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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9f57f44 --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +* text=auto +*.txt text +*.md text +*.htm text +*.html text +*.png binary +*.jpg binary +*.svg text +*.pdf binary +*.bmp binary +*.zip binary +*.midi binary +*.mp3 binary diff --git a/79393-0.txt b/79393-0.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..cb6b3bb --- /dev/null +++ b/79393-0.txt @@ -0,0 +1,1676 @@ +*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79393 *** + + + + + 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. + +*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79393 *** diff --git a/79393-h/79393-h.htm b/79393-h/79393-h.htm new file mode 100644 index 0000000..224cc09 --- /dev/null +++ b/79393-h/79393-h.htm @@ -0,0 +1,2834 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html> +<html lang="en"> +<head> + <meta charset="UTF-8"> + <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> + <meta name="format-detection" content="telephone=no,date=no,address=no,email=no,url=no"> + <title> + James Branch Cabell | Project Gutenberg + </title> + <link rel="icon" href="images/cover.jpg" type="image/x-cover"> + <style> + +body { + margin-left: 10%; + margin-right: 10%; +} + +h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 { + text-align: center; /* all headings centered */ + clear: both; +} +h1 { + line-height: 1.4; + text-align: center; +} + + +p { + margin-top: .5em; + text-align: justify; + margin-bottom: .5em; +} + +hr { + width: 33%; + margin-top: 2em; + margin-bottom: 2em; + margin-left: 33.5%; + margin-right: 33.5%; + clear: both; +} + + +hr.chap {width: 65%; margin-left: 17.5%; margin-right: 17.5%;} +@media print { hr.chap {display: none; visibility: hidden;} } + +div.chapter {page-break-before: always;} +h2.nobreak {page-break-before: avoid;} + +table { + margin-left: auto; + margin-right: auto; +} +table.left {margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 10%;} +table.autotable { border-collapse: collapse; } +table.autotable td, +table.autotable th { padding: 0.25em; } + +.tdl {text-align: left;} +.tdr {text-align: right;} + +.pagenum { /* uncomment the next line for invisible page numbers */ + /* visibility: hidden; */ + position: absolute; + left: 92%; + font-size: small; 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+} + +/* Poetry */ +/* uncomment the next line for centered poetry */ +.poetry-container {display: flex; justify-content: center;} +.poetry-container {text-align: center;} +.poetry {text-align: left; margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 5%;} +.poetry .stanza {margin: 1em auto;} +.poetry .verse {text-indent: -3em; padding-left: 3em;} + + +/* Transcriber's notes (includes pagebreak before) */ +.transnote {background-color: #EAFEEA; + color: black; + font-size:small; + padding:0.5em; + margin-bottom:5em; + font-family:sans-serif, serif; + page-break-before: always; +} + +hr.short { + width: 50px; + margin-top: 1px; + margin-bottom: 1px; + clear: both; + margin: auto; +} +hr.mid { + width: 16em; + margin-top: 1px; + margin-bottom: 1px; + clear: both; + margin: auto; +} + +/* box-border around text (div class) */ +.border { + width: 16em; + margin: auto; + padding-left: 1em; + padding-right: 1em; + padding-top: 1em; + padding-bottom: 1em; + border-top: 2px solid black; + border-bottom: 2px solid black; + border-left: 2px solid black; + border-right: 2px solid black; + margin-top: 2em + } + +/* TOC */ +.toc-container { + display: flex; + justify-content: center; +} + +/* horiz and vert alignment of text in tables */ +.tdlt { + text-align: left; + vertical-align: baseline; +} + +/* faux-h2 for front matter */ +.front { + font-size: x-large; + font-weight: bold; + text-align: center; + page-break-before: avoid; +} + +/* faux-h1 centered */ +.fh1 { + display: block; + font-size: xx-large; + font-weight: bold; + text-align: center; +} + +/* misc text formatting */ +.large {font-size: large;} +.xxxl {font-size: 1.5em; letter-spacing: .25em;} +.x-ebookmaker .xxxl {font-size: xx-large;} + +.illowp100 {width: 100%; max-width: 100em;} /* landscape image */ + + +/* Poetry indents */ +.poetry .indent0 {text-indent: -3.0em;} + + </style> +</head> + +<body> +<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79393 ***</div> + +<main> + + +<p class="center large">MODERN AMERICAN WRITERS</p> +<hr class="mid"> +<p class="center">I. JAMES BRANCH CABELL</p> + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" aria-hidden="true"> +<div class="chapter"> +</div> +<div class="border"> +<p class="center large">MODERN AMERICAN<br> +WRITERS</p> + +<p class="center"><i>Edited by</i> <span class="smcap">Ernest Boyd</span></p> +<hr class="short"> +<p> +I. JAMES BRANCH CABELL<br> +<span class="fright">By <span class="smcap">Carl Van Doren</span></span></p> +<div style="clear: both;"></div> +<p>II. EDITH WHARTON<br> +<span class="fright">By <span class="smcap">Robert Morss Lovett</span></span> +</p><br> + +<hr class="short"> + +<p class="center">In Preparation</p> + +<p> +THEODORE DREISER<br> +<span class="fright">By <span class="smcap">Burton Rascoe</span></span></p> +<div style="clear: both;"></div> +<p>EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON<br> +<span class="fright">By <span class="smcap">Ben Ray Redman</span></span></p> +<div style="clear: both;"></div> +<p>H. L. MENCKEN<br> +<span class="fright">By <span class="smcap">Ernest Boyd</span></span> +</p><div style="clear: both;"></div> + +<p class="center">and others.</p> +</div> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" aria-hidden="true"> +<div class="chapter"> +<h1>JAMES BRANCH<br> +<span class="xxxl">CABELL</span></h1> +</div> + +<br><br> +<p class="front"><i>By</i><br> +CARL VAN DOREN</p> + +<br><br> +<p class="front">ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY<br> +NEW YORK :: :: :: :: :: :: 1925</p> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" aria-hidden="true"> +<div class="chapter"> +<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Copyright, 1925, By<br> +Robert M. McBride & Co.