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Title: James Branch Cabell
Author: Carl Van Doren
Release date: August 18, 2026 [eBook #79393]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Robert M. McBride & Co., 1925
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JAMES BRANCH CABELL ***
MODERN AMERICAN WRITERS
I. JAMES BRANCH CABELL
MODERN AMERICAN
WRITERS
_Edited by_ +Ernest Boyd+
I. JAMES BRANCH CABELL
By +Carl Van Doren+
II. EDITH WHARTON
By +Robert Morss Lovett+
In Preparation
THEODORE DREISER
By +Burton Rascoe+
EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON
By +Ben Ray Redman+
H. L. MENCKEN
By +Ernest Boyd+
and others.
JAMES BRANCH
CABELL
_By_
CARL VAN DOREN
ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY
NEW YORK :: :: :: :: :: :: 1925
+Copyright, 1925, By
Robert M. McBride & Co.+
_Printed in the United
States of America_
Published 1925
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. +Cabell Minor+ 1
II. +Cabell Major+ 31
III. +Scholia+ 56
+Bibliography+ 85
James Branch Cabell
I. CABELL MINOR
There are more arguments to prove that James Branch Cabell is a legend
than to prove that he is a fact. The most dependable of contemporary
authorities says of him that he is an “author; _b._ Richmond, Va.,
Apr. 14, 1879; _s._ Robert Gamble and Anne (Branch) C.; A. B., William
and Mary, 1898; _m._ Priscilla, _d._ William Joseph Bradley, of
‘Auburn,’ Charles City Co., Va., Nov. 8, 1913. Instr. French and Greek,
William and Mary, 1896-7; worked in pressroom Richmond (Va.) Times,
1898; on staff New York Herald, 1899-1901, and Richmond (Va.) News,
1901; contbr. short stories, etc., to mags., 1902-10, and conducted
geneal. and original research work in America, France, Ireland and
Eng.; engaged in coal-mining in W. Va., 1911-13; genealogist Va. S.
R., 1919-20; historian Va. Soc. Colonial Wars, 1916--and Va. Soc.
S. A. R., 1917--; pres. Va. Writers’ Club, 1918-21; editor Va. War
History Commn., 1919--; mem. Kappa Alpha (Southern), Phi Beta Kappa.
Episcopalian.” To these details this most juiceless of contemporary
authorities adds only the titles of Mr. Cabell’s various books and his
address. Remarkably little else about him as a person has been made
public: a few attractive but non-committal photographs, a few bits of
information little above the level of amiable gossip. All that emerges
is the evidence that he is a Virginian of the old stock, cultivated
and reticent, who with unvarying fidelity if with varying fortunes has
given himself to the writing of books.
The legend which has grown up about Mr. Cabell no doubt owes its
exuberance to the scarcity of the facts upon which it has been fed.
It babbles, as he has pointed out, about his “romantic irony, his
cosmic japes, his bestial obscenities, his well-nigh perfect prose,
his soaring imagination, his corroding pessimism,” with tiresome
reiteration. It speaks largely about his great acquisitions of
medieval lore, and hints less largely at his excessive learning in
various forbidden topics. It whispers, elsewhere, of such spiritual
misdemeanors as in other ages were called compacts with the devil.
It goes, even, to the length of mentioning, at a safe distance from
the laws concerning libel, misdemeanors not so spiritual. That the
legendary aspects of Mr. Cabell, however unwarranted, have such
vitality shows well enough that they spring from the rich soil
of public ignorance. It may, nevertheless, be admitted that he
has enriched the growth by his habits of secrecy and innuendo and
mystification and by his obvious disregard of the patterns of thought
and sentiment by which his readers naturally expect him to cut his
fictions. If he conceals so much, they reason, he must have still more
to withhold from the light of day. If he disregards the customary
patterns, he must himself regard dark and dangerous ones.
Meanwhile Mr. Cabell, keeping the facts to himself and doubtless
smiling at the legend, has gone on in his avowed practice of the desire
“to write perfectly of beautiful happenings.” And the time has come
when it is no longer possible to resist the temptation to examine his
aims and his achievements in the chapter of his career which he is just
now concluding.
Nor is it easy to resist the temptation to say, at the outset, that Mr.
Cabell is already a classic if any American novelist of this century
is. The shifts of taste from age to age may now depress and now exalt
the credit of the famous _Jurgen_, but so have they done during the
past five generations with _Tristram Shandy_, another masterpiece
frequently baited by the sort of censor who dreads wit unless it picks
its topics with caution. Both by its wit and by its beauty, _Jurgen_
is entitled to survive. Moreover, it is far from being its author’s
only claim to eminence. Certain of his admirers debate among themselves
whether _Figures of Earth_ is not profounder than _Jurgen_, or _The
High Place_ more artfully narrated, or _Domnei_ lovelier. _Chivalry_
was a particular favorite of Mark Twain, who kept it at his bedside.
And these are but five of the fifteen Cabell books which stand closely
linked together in the careful scheme according to which they are all
arranged. Even though, as is inevitable, two or three of them will
outlive the others, the entire fifteen must be taken into account.
There they stand, graceful and compact, devoted to the record of
beautiful happenings in a language which never falls below a high
level of perfection. They deal with a world which at first may seem
extraordinarily remote from the concerns of most recent fiction. That
world, however, the invented medieval province of Poictesme, speedily
grows familiar to any imagination which ventures into it without undue
prejudice, for it has its own logic, as well as its own history and
geography. Human life is there as vain a thing as in Ecclesiastes,
but it abounds in the dramas of aspiration and desire by which the
thread of existence is carried on. Only through the gate of irony,
indeed, may this imagined universe be entered. Solemn souls will
miss the gate and fumble along an impenetrable wall. But less solemn
spirits, passing blithely through the gate, find one of the most
exquisite worlds in fiction. It is full of magnificent adventures, high
speeches, chivalrous and gallant personages. The landscapes are of
agreeable proportions, with smooth lawns and fragrant orchards, with
forests and mountains ripe with color. The costumes and the interiors
are scrupulously considered, that they may all be beautiful, or at
least significant. The cross roads of history meet in this world, and
space no less than time comes to a focus there. Yet nothing tawdry
or sprawling has been admitted. All is order and art. While there is
plenty of satire, it rarely concerns itself with temporary matters.
There is learning, but it lays no serious burden upon the stories;
there are opinions, but they waste little time in wrangling over
controverted issues. Whoever reads these books and comprehends the
scheme which now binds them into unity, will feel that Mr. Cabell,
like another Adam, has found his Eden, has dressed and tended it, has
populated and civilized it, and has made it the home of valor and
beauty and wit.
No wonder that, twenty years after the appearance of his first book,
Mr. Cabell, substantially intrenched behind the uniform edition of his
works, looks back with a resentful eye upon the early and scattered
volumes which are hunted by collectors and bibliographers as the rarer
volumes of no other contemporary American are hunted. Like Holofernes,
this iconoclastic Virginian would prefer to hack the Cabell of
yesterday merrily into pieces and give him to the Cabell of to-morrow
for his breakfast. “Were the choice afforded me,” the Holofernian
Cabell says, “no one of these first editions ... would to-day exist.”
Such iconoclasm, however, cannot be permitted, or at least will not be
permitted so long as a single investigator is curious about the steps
by which Mr. Cabell, with seldom matched fidelity, has advanced from
the region of tentative experiments to the region through which he now
manœuvers on surer, more ironic feet. The miracle of his emergence from
the world in which he grew up is at once too exciting and too edifying
to be forgotten in the stir caused by his arrival in a very different
world. Even the most secular scripture need not hesitate to begin with
some kind of Genesis.
Concerning the ardent, absurd youth who wrote _The Eagle’s Shadow_ the
Cabell who wrote _Straws and Prayer-Books_ speaks disarmingly in a late
autobiographic note. “I would like,” that youth is made to say, “to
write the very nicest sort of books--like Henry Harland’s and Justus
Miles Forman’s and Anthony Hope’s. They would be about beautiful, fine
girls and really splendid young men, and everything would come out all
right in the end.... I simply want to contribute to the best magazines,
and write some wholesome ... entertaining books, that will sell like
_The Cardinal’s Snuff-Box_ and _The Prisoner of Zenda_.” In 1902, of
course, such aspirations were not entirely quaint. Cloaks and masks
were in the mode. Approved heroines waited in Ruritanias or Graustarks
for the dashing heroes who should come from England or the United
States and rescue them from the thorns by which they were surrounded.
The paths of romance led to the greenwood, to the medieval tournament
or pleasaunce, to the age of periwig and patch and small sword and
furbelow, to the more recent drawing-room or terrace where repartee
glittered over tea-tables. _The Eagle’s Shadow_, let it be remembered,
appeared as a serial in what was shortly to be the most popular of all
the popular magazines, and the brief tales by its author which dressed
this weightier dish found their way into periodicals of established
reputation, to be illustrated by established illustrators. There
was no serious disregard of current fashion in Mr. Cabell’s tender
reinterpretations of Falstaff or Villon or in his heartening discovery
that the most frivolous beau and belle had really hearts of gold. Few
readers of these stories noticed the hand of irony within the glove of
velvet.
The hand, nevertheless, inhabited the glove. Mr. Cabell was already in
several respects a scholar and a critic. At William and Mary he had
taught French and Greek while still an undergraduate; in his first
acknowledged contribution to belles-lettres he had taken Congreve for
his theme and had defended that insouciant wit against either moralists
or apologists. The infection of maturity had commenced to work. “From
the start,” the latest Cabell was subsequently to warn the earliest,
“will be tugging at your pen a pig-headed imp that will be guiding it
his way instead of the way you intended. And with each book he will be
growing stronger and more importunate and more cunning, and he will
be stealing the pen away from you for longer and longer intervals. And
by and by that imp, full grown now and the very devil of a taskmaster,
will be dictating your books from beginning to end--not to speak here
of his making you sweat blood when you revise, at his orders, all the
earlier ones.... You ... will call him the desire to write perfectly of
beautiful happenings.”
