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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.