</span></p> +</div> + +<p class="center"><i>Printed in the United<br> +States of America</i></p> + +<p class="center">Published 1925</p> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" aria-hidden="true"> +<div class="chapter"> + <h2 class="nobreak" id="CONTENTS"> + CONTENTS + </h2> +</div> + +<div class="toc-container"> +<table class="autotable"> +<tr> + <td class="tdl"></td> + <td class="tdl"></td> + <td class="tdr">PAGE</td> +</tr> +<tr> + <td class="tdl">I.</td> + <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Cabell Minor</span></td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> + <td class="tdl">II.</td> + <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Cabell Major</span></td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_31">31</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> + <td class="tdl">III.</td> + <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Scholia</span></td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_56">56</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> + <td class="tdl"></td> + <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Bibliography</span></td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_85">85</a></td> +</tr> +</table> +</div> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" aria-hidden="true"> +<div class="chapter"> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</span></p> + + +<p class="fh1">James Branch Cabell</p> +</div> + +<br><br> + <h2 class="nobreak" id="I_CABELL_MINOR"> + I. CABELL MINOR + </h2> + + + +<p>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; <i>b.</i> Richmond, +Va., Apr. 14, 1879; <i>s.</i> Robert Gamble and +Anne (Branch) C.; A. B., William and +Mary, 1898; <i>m.</i> Priscilla, <i>d.</i> 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., +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Jurgen</i>, but so have they done +during the past five generations with <i>Tristram +Shandy</i>, 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, <i>Jurgen</i> 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 <i>Figures of Earth</i> is not profounder +than <i>Jurgen</i>, or <i>The High Place</i> +more artfully narrated, or <i>Domnei</i> lovelier. +<i>Chivalry</i> 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. +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</span> +Even though, as is inevitable, two +or three of them will outlive the others, the +entire fifteen must be taken into account.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>Concerning the ardent, absurd youth who +wrote <i>The Eagle’s Shadow</i> the Cabell who +wrote <i>Straws and Prayer-Books</i> speaks disarmingly +in a late autobiographic note. “I +would like,” that youth is made to say, “to +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</span> +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 <i>The Cardinal’s Snuff-Box</i> and <i>The Prisoner +of Zenda</i>.” 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. <i>The Eagle’s +Shadow</i>, 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</span> +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.”</p> + +<p>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 <i>The Line of +Love</i>. 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>The episodes in his volumes of short stories, +<i>The Lane of Love</i>, <i>Gallantry</i>, <i>Chivalry</i>, <i>The +Certain Hour</i>, are essentially gestures. With +poets and warriors as their almost invariable +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</span> +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 <i>In Necessity’s Mortar</i>, 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 +<i>The Scapegoats</i>, 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. +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</span> +“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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>The +Housewife</i>, for instance, at present stands, +King Edward is content to speak thus of his +queen when he hears of her great loyalty: +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</span> +“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 <i>The Certain +Hour</i>. 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>“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.... +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</span> +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 <i>Chivalry</i> 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.</p> + +<p>Mr. Cabell’s Gallantry is enough like his +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</span> +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 <i lang="fr">coup de +grâce</i>, 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</span> +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 <i>Gallantry</i>. John Bulmer, Duke of +Ormskirk, protagonist of <i>In the Second +April</i>, 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>The Faërie Queene</i>, 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. +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</span> +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 <i>The Tempest</i>, 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. +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</span> +Beautiful happenings, he knows, seem more +beautiful when they have already been looked +upon as memorable.