The maturer Cabell has so carefully obliterated his tracks, with what
looks, at many points, like an amused mendacity, that it is difficult
now to guess just when in his career he settled upon the design which
has finally come to govern all his material. He himself explains that
the inception of his scheme goes back to 1901, “when I wrote the first
of the stories bound up together as _The Line of Love_. And the general
‘method’ followed in that volume--of depicting a decisive event in the
lives of two persons, then a similar untying of knots in the life of a
child of that couple, and yet afterward in one of the grandchildren’s
life-history--has been extended, but never altered, in my succeeding
volumes.... And all traces--pretty clearly now--from Dom Manuel, and
the descendants whom he and Alianora left in England, and the other
descendants whom he and Niafer left in Poictesme, and from the eleven
images that he and Freydis informed with fire from Audela, and set to
live as men among mankind.” Whenever Mr. Cabell definitely undertook
to elaborate his richly colored genealogy, at least he did not, as a
careful examination of those anathematized first editions shows, for
some time unmistakably reveal his scheme. The unity of his work lay in
his temper, in his comparative disinclination, or inability, to invent,
in the gradual drift of his imagination toward two or three settings
and two or three sets of characters for which eventually he gave up
all others. While this unity was asserting itself, he moved about
through medieval France and eighteenth-century England and contemporary
America, searching for episodes worthy to be recounted in his tone of
mingled rapture and skepticism.
The episodes in his volumes of short stories, _The Lane of Love_,
_Gallantry_, _Chivalry_, _The Certain Hour_, are essentially gestures.
With poets and warriors as their almost invariable heroes, and love as
their almost invariable theme, they set forth each of them some high
moment of valor or renunciation in which much is demanded of the hero,
who meets it with even more than is demanded. François Villon, in _In
Necessity’s Mortar_, for the last time sees Catherine de Vaucelles,
who has jilted him and shamed him, discovers that she still loves
him, but, now that through years of despair he has become a mere “hog
with a voice,” decides that he must kill her love to save her, and
so disavows any preference for her whatever. The Prince de Gâtinais,
in _The Scapegoats_, having with one dire gesture poisoned his son’s
low-born sweetheart to give the younger man to his high-born duty and
to France, with another tremendous gesture poisons himself in expiation
for a deed which he does not in the least regret. At such moments
the protagonists of this universe rise above the customary stature
of mankind, touching the cold stars with heads full of mad, glorious
conceits. Mr. Cabell knows that the gestures are for the most part
vain. Villon, crying out in agony over his obligation, finds that his
cry suggests a neat ballade. “So, dismissing for the while his misery,
he fell to considering, with undried cheeks, what rhymes he needed.”
Louis de Soyecourt, by his father’s action made Duke of Noumaria, in
the end escapes from the boredom of his duty to a happy vagabondage as
a piano-timer. Yet though the conceits are mad, they are glorious. Who
would live forever? Who would take love at less than the peak and then,
through dwindling years, have nothing supernal to remember? Who would
miss the chance once in a lifetime to confound all foes and rivals with
a magnanimity which though bitter must seem immense? Mr. Cabell has a
weakness for these gestures that gives him, as an artist, strength.
The danger which has always hung over Mr. Cabell in his chronicling
of such gestures is the danger of sentimentalism. Lovely as a bubble
may be, it can be broken by one puff too much, and then nothing is
left of its iridescence. The puff too much he occasionally gave in his
earlier versions. As _The Housewife_, for instance, at present stands,
King Edward is content to speak thus of his queen when he hears of her
great loyalty: “She waddles now.... Still, I am blessed.” But once
the passage ran more loftily: “Now at last he understood the heart of
Philippa. ‘Let me live,’ the king prayed; ‘O Eternal Father, let me
live a little while that I may make atonement!’” There was a time,
that is to say, when Mr. Cabell blurred the fine edge of his rapture
by moments of passion wherein he forgot to be sophisticated. Verbal
changes here and there in the revision have been necessary to cut away
an earlier softness, particularly when his warriors tended to be poets
or orators at dramatic crises. This difficulty does not arise when his
heroes are technically poets, as they are in _The Certain Hour_. Of
them it may reasonably be expected that they will bear themselves with
a zest and wit which would hardly be allowed them, even at the most
striking turns of their careers, were they men of some more prosaic
calling and language. But then Mr. Cabell’s heroes are all actually,
in one degree or another, poets, much like those young men who lift
and enliven the plays of Shakspere. Again and again the Cabellian
theme is the conflict between a poet and a warrior for the same lady;
and though the poet as a rule has the neater tongue and the quicker
intelligence, he has no marked advantage over his rival in goldenness
of speech. The poets are warriors and the warriors are poets. To keep
such equations credible, Mr. Cabell has been obliged to lay his scenes
ordinarily in ages which cherished both valor and poetry and which held
them interwoven with delicate codes of honor. With one of his favored
ages he associates the cult of Chivalry; with the other, Gallantry.
“The cornerstone of Chivalry I take to be the idea of vicarship: for
the chivalrous person is, in his own eyes at least, the child of God,
and goes about this world as his Father’s representative in an alien
country. It was very adroitly to human pride, through an assumption
of man’s responsibility in his tiniest action, that Chivalry made
its appeal; and exhorted every man to keep faith, not merely with
the arbitrary will of a strong god, but with himself. There is no
cause for wonder that the appeal was irresistible, when to each man
it thus admitted that he himself was the one thing seriously to be
considered.... So man became a chivalrous animal; and about this
flattering notion of divine vicarship builded his elaborate mediæval
code, to which, in essentials, a great number of persons adhere even
nowadays.” Had Mr. Cabell been less a poet himself, he might have
fallen into astringency with such a conception as his starting-point.
As it is, the conception merely furnishes the ironic edge which shears
away the exuberance to which his love of gestures might have led him.
He does not, on account of this comic attitude, take less interest in
the chivalrous impulses which his characters exhibit. Bound by their
sense of responsibility to an extent which he knows is comic, they
yet conduct themselves with a high seriousness which, while it lasts,
is the breeder of superb rhetoric and noble actions, and incidentally
of admirable drama. Each of them, man or woman, in _Chivalry_ and in
the allied stories of the other volumes, is ringed round with perils,
and each of them bears himself magnificently to the point of death or
whatever different reward awaits him.
Mr. Cabell’s Gallantry is enough like his Chivalry in its consequences
to those who live by it. “Now the essence of Gallantry, I take it,
was to accept the pleasures of life leisurely and its inconveniences
with a shrug.... A gallant person will ... always bear in mind that
in love-affairs success is less the Ultima Thule of desire than its
_coup de grâce_, and he will be careful never to admit the fact,
especially to himself.... He will prink; and he will be at his best
after sunset. He will dare to acknowledge the shapeliness of a thief’s
leg, to contend that the commission of murder does not necessarily
impair the agreeableness of the assassin’s conversation; and to insist
that God is kindlier than the genteel would regard as rational. He
will, in fine, sin on sufficient provocation, and repent within the
moment, quite sincerely, and be not unconscionably surprised when he
repeats the progression: and he will consider the world with a smile of
toleration, and his own doings with a smile of honest amusement, and
Heaven with a smile that is not distrustful.” Gallantry, indeed, is a
sort of frivolous Chivalry, living up to its code on a plane of life
where less seems to be involved in the issue of any given event than
on the plane of vicarship. But there is for all that a rapier in every
ruffled hand which is celebrated in _Gallantry_. John Bulmer, Duke of
Ormskirk, protagonist of _In the Second April_, is the quintessential
Cabell hero of the earlier books. Like all his fellows, he reflects
often upon the boy he used to be and makes much of an old love, but he
knows that he does not too violently regret his past nor too poignantly
remember the Alison of his first April. Now seasoned in the world,
he matches and overmatches it with a cunning which he cannot forego
even in his courtship of Claire de Puysange. He distresses her, who
is less than half his age, with his persistent lightness on the most
desperate occasions, yet at their great occasion he meets his enemies
with a courage as unassailable as if he did not accompany it with
words of such laughing eloquence as madden her before they convince
her. Bulmer cuts the figure that every quick-spirited youth and every
full-hearted man would like to cut. He is, to be sure, a dream of
gallant perfection, and no more; but he curiously stirs the blood of
man and boy alike. And with what art Mr. Cabell constructs the drama
of Bulmer’s wooing and winning: the incognito sustained yet recognized,
the rejection endured with pain yet with gay fortitude, the magnificent
duel on the tower! It is, perhaps, the art of Congreve, but of a
Congreve warmed with rich colors and a generous audacity.
In the towered cathedral which Mr. Cabell has gradually built, on the
level plain of current life, for his undeviating worship of beauty
and heroism, the short stories of these four volumes are the smaller
chapels braced against the central structure, the ornaments carved
boldly on the weather side or tucked away in shadowy corners to tempt
the curious. Without, it should be made clear, unparalleled erudition,
he has nevertheless ransacked many remote places for his materials and
his patterns. His universe in various fashions resembles that of _The
Faërie Queene_, wherein geographical and chronological boundaries melt
and flow, wherein fable encroaches upon history, and the creative mood
of the poet re-cuts his shining fabrics as if they were whole cloth
intended solely for his purposes. Mr. Cabell has a partiality for
the Middle Ages, when the fates of the European nations were tangled
with contending dynasties, and for the eighteenth century, but, like
Spenser, he draws upon the ancient world and the world of dreams. In
choosing those dramatic moments which he has elected to record, he
tends to choose occasions about which history is partly silent in the
lives of its eminent men and women: a late meeting of Falstaff with
a boyhood sweetheart, the forced decision of Villon to turn thief,
the final interview of Marlowe with the girl he loves, the apocryphal
courtship of Katharine of Valois and Henry V, the philosophical
plagiarism of Shakspere in writing _The Tempest_, the mysterious death
of Herrick, the marriage of Wycherley to the Countess of Drogheda and
of Sheridan to Miss Ogle. Not that Mr. Cabell is confined to history,
even thus lightly handled; he has no objection to inventing poets and
warriors when he needs them, nor to being as circumstantial about them
as about the genuine personages of his tales. But he requires the added
glamour which is given to fiction by its association with remembered
or rumored facts. Beautiful happenings, he knows, seem more beautiful
when they have already been looked upon as memorable.
The temper with which he approaches all these themes has from the first
been ironic, so much so that he regularly distresses readers who prefer
to have their romances entirely romantic. His heroes are not forever
heroes. The tide turns with them, and the sun sets, and the flower
fades. Perhaps he early learned to glory in his disillusionment; at
least he has never relaxed into credulity. Consequently he does not
tell his stories with an abandoned rush of narrative. They move on
deliberate feet, their episodes rounded out with a steady-handed art.
Always Mr. Cabell interprets the action in the terms of a spectator who
knows that though ecstasy is supreme it is also vain. At the same time,
there is that in his constitution which will not let him merely strip
and dissect. He must adorn while he analyzes.
