, where he got his doctor’s degree. He relates his early medical
experiences and tells of his first attempts at writing. A memorable
voyage to West Africa as a ship’s surgeon, his earlier religious ideas
and beliefs and the changes they underwent, and his marriage are all
dealt with.
Then comes the story of his first real success as an author, made with
the novel, _A Study in Scarlet_. He had resounding subsequent successes
with _Micah Clarke_, _The Sign of the Four_, and _The White Company_. The
creation of Sherlock Holmes was a great milestone in Conan Doyle’s life.
This is without question the most famous character in English fiction.
Visits to America and Egypt and political adventures are chronicled.
There are reminiscences and anecdotes of Roosevelt, George Meredith,
Kitchener, Lloyd George, Balfour, Mr. Asquith, Henry Irving, Kipling,
Bernard Shaw, Barrie and many others, living and dead, sprinkled through
these extremely readable chapters. The closing chapter is devoted to the
author’s amazing experiences in psychical research; and it must be said
for him that he writes more persuasively of his experiences and beliefs
in this affair than anyone else has ever managed to do. Altogether
_Memories and Adventures_ will engross anyone who opens it.
Very different, with its own style and an accent of enthusiasm
throughout, is Constantin Stanislavsky’s _My Life in Art_. This man has
been the stage director of the Moscow Art Theater since its establishment
in 1898; and although that theater is now known throughout the world, and
is frequently hailed as the world’s foremost playhouse, Stanislavsky’s
reputation outside Russia has naturally been confined to the circles of
dramatic art. His autobiography depended for its American publication
wholly on the intrinsic interest of what he had to tell. You may infer
that that interest is considerable. It is.
I spoke of the book’s style. It is peculiar, individual; sincere and
unskilled, awkward and yet masterful; admirable because so evidently a
part of the author. Born in 1863, the son of a wealthy Russian merchant
family and the grandson of a French actress, Stanislavsky as a boy
showed stage talents in family theatricals; and though he later slaved
over accounts in his father’s counting-house, his nights were nights of
feverish absorption in the theater. His birth placed him in the thick
of the social and intellectual life of Moscow, for he belonged to the
class which has created the arts of Russia. At twenty-five he became
director of the Society of Art and Literature, a group of young people
with serious ideas about the stage and a great dissatisfaction with the
current Russian theater. When Stanislavsky met Nemirovich-Danchenko, the
Moscow Art Theater was founded.
The first half of _My Life in Art_ is therefore chiefly personal, a rich
slice of Russian life with plum-like impressions and reminiscences of
Rubinstein, Tolstoy, Tommaso Salvini the elder and other great artists
of that time. The second half deals with the Moscow Art Theater, in
which Stanislavsky made for himself a reputation as one of Russia’s
greatest actors, particularly in the rôles of Othello, Brutus, and Ivan
the Terrible. This part of _My Life in Art_ is crammed with material of
interest and value not only to those who follow the theater but to all
whose great interest is art. Chekhov, Tolstoy, Maeterlinck and others
in person are delightfully mixed with interpretative experience in
their plays and in the plays of Shakespeare, Molière, Pushkin and other
immortals. The book closes with a description of the present work of the
Moscow Art Theater, including the Soviet régime in Russia and the visit
to America.
At last we have a biography of Clyde Fitch, achieved in that most
satisfactory of ways, by means of his letters. Mr. Montrose J. Moses
and Miss Virginia Gerson, who edited the memorial edition of Clyde
Fitch’s plays, have been engaged for some time in collecting the Fitch
letters and the result of their labor is now published in one volume.
_Clyde Fitch and His Letters_ reflects well a personality which people
never forgot, since meeting him was, as some one said, like meeting a
figure in fiction. Fitch had a genius for friendship. His letters were
always unstudied, without pretension to literary style, and brimful of
a strongly impressionist reaction to the place or the event. He dashed
them off as the spirit prompted—on board ship, by an open window of
a Continental hotel, on the terraces of his country house; notes of
appreciation, notes of invitation, long, impulsive descriptions of
European festivities (some processional in Spain or some picturesque
account of Venetian gondoliering). They breathe, these letters, of
his warm association with the novelist, Robert Herrick; they show a
light-hearted friendship with Maude Adams and Kate Douglas Wiggin; they
show interchanges of appreciation between Fitch and William Dean Howells.
Again, the reader sees the evidence of the personal concern and interest
Fitch showed in the actors and actresses engaged for his plays. From
the incipient idea of a plot for a play to the play’s first night, the
letters enable the reader to follow breathlessly the climb of Clyde Fitch
to the position of America’s most successful playwright. But he remained
a simple, unaffected sort of person.
One cannot say more, I suppose, than that from the day when Richard
Mansfield asked him to write “Beau Brummell” to the day of Clyde Fitch’s
death, when he had taken “The City” abroad for a final polishing which
death prevented, _Clyde Fitch and His Letters_ is full of the live rush
of the man. A very sane and fundamentally enthusiastic attitude was his
toward American life, and those who read the book will not miss that part
of it.
iv
Of two books by women, one, _Sunlight and Song_, by Maria Jeritza, is the
great singer’s autobiography; while Frances Parkinson Keyes’s _Letters
from a Senator’s Wife_ is autobiographical only incidentally.