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</span> +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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</span> +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 <i>The +Eagle’s Shadow</i>, <i>The Cords of Vanity</i>, <i>The +Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck</i>, <i>The Cream of +the Jest</i> 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>The records themselves range from such a +less than characteristic story as that in <i>The +Eagle’s Shadow</i>, with its sillibub dialogues +and its theatrical solution, to such a more than +characteristic story as that in <i>The Cream +of the Jest</i>, 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 <i>The Eagle’s Shadow</i>, is less than characteristic +of its author in his maturity. What +stretches out through <i>The Cords of Vanity</i> +is merely another line of love, with a single +personage serving as the lover in all cases. +Robert Etheridge Townsend, poet and romancer, +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</span> +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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>The theme, nevertheless, now and then +reaches out to touch aspects of existence +which do not properly belong within its narrower +bounds. <i>The Rivet in Grandfather’s +Neck</i>, 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 <i>Rivet</i> is also +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</span> +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 <i>The Cream of +the Jest</i> 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 <i>The Cream of +the Jest</i> 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</span> +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.</p> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" aria-hidden="true"> +<div class="chapter"> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</span></p> + + + <h2 class="nobreak" id="II_CABELL_MAJOR"> + II. CABELL MAJOR + </h2> +</div> + + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</span> +it. By Niafer he is the father of the Melicent +of <i>Domnei</i>, the Dorothy la Désirée of <i>Jurgen</i>, +the Ettarre of <i>The Cream of the Jest</i>, +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 <i>The Cords of Vanity</i> +and <i>The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck</i>. 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 <i>The Certain +Hour</i>, 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 <i>Beyond Life</i>. +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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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, +<i>Les Gestes de Manuel</i> and <i>La Haulte Histoire +de Jurgen</i>, 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</span> +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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</span> +to deal with all happenings and with all our +fellows, whether they wear or lack the gaudy +name of heroism.”</p> + +<p>Thus cryptically Mr. Cabell suggests that +in <i>Figures of Earth</i>, 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. +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</span> +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 <i>Mundus +vult decipi</i>. 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>“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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>Thus in <i>Figures of Earth</i>, 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</span> +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 <i>Figures +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</span> +of Earth</i> 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!</p> + +<figure class="figcenter illowp100"> + <img class="w100" src="images/poictesme-map.jpg" id="map" alt="(Map of Poictesme)"> + <figcaption> +<p><i>James Branch Cabell fecit</i></p> + <div class="twocols"> +<div> +<p>Copied from the frontispiece of: <span class="smcap">Popular Tales of Poictesme</span>/​Supernatural, +Romantic and/Legendary/​Collected and Illustrated/​by John +Frederick Lewistam/​(<i>drawing</i>)/​London:/​Sampson Howe, Son, and +Marsden,/ 24, Ludgate Hill./​1855./​The Right of Translation is reserved./</p> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + +<div> +<p>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 <i>Popular Tales</i>,—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.</p> + +<p>John Bulmer’s marriage in the former Forest of Acaire, it is estimated, +took place near this map’s <span class="allsmcap">M</span> in the word “<span class="allsmcap">FORMER</span>.”</p> +</div> +</div> +</figcaption> +</figure> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</span> +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. <i>Jurgen</i> 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; +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</span> +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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</span></p> + +<p>This much, however, Jurgen owes to the author +of <i>Figures of Earth</i>: 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.</p> + +<p>Though the conclusion of <i>Jurgen</i> is devastating, +the book itself is a continual delight. +The rage of a few zealots has directed attention +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</span> +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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>It is the symbolism of <i>Jurgen</i> and <i>Figures +of Earth</i> 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</span> +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 <i>Jurgen</i> 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Domnei</i>, +loved by Perion de la Forêt. Partly because +<i>Domnei</i>, originally called <i>The Soul of Melicent</i>, +belongs to the period which produced +<i>Chivalry</i>, and partly because it pretends to be +a prose redaction of <i>Le Roman de Lusignan</i> +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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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. +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</span> +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 <i>Domnei</i> 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</span> +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 <i>Domnei</i>, which is lucid +and unvarying lovely.</p> + +<p>Connected remotely with the Jurgen saga +is <i>The High Place</i>, which in lucidity if not in +loveliness may be compared with <i>Domnei</i>. +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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</span> +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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</span> +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.”