To this element is due his other essential quality as a story-teller,
his silken texture. There are no angles in his surfaces. His style
purrs to a degree that now and then begets monotony; his phrases,
ordinarily so felicitous, now and then have a mannered look; he so
often avoids the simple way of saying simple things that he overloads
his language. It is hard to remember his plots, less hard to remember
his characters, because they have been hidden under his suave tapestry.
At his best, however, and he is very frequently at his best in his
short stories, he is crystal in his meanings and delicately varied in
his rhythms, as in this speech credited to Shakspere: “Lord, what a
deal of ruined life it takes to make a little art! Yes, yes, I know.
Under old oaks lovers will mouth my verses, and the acorns are not
yet shaped from which those oaks will spring. My adoration and your
perfidy, all that I have suffered, all that I have failed in even, has
gone toward the building of an enduring monument. All these will be
immortal, because youth is immortal, and youth delights in demanding
explanations of infinity. And only to this end I have suffered and have
catalogued the ravings of a perverse disease which has robbed my life
of all the normal privileges of life as flame shrivels hair from the
arm--that young fools such as I was once might be pleased to murder my
rhetoric, and scribblers parody me in their fictions, and schoolboys
guess at the date of my death!” Had Mr. Cabell no other gift than to
make wisdom thus descant upon the vanity of life, his most persistent
and successful theme, he would still deserve a praise as worthy as he
is likely to receive in a world which his Shakspere all too accurately
describes.
With the short stories which are as chapels to the Cabellian cathedral
must be ranked the four novels which have their scenes in or near
Lichfield and Fairhaven, those romantic cities which the world thinks
of as Virginian, though Mr. Cabell softly points out that he has never
asserted as much. They are pleasant cities, contentedly provincial,
where the codes of Chivalry and Gallantry persist with something of
the old colors under no matter how changed conditions. If these cities
embrace within their habits such necessities as labor or such luxuries
as prayer, little mention is made of them. Their business, so far as
the novels are concerned, is love--love made with eloquent words and
with delicate codes of honor. A few men do most of the love-making:
Felix Kennaston, Robert Etheridge Townsend, Rudolph Musgrave, John
Charteris. Their careers run through _The Eagle’s Shadow_, _The Cords
of Vanity_, _The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck_, _The Cream of the Jest_
like the cheerful warp of many varied textures. This or that man of
them may have some tender loyalty to his first love, and may often
brood over it with edifying sentiments, but for the most part they
move among the exquisite, glimmering girls of Lichfield and Fairhaven
like the heroes of Restoration comedy, touching a hand here, taking
a kiss there, breaking hearts and themselves becoming heart-broken,
recovering, as do their ladies, with the long sighs of the sentimental
and with the light hearts of the heroic. It is the women who make the
texture varied. There are, indeed, not as many of them as might be
expected in four novels, for they, no less than the men, may reappear
in this or that new plot when they have finished their courses in
another. But they have such diversity in themselves that the stories
are rich with their changing moods. To love one of these women is
a kind of polygamy. Neither Mr. Cabell nor the lover of any of them
studies her deeply enough to strike into the regions where biology
holds the lantern, and where all women, it is argued, are alike. The
ladies of Lichfield and Fairhaven are the ladies of high comedy. Not
shallow, they are gay; not solemn, they are intelligent. They are the
decorative elements which give a charming surface to records of love
conceived cynically yet tenderly.
The records themselves range from such a less than characteristic story
as that in _The Eagle’s Shadow_, with its sillibub dialogues and its
theatrical solution, to such a more than characteristic story as that
in _The Cream of the Jest_, with its two universes always suspended
in the hand of the narrator and turned, now the one, now the other,
uppermost. Perhaps none of the plots, except that of _The Eagle’s
Shadow_, is less than characteristic of its author in his maturity.
What stretches out through _The Cords of Vanity_ is merely another line
of love, with a single personage serving as the lover in all cases.
Robert Etheridge Townsend, poet and romancer, ascends to peak after
peak of rapture, rejoices there with the enchanting mistress of the
hour, and then slips down again to the ironical valley of his daily
life, which knows that the magic of love is only a brief madness. He
is a sorry fellow, deft with words and fickle with emotions. So are
Charteris and Kennaston, only one of them permitted a novel to himself
in this series, but neither of them ever far from any chapter. By their
recurrence they make clear that the method of the Lichfield-Fairhaven
novels is not essentially different from that of the books of short
stories. Whether short or long, the narratives are all episodes, in
sequence or distinct, little dramas given over to exposing the vanity
of human pretensions and human desires. A few situations, adroitly
varied, Mr. Cabell finds enough for his purposes; and he would rather
bring an old, successful character back upon the stage than go to
the trouble of shaping a new, untried one. Moreover, he wants his
heroes to comprehend as well as to endure their fates. Not for him the
blind tragedy and the dumb victim. His lovers burn as other lovers
do, but his lovers even at the summit of felicity are aware of what
is passing, and after due sufferings they heal themselves with the
unembittered smile which is the light of comedy. So exigent with regard
to his characters and their attitudes toward their adventures, Mr.
Cabell is bound to be confined to a few settings, a few actions, a few
personages. His variety lies in the by-paths by which so many of his
plots are conducted to virtually the same end and in the luster of the
language which with so many surprising graces fits itself to nearly the
same theme.
The theme, nevertheless, now and then reaches out to touch aspects of
existence which do not properly belong within its narrower bounds. _The
Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck_, for example, has for its chief personage
the gallant genealogist Rudolph Musgrave, of the Musgraves of Matocton,
who, through all the wonder of his love for the girl who marries him,
cherishes the memory of the girl who married Charteris instead and whom
Musgrave has protected from a disillusioning knowledge of her husband
by one more heroic gesture. Yet the _Rivet_ is also an edged and
beguiling satire. Musgrave, that quaint figure whittled out of chivalry
and dressed up in amiable heroics, is a Southern gentleman comically
perceived and rendered; the narrative glances obliquely at all the
follies and affectations and absurdities of the traditional South. And
_The Cream of the Jest_ is at once a highly original Cabell story and
the virtual epitome of all the Cabell stories. Felix Kennaston lives
in comfortable Lichfield much as its more representative citizens live
there, but in the excursions of his imagination he visits that world
which, by never having existed, partly atones to men for the world that
does exist. These two universes are not separated in _The Cream of the
Jest_ by any tight wall which it is a strain to jump over; they flow
with witching caprice one into another, affording endless opportunities
to compare the universe in which Kennaston lives as Kennaston with the
universe in which he lives as Horvendile. In a sense, his career is an
allegory with the human race for its larger hero. Does not the race,
unable to endure the pain or boredom of its earth, turn perennially
to the clouds and skies and create better regions to dream in? Is
the experience actually more real than the vision? Clearly it may be
argued, as indeed it is argued by Felix Kennaston, that men and women
are nothing more than characters in the mystifying plot which some
great Romancer is weaving over their heads. They travel ordinarily
at the pedestrian gait which among them is called realism when they
imitate it in their own works of art; but now and then they are lifted
and driven by incalculable urges which are perhaps the lyric or
dramatic moments in the life of the Romancer who has created them.
Some such idea lies back of all that Mr. Cabell has written. It is,
of course, the basis of his argument for romance, and it serves to
furnish his narratives, short or long, with their rich color and high,
ironic language. The idea in him is so persistent that it might make
him, in his unconcern with the surface activities of men, a languid
story-teller if he did not have an amount of comic vigor which is
sometimes overlooked in the delight his language and color give. It
might make him, also, more monotonous in his disillusion than he is,
thanks to the gusto with which he savors the phantasmagoric spectacle
of human life. But thus at once detached and avid, he has been able to
practise his art with the disinterested scruples which set the general
level of his excellence above that of any other contemporary American
novelist. Nevertheless, there is a major and there is a minor Cabell.
To the second must be ascribed the short stories, though some of them
are masterpieces within their limits, for the sole reason that they
are, as episodes, unable to display their author’s larger qualities
at the full. To the minor Cabell, not much less surely, belong the
Lichfield-Fairhaven chronicles, by reason of a certain slightness in
their substance and a certain remoteness from that Poictesme which Mr.
Cabell has come, like Felix Kennaston, to inhabit more naturally, and
perhaps more really, than any tangible province.
II. CABELL MAJOR
The Poictesme which Mr. Cabell has created and gradually populated with
a whole dynasty and its subjects, friends, and enemies, lies somewhere
on the map of Europe--just where, there are few precise geographers to
say. The country was a fief of the wicked King Ferdinand of Castile and
Léon, who beheaded his old friend, the rightful count, to make a place
for Manuel. At that time, which was 1234, Poictesme was in the hands
of the Northmen under Duke Asmund, later expelled. Not too far from
Provence, neither was it too far from Scotland, both of which Manuel
visited on his way to claim his new possession. It had a sea-coast, the
cities of Bellegarde and Storisende in which Manuel ordinarily lived,
and many dark woods and twilight heaths and haunted mountains. It
engaged in diplomatic relations with France and England, to say nothing
of less formal contacts between its rulers and all the countries,
real or imagined, of the medieval universe. Scandinavia poetically
impinged upon the province, with Constantinople and Barbary, Massilia,
Aquitaine, Navarre, Portugal, Rome, Alexandria, Arcadia, Olympus,
Asgard, and the Jerusalems Old and New. Though it seems to have seen
its great days in the thirteenth century, it was still prosperous as
late as the eighteenth. Nothing, indeed, in the matter of geography
or history is impossible to Poictesme, for it is, of course, a pure
creation. Mr. Cabell may please himself with skirting actuality in a
hundred or a thousand details, as he does; but his innumerable elusions
are only incidental to a deliberate scheme. Having found no world in
which he could be satisfied to build the structure of his art, he has
invented and completed one.
Because he has been in one of his professions a genealogist, Mr. Cabell
sees Poictesme with something of the genealogist’s eye. Manuel, Count
and Redeemer of the province, is also its prime ancestor. From his
heroic loins spring all the later Cabellian generations, whether in
Poictesme or out of it. By Niafer he is the father of the Melicent of
_Domnei_, the Dorothy la Désirée of _Jurgen_, the Ettarre of _The Cream
of the Jest_, as well as of the Emmerick who succeeds him; this line
reaches, by way of the short stories, down through the English Allonbys
and Bulmers to the American Rudolph Musgrave and Felix Kennaston and
Robert Etheridge Townsend of _The Cords of Vanity_ and _The Rivet in
Grandfather’s Neck_. By Alianora of Provence, technically wife of Henry
III of England, Manuel is the father of Edward I, whose descendants are
numerous and impressive. In a different fashion Manuel has the help
of Freydis in the process of informing with almost human fire the ten
figures which he has modeled and which move among mankind as the poets
of _The Certain Hour_, wherein Shakspere and Herrick and Wycherley and
Pope and Sheridan are brothers in clay of the John Charteris who is
Mr. Cabell’s mouthpiece in _Beyond Life_. Moreover, the skein of all
these lines of descent is tangled. The blood of Manuel touches that of
the lords of Puysange, so famous in Poictesme and in so many Cabell
stories; Edward Longshanks is reprehensibly related to the Bulmers;
Cynthia Allonby appears as the Dark Lady of Shakspere. Even though Mr.