</p> + +<p>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. <i>The High Place</i> is as diabolistic as +<i>Domnei</i> 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</span> +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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</span> +because of this insane toplofty dreaming.”</p> + +<p>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.</p> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" aria-hidden="true"> +<div class="chapter"> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</span></p> + + + <h2 class="nobreak" id="III_SCHOLIA"> + III. SCHOLIA + </h2> +</div> + + +<p>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 +<i>Jurgen</i>. 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>The +Judging of Jurgen</i> and <i>Taboo</i>, are minor answers +to minor critics, and <i>Joseph Hergesheimer</i>, +while incidentally revealing, is but his +analysis of another writer’s art. <i>The Lineage +of Lichfield</i> 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</span> +to represent a truth of life. He himself has so +well set forth his scheme in the Epistle Dedicatory +to the <i>Lineage</i> that quotation is the best +comment.</p> + +<p>“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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</span> +subdividing the troubled and attritioned flowing +into more numerous streamlets....</p> + +<p>“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.</p> + +<p>“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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>“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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</span> +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.’”</p> + +<p>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 <i>vis comica</i> 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</span> +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.”</p> + +<p>The march of the Biography has at last, +thanks to the <i>Lineage</i>, become traceable. +Starting out with <i>Figures of Earth: A Comedy +of Appearances</i>, 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, <i>Domnei: A Comedy of Woman-Worship</i> +and <i>Chivalry: Dizain des Reines</i>. Returning +along its chronological path, the Biography +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</span> +studies the career of Manuel’s great +contemporary in <i>Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice</i>, +and from it proceeds, by what may be +called the line of gallantry, through <i>The Line +of Love: Dizain des Manages</i>, <i>The High +Place: A Comedy of Disenchantment</i>, and +<i>Gallantry: Dizain des Fêtes Galantes</i>, to the +middle of the eighteenth century. Turning +back once more, the Biography brings up the +line of poetry in <i>The Certain Hour: Dizain +des Poëtes</i>, <i>The Cords of Vanity: A Comedy +of Shirking</i>, to Mr. Cabell’s own book of +verse, <i>From the Hidden Way: Dizain des +Échos</i>. Finally come the other novels with an +American setting, <i>The Rivet in Grandfather’s +Neck: A Comedy of Limitations</i>, <i>The Eagle’s +Shadow: A Comedy of Purse-Strings</i>, and +<i>The Cream of the Jest: A Comedy of Evasions</i>, +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, <i>Beyond Life: Dizain des Demiurges</i>, +and the epilogue, <i>Straws and Prayer Books: +Dizain des Diversions</i>.</p> + +<p>Mr. Cabell includes his prologue and epilogue +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</span> +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 <i>Beyond +Life</i>, “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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</span> +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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</span> +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.”</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</span> +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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</span> +of distinction and clarity, and beauty and +symmetry, and tenderness and truth and urbanity.</p> + +<p>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. <i>Straws and Prayer-Books</i>, +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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</span> +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.”</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</span> +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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</span> +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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</span> +few inches. And yet, as I consider +these inadequate brown volumes, I suspect +that the word I am looking for is ‘gratitude.’”</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</span> +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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>Mr. Cabell is not, however, at his most poetical +in his verse. <i>From the Hidden Way</i> 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</span> +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, +<i>But Wisdom Is Justified of Her Children</i>:</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> + <div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">“Phyllida, spring wakes about us—</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Wakes to mock at us and flout us</div> + <div class="verse indent0">That so coldly do delay:</div> + <div class="verse indent0">When the very birds are mating,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Pray you, why should we be waiting—</div> + <div class="verse indent0">We that might be wed to-day?