Cabell has in his later books, and in the later editions of his earlier
books, laid an increasing emphasis upon the genealogical unity of his
charters, he from the first worked in a manner which made it possible
for him thus to draw them together when he was ready.
This unity in Poictesme has thrown into a higher and higher relief the
two great figures who dominate it, not only because they are eminent in
that country but because they between them manage to exhibit virtually
all the human qualities which interest Mr. Cabell. They are Manuel
the Redeemer and Jurgen the pawnbroker. Characteristically, their
creator refers to what he calls his original sources, _Les Gestes de
Manuel_ and _La Haulte Histoire de Jurgen_, and he unearths a literary
historian to say for him that: “the Gestes are mundane stories, the
History is a cosmic affair, in that, where Manuel faces the world,
Jurgen considers the universe.... Dom Manuel is the Achilles of
Poictesme, as Jurgen is its Ulysses.” In his own person Mr. Cabell
goes on to say: “Now, roughly, the distinction serves. Yet minute
consideration discovers, I think, in these two sets of legends a more
profound, if subtler, difference, in the handling of the protagonist:
with Jurgen all of the physical and mental man is rendered as a matter
of course; whereas in dealing with Manuel there is, always, I believe,
a certain perceptible and strange, if not inexplicable, aloofness.
Manuel did thus and thus, Manuel said so and so, these legends recount:
yes, but never anywhere have I detected any firm assertion as to
Manuel’s thoughts and emotions, nor any peep into the workings of this
hero’s mind.... These old poets of Poictesme would seem, whether of
intention or no, to have dealt with their national hero as an admirable
person whom they have never been able altogether to love, or entirely
to sympathize with, or to view quite without distrust.” Mr. Cabell
hints that this may be due to “the natural inability of a poet to
understand a man who succeeds in everything,” but he himself avers that
he is content to follow the old romancers, pointing out that “in real
life ... such is the fashion in which we are compelled to deal with
all happenings and with all our fellows, whether they wear or lack the
gaudy name of heroism.”
Thus cryptically Mr. Cabell suggests that in _Figures of Earth_, his
novel devoted to Manuel, he has set himself to portray a man of action
busy with his diverse affairs. Manuel, it is true, is essentially an
artist. What seems to him his greatest aim is to mold out of clay,
in the manner of the gods, certain figures in his own image. But
the burden of necessity constantly interrupts him. He is obliged to
turn aside from these concerns to redeem and rule Poictesme, to love
various women, and to bear himself among men as becomes a hero of
his station. Or rather, he permits himself so to be obliged. When he
appears upon the scene he is a swineherd in the mythical regions of
Rathgor and Lower Targamon. With Suskind, a fairy mistress uncorrupted
by sin or salvation, he has studied “the secret of preserving that
dissatisfaction which is divine where all else falls away with age
into the acquiescence of beasts.” Suskind, however, Manuel deserts
because he is tempted by the prospects of human glory. At first he is
confident enough to take for his motto: “I follow after my own thinking
and my own desires.” But among mankind he finds that success is to be
purchased at another price, and that the world is eager to be deceived,
so he changes his motto to _Mundus vult decipi_. Though at his voice
all spells are broken and at his touch all walls tumble down, he is
steadily subdued to the color of the universe he lives in. It costs
him thirty years to win back Niafer, whom once in his arrogance he had
allowed Grandfather Death to take rather than Manuel, but who turns out
to be much like any other wife. Having been made count of Poictesme
for no particular reason of his own, he wastes enormous energies in
redeeming it, and then is bored by the duties thereby brought upon
him. Of the figures which he has, with the unearthly assistance of
Queen Freydis, informed with fire, the one which Manuel most values is
Sesphra, whose name, after all, is but Phrases transposed. Eventually,
this hero with the proud heart spends most of his days in the Room of
Ageus, which is an anagram for Usage. Tempted by Suskind to return to
her high-hearted garden, he pleads an excuse in his daughter Melicent,
though the child actually wearies him whenever he has played with her a
quarter of an hour; and when he perceives the insidious mark of Suskind
upon Melicent, he goes out and slays the lovely spirit, “whose heart
and life was April, and who plotted courageously against the orderings
of unimaginative gods.” Thereafter it required Grandfather Death to
fetch Manuel back to the dim pool of Haranton, where still awaited him
the figure of himself which he had long ago begun and never finished.
“Oh, certainly,” says Manuel to Grandfather Death, “Count Manuel’s
achievements were notable and such as were not known anywhere before,
and men will talk of them for a long while. Yet, looking back,--now
that this famed Count of Poictesme means less to me,--why, I seem to
see only the strivings of an ape reft of his tail, and grown rusty at
climbing, who has reeled blunderingly from mystery to mystery, with
pathetic makeshifts, not understanding anything, greedy in all desires,
and always honeycombed with poltroonery. So in a secret place his
youth was put away in exchange for a prize that was hardly worth the
having; and the fine geas [bond or obligation] which his mother laid
upon him was exchanged for the common geas of what seems expected.”
This, in half a paragraph, is Mr. Cabell’s allegory of worldly success.
Through the career of such a demi-demon as Manuel runs the enlarging
thread of defeat; the other side of all his triumphs wears the face of
loss. Hope falters and courage compromises. The mightiest champion is
no better off than Gulliver when he wakes in Lilliput and finds himself
bound by countless threads in one helpless position. And the mightiest
champion is likely to be worse off, for the chances are that he will
accept his threads and by and by make virtues of them.
Thus in _Figures of Earth_, which is called A Comedy of Appearances,
the ordinary formula of comedy is reversed. To most ironic commentators
it seems amusing that duped boys should cling to visions instead of
adjusting themselves with a minimum of conflict to the solid, prudent
realities. No story, to such commentators, seems so salutary, and
none is employed by them so frequently, as the story of a youth who
unlearns unwisdom in the school of secular experience, arriving, at
the end, at the conclusion that as the common is the sensible, it is
no doubt also the excellent. Though Mr. Cabell is ironic enough, he
does not find undeniable doctrine taught in the secular schools. The
dreams of youth come back to haunt the wisest men, who may have to
admit that the dreams are of a more persistent substance than the daily
phantasms which they have pursued. The average millions, who have had
no such dreams or who have been so disloyal to them that they remember
them only as fumblings in the dark, exult at the spectacle of a hero
deprived gradually of the use of his bright wings and harnessed to
the customary furrow. This exultation Mr. Cabell challenges. What to
him appears comic in the situation is not that the youth should have
resisted the world so long but that he should have been taken in by
it so completely. The surrender would be tragic were it not shared
by so many men and by them so stoutly rationalized into victory. For
such rationalizing Mr. Cabell in _Figures of Earth_ reserves his
chief laughter. As another might laugh at the promises of Suskind, he
laughs at the homely counsels of Niafer. For the center of genuine
existence does not in his apprehension coincide with the center of
busy mediocrity. He is of another country. In that other country the
rapture of love endures without subsiding into comfortable friendship,
and glory is measured by a sense of aims perfectly achieved rather
than by the buzz of imbecile applause from trivial onlookers. How
preposterous that Manuel should have emigrated from such a region to be
a commonplace husband and count and father!
[Illustration: (Map of Poictesme)
_James Branch Cabell fecit_
Copied from the frontispiece of: +Popular Tales of
Poictesme+/Supernatural, Romantic and/Legendary/Collected and
Illustrated/by John Frederick Lewistam/(_drawing_)/London:/Sampson
Howe, Son, and Marsden,/ 24, Ludgate Hill./1855./The Right of
Translation is reserved./
This map, be it noted, omits the Bas-Taunenois region (Val-Ardray),
which in the thirteenth century formed the northern and eastern
frontier of Poictesme. In Val-Ardray were the old Forest of Bovion
(now, like a great part of Acaire, cleared ground) and the plains of
the Ardre River, then defended (as is shown) by Aradol and, further
east, by the fortresses of Nointel, Basardra, Yair and Upper Ardra.
This district would appear to have been, somewhat naively, left
out by Lewistam so as to make room for his map’s title. A similar
awkwardness in cartographic art has, one deduces, led to the
omission of Lorcha, so often mentioned in the text of the _Popular
Tales_,--that evil tower which stood, of course, in Acaire, about
midway between Asch and the Château des Roches. It is noteworthy,
for the rest, that this map retains the old name Beauvillage for the
little town more ambitiously entitled, since the seventeenth century,
Beauséant. Bülg, doubtless, is followed here.
John Bulmer’s marriage in the former Forest of Acaire, it is
estimated, took place near this map’s +M+ in the word “+FORMER+.”
]
Yet there is, Mr. Cabell knows, an argument which goes still further.
If the career of Manuel is centripetal, drawing him into the
terrestrial vortex, the career of Jurgen is centrifugal, flinging him
off through white space and parti-colored time; and the end of both
careers is equally age and decrepitude and the sense of universal
vanity. For all men live, whatever their rebellions, under the rule of
Koshchei the Deathless, who made things as they are. From that rule
even the incredible adventures of the pawnbroker of Poictesme cannot
free him. Jurgen, having spoken kindly of things as they are, is for a
reward permitted to have a year of youth and to move about in the world
with his old head upon his young shoulders, an impish, inquisitive,
amorous Faust. _Jurgen_ is called A Comedy of Justice, but the thing
its hero seeks is really what is known as poetic justice because it
nowhere exists in the mechanical realm of Koshchei. Nonchalantly
during this replevined year Jurgen assumes the titles one after the
other of duke and prince and king and emperor and pope. As emperor
he ventures into hell; as pope he ascends to heaven, where he seats
himself impudently upon the very throne of God. The year takes him to
the court where Guenevere is a princess, in that flush of loveliness
which had not yet become the flower eventually to seem divine to the
knights of Arthur; and Jurgen has the love of Guenevere. The year takes
him to Cocaigne, where the only law is that every man shall do that
which seems good to him, and where Queen Anaïtis, more often known
as the Lady of the Lake, instructs him in many perverse and curious
arts; and Jurgen has the love of Anaïtis. The year takes him to
Pseudopolis, where Grecian Helen lives married to Achilles and warred
upon by the hosts of Philistia; and Jurgen, though too prudent to touch
her incomparable beauty and thus bring it into comparison with all the
beauty he has tasted, is lifted to a fresh vision of the marvels he
had long ago perceived in Dorothy la Désirée, Count Manuel’s daughter,
whom he loved when he was twenty and a poet. But when, at the end of
his great journey, he is offered by Koshchei his choice of these bright
women, he sorrowfully rejects all of them. Through knowledge he has
lost the code of Chivalry which could have made him suspect divinity in
Guenevere; through becoming forty he has lost the zest of the senses
which could have made him fix all his desire upon Anaïtis; through
infidelity to his old vision of perfection he has lost the courage
which might have made him willing to mate with Helen. Though Koshchei
with one hand has made him generous offers, Koshchei with the other
hand has beaten him. Jurgen finally from too much sugar turns back to
honest salt and rejoins his commonplace but comfortable wife.
This much, however, Jurgen owes to the author of _Figures of Earth_: he
believes that in thus admitting his tether he has sustained defeat, not
gained a victory. “I have become again a creature of use and wont; I am
the lackey of prudence and half-measures; and I have put my dreams upon
an allowance.... I have failed my vision!... I have failed, and I know
very well that every man must fail: and yet my shame is no less bitter.
For I am transmuted by time’s handling! I shudder at the thought of
living day-in and day-out with my vision.... It does not seem fair,
but there is no help for it.” The justice which Jurgen has hunted
through the universe is as much an illusion as the success which Manuel
captured. The day comes when the incorrigible dreamer, long cured of
his phantasms of reality, suddenly discovers that he has not sufficient
faith in anything, not even in his own deductions, and that he must go
back to earth as naked as he was when he came out of his mother’s womb.
Though the conclusion of _Jurgen_ is devastating, the book itself is
a continual delight. The rage of a few zealots has directed attention
to certain phallic passages in the narrative, but these so admirably
fit the general scheme that only the nimble-snouted root them out and
mumble them. For Mr. Cabell, alone among American novelists, the hot
writhings and grotesque abandonments of love are as much a part of
love’s comedy as the more spiritual perturbations, and he has allowed
his irony to play over the body hardly less than over the soul of
Jurgen. But the real concern of the uproarious legend is with the
voyaging, trafficking soul. Such insolence as Jurgen’s thrusts itself
into every forbidden corner and such intelligence as his brings away at
least a little wisdom. These are the territories of romance which he is
visiting, wherein the world’s imagination has localized the great deeds
and emotions which the race remembers; but Jurgen, with his cheeky
shrewdness, finds nonsense behind many of the emotions and postures
behind many of the deeds. Even in hell there are delusions, for the
witty and profound devils who inhabit it are kept busy inventing
and executing the torments which men, in the pride of their sins,
demand. Indeed, all hell is nothing but an illusion which Koshchei has
created for the gratification of vain mankind. Heaven itself, cut by
Koshchei on the garish pattern furnished him by Revelations, is another
illusion, in which Jurgen’s grandmother lives tenderly nourished upon
the blisses which she had expected to find there. And how rollickingly
on page after page are ridiculed the prudes of Philistia and the
excessive claims of democracy, which is the form of government
chosen by the devils, and the pretensions of many orthodoxies and
the blindness of sentimentalists and the brevity and unreality of
appearances. Jurgen looks in turn at all the bubbles of existence, past
or present, and pricks them one by one. At the same time, his story
is not a continuous snarling. It is full-bodied, a progression full
of beauty and pity and mirth, as if a huge organ should burst into
laughter.
It is the symbolism of _Jurgen_ and _Figures of Earth_ which makes
them at some points difficult. Mr. Cabell is the most humorous
of mythologists. Out of what might seem pedantry if there were
less gusto in it, or ignorance if there were less method, he has
inextricably jumbled all the mythologies as well as all the histories
and geographies. Nor has he hesitated to invent with a large hand.
The result is that he crowds his pages with symbols which may be
brilliantly suggestive and which may be merely mystification. And
mystification, of course, is often irritation. But Mr. Cabell no more
minds irritating than he minds mystifying. He works under cover, always
by the method of indirection. Not even in a certain priceless copy of
_Jurgen_ which he once fully annotated for a friend does he give away
all his secret meanings. Allegory lurks where no one has any reason to
suspect it; allegory is also sometimes absent from passages wherein
by all precedent it ought to be. What reader, in such circumstances,
can be quite sure that Mr. Cabell is not having sport with him? No one
can be sure, and from the uncertainty springs discomfort in downright
bosoms. For downright bosoms this comic poet did not write these books.
He writes for scholars who are erudite enough to catch a reasonable
share of his allusions but not so literal as to be vexed when an
allusion goes over their heads; for worldlings who are sophisticated
enough to laugh with him at all follies and yet to take no offense if
he hints that perhaps even sophistication may be another folly; for
poets who are whole enough to follow him to the moon for visions and
still to take pleasure with him when he returns to move gleefully about
the earth. All told, these scholars and worldlings and poets make up
perhaps a smallish audience. That, however, Mr. Cabell knows perfectly.
He understands that it is but an illusion of comic justice to hold that
good plays are always performed before good houses.
The Manuel and Jurgen sagas are too rich to be exhausted within the
limits of a single book apiece. Melicent, for instance, Manuel’s
daughter upon whom Suskind laid her mark, reappears as the radiant
heroine of _Domnei_, loved by Perion de la Forêt. Partly because
_Domnei_, originally called _The Soul of Melicent_, belongs to the
period which produced _Chivalry_, and partly because it pretends to
be a prose redaction of _Le Roman de Lusignan_ by Nicolas de Caen,
that invented poet, it has but few touches of bitter irony. It is
Mr. Cabell’s highest flight in the representation of the extravagant
woman-worship developed out of the chivalric code--the worship
which began by ascribing to the beloved the qualities of purity and
perfection, of beauty and holiness, and ended by virtually identifying
her with the divine. This high-flying folly can go no further than it
goes in the careers of Perion and Melicent, who are so uplifted by
ineffable desire that their souls reach ceaselessly out to each other
though obstacles large as continents intervene. For Perion the most
deadly battles are but thornpricks in the quest of Melicent; and such
is Melicent’s loyalty that the possession of her body by Demetrios of
Anatolia leaves her soul immaculate and almost unperturbed. In this
tale love is canonized: throned on alabaster above all the vulgar gods
it diffuses among its worshipers a crystal radiance in which mortal
imperfections perish, or are at least forgotten during rapturous hours.
A cynical rogue like Jurgen might point out that Perion and Melicent
have as an asset to their fidelity the advantage that they never
meet during their long quest and might insinuate that they are
simple creatures who run no risk of any withering contact with the
intelligence. Nothing, in any case, pulls them down. Even that second
of disappointment which Perion feels when Melicent comes to him in the
bloody Court of Stars proves to be but one pulse-beat lost between his
old loyalty and its more glorious successor. A consequence of such
single-mindedness is that _Domnei_ is unified and dramatic beyond any
other of the Cabell novels. It lacks all the hocus-pocus of mythology;
it is innocent of symbolism. Melicent and Perion have divided one
idea between them, and they cherish the matched halves, as village
lovers divide and cherish a sixpence. When Perion, taken prisoner
by Demetrios, is threatened with his tortures, Melicent ransoms him
with herself given in marriage to the proconsul; and when Melicent,
in turn, is threatened with similar agonies, Perion buys the life of
Demetrios at a great price and sends him back to her white arms. Their
love is so powerful that it infects their world. Demetrios, who cannot
understand it, is yet shamed by it. He withholds his greedy hands from
Melicent and becomes the honorable rival of Perion. Even Ahasuerus
the Jew, after his long scheming has made him master of the Melicent
whom he has from the first desired, renounces her, contenting himself
with the poor consolation that he, like Demetrios, surpasses Perion
in his recognition of the true soul of Melicent. Are these actions
merely gestures? Perhaps, but they are never empty. One by one they
build up the illusion of a universe wherein love fulfills its blazing
promises, out of the reach of fickleness or jealousy or the mere
hunger of the senses. And with what steadiness Mr. Cabell unrolls his
plot, proceeding from gesture to gesture till all his characters have
been purged of their low motives and the lovers stand exultant in the
noon of their victory over all unworthiness. With this intentness and
steadiness of his conception goes the style of _Domnei_, which is lucid
and unvarying lovely.
Connected remotely with the Jurgen saga is _The High Place_, which in
lucidity if not in loveliness may be compared with _Domnei_. There is
the minor connection that Florian de Puysange has the unlawful blood
of Jurgen in him, and the major connection that that blood leads
Florian along paths, as far away as the eighteenth century, which dimly
recall the paths of Jurgen. For Florian is no single-hearted Perion
de la Forêt, struggling forever up one mount of ecstasy. Almost at the
beginning of the story he attains the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood,
Melior, and is thereafter terribly bored by her; the four wives he has
had already have not taught him to rise superior to disillusion. Nor
is boredom his only fate; he is hoodwinked by her too, and deprived of
all his grounds of faith. He who had won her cynically enough, making
a pact with Janicot that she was to remain Florian’s wife but a year
and that Janicot was to have her child for his fee, finds that the
child is not his own but Holy Hoprig’s. Melior is a minx, and Hoprig,
whom Poictesme has thought a saint, is a fraud. Beauty and holiness,
that is to say, have connived to cheat Florian. This later Jurgen comes
then to something like the conclusions of his legendary ancestor, and
listens without too angry a dissent to the doctrine of worldly prudence
as enunciated by his father: “To submit is the great lesson. I too was
once a dreamer: and in dreams there are lessons. But to submit, without
dreaming any more, is the great lesson; to submit, without either
understanding or repining, and without demanding of life too much of
beauty or of holiness, and without shirking the fact that this universe
is under no least bond ever to grant us, upon either side of the grave,
our desires. To do that, my son, does not satisfy and probably will not
ever satisfy a Puysange. But to do that is wisdom.”
Listening without too absolute a consent, for Florian is a Puysange,
he yet agrees that in practice the one rule to follow is: “Thou shalt
not offend against the notions of thy neighbor.” Florian does not
so offend, though he commits, in one way or another, almost all the
other offenses possible. True, Mr. Cabell in the end explains that the
whole story has been a dream of Florian’s, brought on by his reading
of Perrault’s version of the Sleeping Beauty. It is, however, such a
dream as would come to a Puysange, with the strain of Jurgen in him.
_The High Place_ is as diabolistic as _Domnei_ is devout. The center of
neither action lies within the confines of ordinary humanity. Florian
is jauntily at ease with Janicot. And it is Janicot, the ancient
adversary, who, talking with Michael the archangel, pronounces the
commentary and the benediction: “I have never been omnipotent, I am
not worshipped in any shining temple even to-day; but always I have
been served.... God after god has set rules to bridle and to change the
nature of my people. Meanwhile I do not meddle with their natures, I
urge them to live in concord with their natures, and to make the most
of my kingdom.... Your master is strong, as yet, and I too am strong,
but neither of us is strong enough to control men’s dreams. Now, the
dreaming of men--mark you, I do not say of humankind, for women are
rational creatures,--has an aspiring which is ruthless. It goes beyond
decency, it aspires to more of perfectibility than any god has yet been
able to provide or even to live up to. So this quite insane aspiring
first sets up beautiful and holy gods in heaven, then in the dock; and,
judging all by human logic, decrees this god not to be good enough....
It follows that all gods must pass until--perhaps--a god be found who
satisfies the requirements of this disastrously exigent human dreaming.
It follows that I must perforce go quietly about my kingdom because of
this insane toplofty dreaming.”
Thus Janicot furnishes a key to Poictesme: it is a country in which
men, fettered as they may be by space and time, by good and evil, dream
triumphantly beyond them.
III. SCHOLIA
Though Mr. Cabell has carried out to his own conclusion the most
complete scheme of romance ever undertaken by an American romancer, he
has met with strange fortunes on his devoted road. At the outset he
seemed to slip into a prevailing category, and indeed seems almost to
have put on as a disguise the cloak and sword of the prevailing fashion
in romance. He prospered then, only, with the passing of the fashion,
to fall into a decline of reputation not at all matched by any falling
off in the quality of his product. From such a state he was rescued by
the turmoil of eminence which followed the attacks upon _Jurgen_. This
must have been as annoying to him as it was unjust to his masterpiece;
it nevertheless enabled him to consolidate his position and to bring
all his books back into circulation, revised to fit his matured scheme.
Having stood since that episode in the rank of the later classics, he
now perhaps runs the risk of being estimated by the hearsay which
everybody knows without being studied by anybody with the care which he
requires and deserves. His individual books may be delightful, but they
revolve around the central sun of an idea without which he cannot be
seen as entirely himself.
Though only of late has he made his dominating idea explicit, he has
made it thoroughly explicit in a series of commentaries which he calls
Scholia. Certain of these, such as _The Judging of Jurgen_ and _Taboo_,
are minor answers to minor critics, and _Joseph Hergesheimer_, while
incidentally revealing, is but his analysis of another writer’s art.
_The Lineage of Lichfield_ is more significant. In it Mr. Cabell has
painstakingly worked out the genealogy which furnishes the skeleton of
his romantic scheme, tracing the ancestry of all his characters back
along one line or other to the epic Manuel. At the same time, he has
confirmed these relationships by annotations, in the revised edition,
to various of his stories which theretofore had seemed to stand alone.
The genealogical unity of his imagined world, however, is but a symbol,
chosen as a device of art to represent a truth of life. He himself has
so well set forth his scheme in the Epistle Dedicatory to the _Lineage_
that quotation is the best comment.
“Now on the face of it, as I have confessed, the thing is a pedigree
which indicates the descent of various persons, about whom I have
written the stories and books named marginally, from Dom Manuel of
Poictesme. In reality, I think, this volume is an outline--or, say, a
map--of some nine centuries of Dom Manuel’s life, the life of which
my other books are the Biography. For, be it repeated, the life that
informed tall Manuel the Redeemer did not become extinct when the
old champion rode westward with Grandfather Death: the body and the
appearance of Dom Manuel was gone, but his life remained perpetuated
in divers children--in, to be accurate, a respectable total of sixteen
persons,--who afterward transmitted this life to their progeny, as did
they in turn to their own offspring. So this life flowed on through
time--and through such happenings in France and England and America as,
one by one, my books have recorded, with every generation dividing and
subdividing the troubled and attritioned flowing into more numerous
streamlets....
“It is about this life that I have written elsewhere, in many places,
in various chapters of a Biography which is largish now, but stays
incomplete, and will not ever be completed. For this human life, as I
write about it, appears to me a stream that, in journeying toward an
unpredictable river, itself the tributary of an unplumbed ocean, is
fretted equally (still to preserve the fluvial analogue) by the winds
of time and by many pebbles of chance. So are there various ripples
raised upon the stream as it goes--ultimately--seaward: and, noting
these, we say this ripple is Manuel, that Ormskirk, and the other
Charteris; noting also that while we name it the small stir is gone.
But the stream remains unabated, nor is the sureness of its moving
lessened, any more than is the obscurity of its goal.
“Or let us shift the figure. Let us rather liken this continuously
reincarnated life of Manuel to an itinerant comedian that with each
generation assumes the garb of a new body, and upon a new stage enacts
a variant of yesterday’s drama. For I do not find the comedy ever to
be much altered in its essentials. The first act is the imagining of
the place where contentment exists and may be come to; and the second
act reveals the striving toward, and the third act the falling short
of, that shining goal, or else (the difference here being negligible)
the attaining of it to discover that happiness, after all, abides a
thought farther down the bogged, rocky, clogged, befogged heartbreaking
road, if anywhere. That is the comedy which, to my finding, the life
I write about has enacted over and over again on every stage between
Poictesme and Lichfield.
“I call it a comedy. Really there is thin sustenance for the tragic
muse in the fact that with each performance the costume of the
protagonist is spoiled, and the human body temporarily informed with
Manuel’s life is thrown perforce to the dust-heap. There is not even
apparent, to reflection, any economic loss: for the wardrobe of this
mundivagant posturer is self-replenishing, in that as each costume
is used it thriftily begets new apparel for the comedian to ruin in
to-morrow’s rendering of the old play. The parent’s flesh is flung
by like an outworn coat: but the comedian, reclad with the child’s
body, tricked out with strong fresh sinews and re-rouged with youth,
is lustily refurbishing, with a garnish of local allusions and of
the latest social and religious and political slang, all yesterday’s
archaic dialogue and inveterate ‘situations.’”
Mr. Cabell understands that formerly, “they whisper, the scenery
was arboreal, and our comedian wore fur and a tail; as before that
his costume was reptilian, and yet earlier was piscine. So do the
scientists trace backward his career to life’s first appearance upon
the stage, when the _vis comica_ which later was to animate the thews
of Manuel had for its modest apparel only a small single bubble
embedded in primeval slime.” And, since “our comedian has dressed his
rôle with increasing elaborateness, progressing from a mere pinhead
of sentiency to all the intricate fripperies of the human body,” Mr.
Cabell likewise understands that “to-morrow the age-old comedian
will be doing and wearing none knows what, although in reason the
restless artist that we call life cannot long stay content with human
bodies for his apparel and medium. Already, in considerate eyes, life
tends to some more handsome expression, by means of the harnessed
chemistries and explosions, and collaborating flywheels and vapors,
and wire-dancing thunderbolts, that in all our cities dwarf the human
beings who serve as the release levers.” Still, history is vague and
prophecy is futile, so Mr. Cabell limits his Biography to the materials
which he can examine. “I merely know that, even though the life of our
planet may by and by discard mankind just as it has discarded the dodo
and the dinosaur, at present men and women are life’s clothing: and I
take it to be the part of urbanity to accept the mode of our day.”
The march of the Biography has at last, thanks to the _Lineage_,
become traceable. Starting out with _Figures of Earth: A Comedy of
Appearances_, it introduces Manuel and Poictesme with something of
the geography and mythology of the province. Then follow the books
particularly devoted to the chivalric code, _Domnei: A Comedy of
Woman-Worship_ and _Chivalry: Dizain des Reines_. Returning along its
chronological path, the Biography studies the career of Manuel’s great
contemporary in _Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice_, and from it proceeds, by
what may be called the line of gallantry, through _The Line of Love:
Dizain des Manages_, _The High Place: A Comedy of Disenchantment_, and
_Gallantry: Dizain des Fêtes Galantes_, to the middle of the eighteenth
century. Turning back once more, the Biography brings up the line of
poetry in _The Certain Hour: Dizain des Poëtes_, _The Cords of Vanity:
A Comedy of Shirking_, to Mr. Cabell’s own book of verse, _From the
Hidden Way: Dizain des Échos_. Finally come the other novels with
an American setting, _The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck: A Comedy of
Limitations_, _The Eagle’s Shadow: A Comedy of Purse-Strings_, and
_The Cream of the Jest: A Comedy of Evasions_, the last of which, by
exhibiting the double life of its hero in Poictesme and in Lichfield,
brings the two ends of the Biography together. There remain to be
listed only the prologue, _Beyond Life: Dizain des Demiurges_, and the
epilogue, _Straws and Prayer Books: Dizain des Diversions_.
Mr. Cabell includes his prologue and epilogue in the Biography, but
they may also be considered among the Scholia. Roughly speaking, the
first explains what he makes of the universe, and the second why he has
made his books. In the universe, at least so far as it concerns itself
with men and women, he finds that the one non-negligible element is
romance, “the first and loveliest daughter of human vanity,” by which
mankind is deceived, itself eagerly taking part in the deception, and
is thereby exalted. “No one on the preferable side of Bedlam wishes
to be reminded of what we are in actuality, even were it possible,
by any disastrous miracle, ever to dispel the mist which romance has
evoked about all human beings.” For the estate of man upon his planet
is trifling. “All about us flows and gyrates unceasingly the material
universe,” Mr. Cabell makes John Charteris say, in _Beyond Life_, “an
endless inconceivable jumble of rotatory blazing gas and frozen spheres
and detonating comets, wherethrough spins Earth like a frail midge. And
to this blown molecule adhere what millions and millions and millions
of parasites just such as I am, begetting and dreaming and slaying and
abnegating and toiling and making mirth, just as did aforetime those
countless generations of our forebears, every one of whom was likewise
a creature just such as I am!... And still--behold the miracle!--still
I believe life to be a personal transaction between myself and
Omnipotence; I believe that what I do is somehow of importance; and
I believe that I am on a journey toward some very public triumph not
unlike that of the third prince in the fairy-tale.” Only with the help
of this persistent self-delusion has the race been able to endure its
plight. So the first man tricked himself into the devout belief that
the naked apes must triumph over all their rivals in the struggle for
hegemony; so the last man will continue to play ape to his dreams.
Romance, then, which begets these dynamic illusions, is a demiurge,
a force poured into the stream of life so near its source that it
may no longer be separated from the stream, and certainly may not be
disregarded by any of the stream’s historians.
As aspects of romance, as creations of the demiurge, Mr. Cabell studies
the principal motives which direct the human enterprise. There is
chivalry, a notion founded upon no ascertainable testimony, to the
effect that men are not only the favored children of the gods but are
their representatives in a foreign country, and so are obliged to bear
themselves as much like gods as may be. Sustained by this conception,
what pinnacles of self-reliant virtue have not men aspired to, and
sometimes reached! There is love, which, springing from a fierce animal
desire, has been now narrowed and now enlarged until it embraces
consideration and reverence and a sensibility so acute as occasionally
to disavow the original impulse. “When you come to judge,” says
Charteris, what man has made of the raw materials of love, “appraising
the deed in view as against the wondrous overture of courtship and
that infinity of high achievements which time has seen performed as
grace-notes, words fail before his egregious thaumaturgy.” There is
common-sense, “another dynamic illusion, through which romance retains
the person of average intelligence in physical employment and, as a
by-product, in an augmenting continuance of creature comforts,” as if
prudence were more than an affair of the swift moment and as if the
things called practical had any ultimate value in the whirling current
of existence. There is religion, based upon the primitive suspicion
which men had that the seen activities of nature must be manipulated
by unseen beings, extended to the hope that these unseen beings were
vitally interested in mankind, and raised finally to the confidence
that there was another universe in which men would be rewarded or
punished for their doings and thoughts in this one. “And religion,
like all the other products of romance, is true in a far higher sense
than are the unstable conditions of our physical life. Indeed, the
most prosaic of materialists proclaim that we are all descended from
an insane fish, who somehow evolved the idea that it was his duty
to live on land, and eventually succeeded in doing it. So that now
his earth-treading progeny manifest the same illogical aspiration
toward heaven, their bankruptcy in common-sense may, even by material
standards, have much the same incredible result.”
Nor in the secular spheres are the motives of mankind less clearly
the illusions of romance. Art but seduces the artist, at almost every
personal cost to himself, into the assurance that he can catch beauty
or truth in the net of his own vision and so transmit something eternal
to posterity, when as a matter of fact posterity will perhaps not even
notice him and certainly will not long bear him in mind as anything
more noticeable than a classic. Patriotism, too, is an anodyne which
the demiurge administers to save men from the bewilderment and panic
they would possibly feel if they once admitted that they live in
nations governed by other men not essentially wiser than themselves,
an anodyne which drugs them into national complacency or lifts them
to a burning loyalty to what they hold to be the national good. And
as to optimism, what could be more unwarrantable an illusion, among
the fortuitous items of experience, than the creed which promises that
any given chain of events must have the happy ending found nowhere in
the universe except in second-rate romances? In short, the demiurge of
romance is the element in life which rounds out with curves and colors
the clumsily articulated skeleton of fact, thereby serving, with the
truest utility which may be asked of it, to add to the dull condition
of the brutes the human desiderata of distinction and clarity, and
beauty and symmetry, and tenderness and truth and urbanity.
That Mr. Cabell does not condemn all these illusions is evidenced by
the labor he has put into his Biography. “From the beginning,” says
John Charteris with his author’s approbation, “I have been contending
that nothing in the universe is of importance, or is authentic to any
serious sense, except the various illusions of romance, the demiurge.”
No Biographer with any gift of irony could have persisted through
fifteen sizeable volumes, and several smaller ones, in the chronicling
of mere painted mirages. _Straws and Prayer-Books_, the epilogue which
rounds out the series at the end of its second decade, inventories and
anatomizes the motives which, so far as Mr. Cabell is aware of them,
have impelled him to the long task. His motives really come down to
one. “The artist,” he commences, “or, at least, the artist who happens
to be a novelist,--is life’s half-frightened playboy.” As other men
devise for themselves the fictions by which they live, he devises
fictions for himself and them, constructing in the process certain
pleasant imaginative alcoves in which all who will may linger as they
advance toward death “through gray and monotonous corridors.” The
artist, however, must not be tricked, as Mr. Cabell says he has not
been, into “the deadly error of succumbing to praiseworthy motives”
and thus “misled into evanescence through philanthropy.” “For the
one really ponderable sort of writer--the writer who communicates
to us something of his own delight and interest in his playing, and
who thus in the end contributes to our general human happiness,--has
been influenced while about this playing by none save selfish
considerations. He has written wholly to divert himself: he has for
that moment been inclavated to pleasure-seeking with somewhat the
ruthlessness of a Nero and all the tenacity of a débutante: and if I
seem unduly to emphasize this obvious fact, it is merely because the
man afterward so often lies about it.”
Most thoroughly to divert himself, says Mr. Cabell, avoiding the
dangerous first person by speaking in the third, the artist makes sport
with the three martinets which he, like other men at bottom, genuinely
abhors: common-sense and piety and death. “The literary artist ...
temporarily endows his followers with the illusion of possessing
what all alchemists have sought,--unfading youth, wealth and eternal
life. He engineers the escape for which men have always longed, and
which they have always known to be attainable, as here, by magic.” So
Mr. Cabell has left behind the flat terrain of common-sense and has
laid the scene of his actions within or somewhere near the magical
boundaries of Poictesme. Moreover: “Everywhere through the shadowland
of legend canter and gallop--with the gleaming eyes of nocturnal
creatures, with a multitudinous tossed shining of steel,--these
‘squires of the night’s body, Diana’s foresters, these minions of the
moon,’ whom the prosaic call thieves and highwaymen: and everywhere
men have admired and cherished some cunning, strong, unconquerable
rogue.” And the artist also, set by his profession a little outside
of the sleek and ordered universe, has given his allegiance less to
the established gods than to Pan, the scapegoat of nature, the outcast
god “who had looked upon the divine handiwork, and seen that it was
not good; or, at any rate, not good enough.” So Mr. Cabell has left
to others the austere task of penning the lives of the saints and has
himself created Jurgen and his experimental crew. Above all, men have
abhorred death, a thing so dreadful to them that except in special
instances they prefer to it the twin tediums of common-sense and piety.
“None the less, it is with this omnipresent and omnicorporeal monarch
that the artist makes sport, depriving death of terrors with the
opiates of religion: and maiming death of potency likewise, so long as
the artist eludes destruction and survives in his art.” So Mr. Cabell,
aware of the impending ugliness as only the lover of loveliness can be,
has for twenty years toilsomely kept on piling his bright pebbles upon
his shining cairn.
Yet what, he says he asked himself just before ending his explanation,
has he got out of his work on the Biography? His first answer was
that he had got nothing, since “the outcome of his manifold playing
... was always unpredictable, always chance-guided, and, in any case,
was of no benefit or hurt to him by and by, and was never of any
grave importance to anybody else.” But on further thought he found a
second answer to his question. “I really had got out of life what I
most wanted. I had wanted to make the Biography: and I had made it,
in just the way which it seemed good to me. To do that had been, no
doubt, my play and my diversion, in the corridors where men must find
diversion ... or else go mad.... But ... it seemed to me, too, that I
had somehow fulfilled, without unduly shirking, an obligation which
had been laid upon me to make the Biography. I was not, heaven knew,
claiming for myself any heavenly inspiration or even any heavenly
countenance. Rather, it seemed to me that the ability and the body and
the life which transiently were at my disposal had been really used:
with these lent implements which were not ever properly speaking mine,
and which presently would be taken away from me, I had made something
which was actually mine.... Here then, upon this shelf, in these brown
volumes which make up the Biography, I can lay hand and eye upon just
what precisely my life has amounted to: the upshot of my existence is
here before me, a tangible and visible and entirely complete summing
up, within humiliatingly few inches. And yet, as I consider these
inadequate brown volumes, I suspect that the word I am looking for is
‘gratitude.’”
In this conclusion, which only by the shorter-sighted codes of
philanthropy can be adjudged arrogant, Mr. Cabell has modestly kept
faith with his whole creed. Looking back over the course of the
Biography he suspects that he has played in it the rôle of Horvendile,
“the erratic demiurge who composes and controls the entire business
extempore, without any prompter except his own æsthetic whims.” He
reasons that it must have been vain, but he testifies that it has been
pleasant. It remains for others, susceptible or not to Mr. Cabell’s
reasoning in the matter, to bear witness to the general pleasure which
has been the by-product of his private diversion.
Those others, however susceptible, will not linger too long over his
reasoning about the vast futility of human life. This is an ancient
doctrine, shared by all who keep their eyes wide open as they charge
the impregnable walls of fate. Nor will those other men for whom Mr.
Cabell has incidentally constructed his charming alcoves linger too
long over the central conception about which the Biography has been
arranged. Ingenious and arresting as it is, it insists upon recalling
certain words of its originator to the effect that “it is the nature
of every explanatory theory to be evolved after the phenomena it
accounts for.” The author of the Biography must be estimated, like any
other artist, by his actual performances; theories are for critics.
If he gives delight by his bold playing with ideas, he gives still
more by the energy, never imitable in mere discourse, with which he
puts such ideas into action in the behavior of the characters he
has created. More beguilingly than did ever Solon or Lycurgus, Mr.
Cabell has outlined the polity of Poictesme; like another Manuel,
he has robustly peopled it, endowing it, possibly, with as long a
life as some identifiable medieval counties had. His people have,
if not the dimensions of verisimilitude, the unmistakableness of
visions; bull-necked Manuel, eating his proud heart amid the tumult
of affairs; lank Jurgen, considering the universe with a mind as free
and nimble as the recalcitrant Pan’s; Melicent and Perion, blown over
seas and mountains in their disunited flesh, but in their spirits
forever clasped in one undying rapture; the lords of Puysange, supple
and insolent in the face of whatever adventures; gallant, hardy,
disillusioned Ormskirk, master of brave gestures and difficult
occasions; John Charteris, airy commentator in a world through which
he flounders; besides these, scores of slighter heroes, cut no doubt
by the pattern of Manuel, but perennially re-enacting the unavoidable
comedy with delicate variations; and besides all these, the exquisite
glimmering girls, the radiant women, who are the ends of the heroes’
pursuits and the enrichments and torments of their successes. A
philosopher might have incubated the theory upon which the Biography
is based; a critic might have elaborated the scheme of carrying Manuel
through many metempsychoses; only a poet, authentically gifted, could
have created the figures which now inhabit Poictesme.
Mr. Cabell is not, however, at his most poetical in his verse. _From
the Hidden Way_ belongs, in a sense, with the Scholia, being made up
in considerable part of what pretend to be English adaptations of
originals by Alessandro de Medici, Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, Nicholas
de Caen, Antoine Riczi, Charles Garnier, Théodore Passerat, Alphonse
Moreau, and Paul Verville--some of them imaginary and some of them
characters of the Biography, where poems by them also appear. The
pretended adaptations are occasionally fresh and sweet; the sonnets,
especially, wherein Mr. Cabell speaks in his own person, have a
convincing timbre; but as a whole his poems give the impression of
being first drafts or subsequent paraphrases of passages better
rendered in the prose. He has very rarely, when working with rhyme and
meter, quite fitted his matter to his own natural rhythm, which is a
prose rhythm, delicate, balanced, and idiosyncratic beyond the reach of
most regular verse. A single comparison is enough. He has never been
happier as a poet than in the lines, ascribed to Alessandro de Medici,
which bear the title, _But Wisdom Is Justified of Her Children_:
“Phyllida, spring wakes about us--
Wakes to mock at us and flout us
That so coldly do delay:
When the very birds are mating,
Pray you, why should we be waiting--
We that might be wed to-day?
“_Life is brief_, the wise men tell us;--
Even those dusty, musty fellows
That have done with life,--and pass
Where the wraith of Aristotle
Hankers, vainly, for a bottle,
Youth and some frank Grecian lass.
“Ah, I warrant you;--and Zeno
Would not reason, now, could he know
One more chance to live and love:
For, at best, the merry May-time
Is a very fleeting playtime;--
Why, then, waste an hour thereof?
“Plato, Solon, Periander,
Seneca, Anaximander,
Pyrrho, and Parmenides!
Were one hour alone remaining
Would ye spend it in attaining
Learning, or to lips like these?
“Thus, I demonstrate by reason
Now is our predestined season
For the garnering of all bliss;
Prudence is but long-faced folly;
Cry a fig for melancholy!
Seal the bargain with a kiss.”
Deft and spirited as these lines are, they strike the ear with the
accents of another century, a little thin, a little derivative. With
how much more substance, with how much richer and deeper rhythms
Horvendile in _The Cream of the Jest_ is allowed to apostrophize
Ettarre, speaking perfectly of beautiful old happenings in the language
of a new rapture!
“Assuredly it was you of whom blind Homer dreamed, comforting endless
night with visions of your beauty, as you sat in a bright fragrant
vaulted chamber weaving at a mighty loom, and embroidering on tapestry
the battles men were waging about Troy because of your beauty; and very
certainly it was to you that Hermes came over fields of violets and
parsley, where you sang magic rhymes, sheltered by an island cavern,
in which cedar and citron-wood were burning--and, calling you Calypso,
bade you release Odysseus from the spell of your beauty. Sophocles,
too, saw you bearing an ewer of bronze, and treading gingerly among
gashed lamentable corpses, lest your loved dead be dishonored; and
Sophocles called you Antigonê, praising your valor and your beauty. And
when men named you Bombyca, Theocritus also sang of your grave drowsy
voice and your feet carven of ivory, and of your tender heart and all
your honey-pale sweet beauty....
“And as Mark’s Queen, ... you strayed with Tristran in the sunlit
glades of Morois, that high forest, where many birds sang full-throated
in the new light of spring; as Medeia you fled from Colchis; and as
Esclairmonde you delivered Huon from the sardonic close wiles of
heathenry, which to you seemed childish. All poets have had these
fitful glimpses of you, Ettarre, and of that perfect beauty which is
full of troubling reticences, and so, is somehow touched with something
sinister. Now all these things I likewise see in you, Ettarre; and
therefore, for my sanity’s sake, I dare not concede that you are a
human being.”
At such moments the poet in Mr. Cabell takes him well beyond the reach
of the Scholiast in him. Other scholiasts, however, may still be
drawn to the task of dealing with the critical problems he presents.
One problem, in particular, invites: the problem as to what place he
occupies in the literature of his native country.
There seems to be no longer any reason for not associating him with the
only comparable American romancers, Hawthorne and Melville. Unlike the
others as each of these three may seem, they have all at least this
much in common, that they are engineers of escape from the universe of
compromises and half-measures to the universe in which both the reason
and the imagination would prefer to live. Hawthorne was indeed more
strictly bound to the actual world than either of the others, yet he
too breathed uncomfortably in it, and kept sending his imagination back
to times in which it could function without the daily handicaps which
fretted him. Only in the dim world of old Salem could he imagine the
proud spirit of Hester Prynne rising up and cracking the stiff frame of
the Puritan code. Melville, less touched by Puritanism than Hawthorne,
fled from his world not along the track of time but along the track of
space, sending his imagination to a cannibal paradise in the Pacific,
to the wild frontiers of the remote ocean where his countrymen wrestled
with angels and demons. Mr. Cabell, more systematic than Melville or
Hawthorne in his thinking, is more thorough in his art. He has left
behind both his own place and his own age, and has taken refuge in an
imagined realm where the very shadows are brighter than the sunshine
of Virginia. He pays for this greater detachment with a certain
rarefaction; Hawthorne is more solid, Melville more robust. It is in
wit and loveliness that Mr. Cabell matches them.
Melville, to be sure, is one of the wittiest of romancers. But he never
won for his wit a full emancipation from the fears which had been
planted in him by his moral training. He fought with the beasts of
conscience; he tortured himself with speculations about immortality; he
could carry even Captain Ahab only as far as to the sulphurous brink of
blasphemy. With conscience and immortality and blasphemy Mr. Cabell’s
wit plays as intrepidly as with less formidable prejudices. It has
no fears. It stares open-eyed at the blazing sun and good-humoredly
strokes the beard of Jehovah. There is, consequently, none of that
violence which goes with Melville’s robuster and racier comedy. So are
there in Mr. Cabell none of the touches of provincialism which go with
Hawthorne’s solider grasp of human character. Is Donatello a faun?
Jurgen is, too. But whereas in the substantial tissue of Donatello the
sense of sin takes root, Jurgen slips through earth and heaven and
hell as unassailably as if Luther had never lived to make men forever
conscious of the moral bearing of all things. Mr. Cabell is thus as
free to admire loveliness wherever he finds it as to discover the
possibilities of mirth in whatever theme. He finds beauty glittering in
the midst of ugly sins, and snares it in his tolerant net. He builds
fresh beauty about ominous symbols, inventing or elaborating them if
need be. He does not, like Hawthorne, feel the obligation constantly
to check the wings of his vision by comparing it with reality. Mr.
Cabell, by questioning the reality of reality, has been naturalized
in the world of dreams till he moves about there without the scruples
lasting over from another allegiance. Thus the beauty of his Poictesme
is double-distilled. Those lovers of beauty who must now and then
come down to earth for renewal will occasionally gasp in Poictesme,
wishing the atmosphere would thicken and the brilliant colors change.
But always Poictesme hangs above the mortal clouds, suspended from
the eternal sky, in the region where wit and beauty are joined in an
everlasting kiss.
THE BOOKS OF JAMES BRANCH CABELL
(+Note+: The following list is chronologically arranged in accordance
with the time in which the action of each volume occurs, with the
exception of the first and last volumes which appear as the prologue
and the epilogue respectively of the Biography. For a more detailed
explanation of the chronology of these works the reader is referred
to “The Lineage of Lichfield.” The editions indicated below are the
final revised versions, as the author wishes them to be preserved.)
_BIOGRAPHY_
1. +Beyond Life+: Dizain des Démiurges. New York. 1919.
2. +Figures of Earth+: A Comedy of Appearances. New York. 1921.
3. +The Silver Stallion.+ (_In Preparation._)
4. +Domnei+: A Comedy of Woman Worship. With an introduction by
Joseph Hergesheimer. New York. 1920. (Revised edition of a work
originally published as “The Soul of Melicent”--New York. 1913.)
5. +Chivalry+: Dizain des Reines. With an introduction by Burton
Rascoe. New York. 1921. (Revised edition of a work originally
published in 1909.)
6. +Jurgen+: A Comedy of Justice. New York. 1919.
7. +The Line of Love+: Dizain des Mariages. With an introduction by
H. L. Mencken. New York. 1921. (Revised edition of a work originally
published in 1905.)
8. +The High Place+: A Comedy of Disenchantment. New York. 1923.
9. +Gallantry+: Dizain des Fêtes Galantes. With an introduction
by Louis Untermeyer. New York. 1922. (Revised edition of a work
originally published in 1907.)
10. +Something About Eve.+ (_In Preparation._)
11. +The Certain Hour+: Dizain des Poëtes. New York. 1916.
12. +The Cords of Vanity+: A Comedy of Shirking. With an introduction
by Wilson Follett. New York. 1920. (Revised edition of a work
originally published in 1909.)
13. +From the Hidden Way+: Dizain des Échos. New York. 1924. (Revised
edition of a work originally published in 1916.)
14. +The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck+: A Comedy of Limitations. New
York. 1915.
15. +The Eagle’s Shadow+: A Comedy of Purse-Strings. With an
introduction by Edwin Björkman. New York. 1923. (Revised edition of a
work originally published in 1904.)
16. +The Cream of the Jest+: A Comedy of Evasions. With an
introduction by Harold Ward. New York. 1922. (Revised edition of a
work originally published in 1917.)
17. +Townsend of Lichfield.+ (_In Preparation._)
18. +Straws and Prayer-Books+: Dizain des Diversions. New York. 1924.
_SCHOLIA_
1. +The Judging of Jurgen.+ Chicago. 1920.
2. +Taboo+: A Legend Retold from the Dirghic of Sævius Nicanor, with
prolegomena, notes and a preliminary memoir. New York. 1921.
3. +Joseph Hergesheimer+: An Essay in Interpretation. Chicago. 1921.
4. +The Jewel Merchants+: A Comedy in One Act. New York. 1921.
5. +The Lineage of Lichfield+: An Essay in Eugenics. New York. 1922.
_GENEALOGY_
1. +Branch of Abingdon.+ Richmond. 1911.
2. +Branchiana.+ Richmond. 1907.
3. +The Majors and Their Marriages.+ Richmond. 1915.
Transcriber’s Notes
In the .txt version, surrounding characters have been used to indicate
_Italics_ and +Smallcaps+
Minor typographical and formatting errors have been corrected.
(Descriptive/Alt text) has been added to the illustration.
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