</div> + </div> +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</span> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">“<i>Life is brief</i>, the wise men tell us;—</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Even those dusty, musty fellows</div> + <div class="verse indent0">That have done with life,—and pass</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Where the wraith of Aristotle</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Hankers, vainly, for a bottle,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Youth and some frank Grecian lass.</div> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">“Ah, I warrant you;—and Zeno</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Would not reason, now, could he know</div> + <div class="verse indent0">One more chance to live and love:</div> + <div class="verse indent0">For, at best, the merry May-time</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Is a very fleeting playtime;—</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Why, then, waste an hour thereof?</div> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">“Plato, Solon, Periander,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Seneca, Anaximander,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Pyrrho, and Parmenides!</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Were one hour alone remaining</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Would ye spend it in attaining</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Learning, or to lips like these?</div> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">“Thus, I demonstrate by reason</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Now is our predestined season</div> + <div class="verse indent0">For the garnering of all bliss;</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Prudence is but long-faced folly;</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Cry a fig for melancholy!</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Seal the bargain with a kiss.”</div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</span> +richer and deeper rhythms Horvendile in <i>The +Cream of the Jest</i> is allowed to apostrophize +Ettarre, speaking perfectly of beautiful old +happenings in the language of a new rapture!</p> + +<p>“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....</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</span></p> + +<p>“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.”</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</span> +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. +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</span> +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.</p> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" aria-hidden="true"> +<div class="chapter"> + +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</span> + + + <h2 class="nobreak" id="THE_BOOKS_OF"> + THE BOOKS OF<br> + JAMES BRANCH CABELL + </h2> +</div> + +<blockquote> +<p>(<span class="smcap">Note</span>: 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.)</p> +</blockquote> + + +<h3><i>BIOGRAPHY</i></h3> + +<table class="autotable left"> +<tr> + <td class="tdlt">1.</td> + <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Beyond Life</span>: Dizain des Démiurges. New York. 1919.</td> +</tr> +<tr> + <td class="tdlt">2.</td> + <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Figures of Earth</span>: A Comedy of Appearances. New York. 1921.</td> +</tr> +<tr> + <td class="tdlt">3.</td> + <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Silver Stallion.</span> (<i>In Preparation.</i>)</td> +</tr> +<tr> + <td class="tdlt">4.</td> + <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Domnei</span>: 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.)</td> +</tr> +<tr> + <td class="tdlt">5.</td> + <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Chivalry</span>: Dizain des Reines. With an introduction by Burton Rascoe. New York. 1921. (Revised edition of a work originally published in 1909.)</td> +</tr> +<tr> + <td class="tdlt">6.</td> + <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Jurgen</span>: A Comedy of Justice. New York. 1919.</td> +</tr> +<tr> + <td class="tdlt">7.</td> + <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Line of Love</span>: Dizain des Mariages. <span class="pagenum" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</span>With an introduction by H. L. Mencken. New +York. 1921. (Revised edition of a work originally published in 1905.)</td> +</tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdlt">8.</td> + <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The High Place</span>: A Comedy of Disenchantment. New York. 1923.</td> +</tr> +<tr> + <td class="tdlt">9.</td> + <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Gallantry</span>: Dizain des Fêtes Galantes. With an introduction by Louis Untermeyer. New York. 1922. (Revised edition of a work originally published in 1907.)</td> +</tr> +<tr> + <td class="tdlt">10.</td> + <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Something About Eve.</span> (<i>In Preparation.</i>)</td> +</tr> +<tr> + <td class="tdlt">11.</td> + <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Certain Hour</span>: Dizain des Poëtes. New York. 1916.</td> +</tr> +<tr> + <td class="tdlt">12.</td> + <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Cords of Vanity</span>: A Comedy of Shirking. With an introduction by Wilson Follett. New York. 1920. (Revised edition of a work originally published in 1909.)</td> +</tr> +<tr> + <td class="tdlt">13.</td> + <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">From the Hidden Way</span>: Dizain des Échos. New York. 1924. (Revised edition of a work originally published in 1916.)</td> +</tr> +<tr> + <td class="tdlt">14.</td> + <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck</span>: A Comedy +of Limitations. New York. 1915.</td> +</tr> +<tr> + <td class="tdlt">15.</td> + <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Eagle’s Shadow</span>: A Comedy of Purse-Strings. +With an introduction by Edwin +Björkman. New York. 1923. (Revised edition +of a work originally published in 1904.)</td> +</tr> +<tr> + <td class="tdlt">16.</td> + <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Cream of the Jest</span>: A Comedy of Evasions. With an introduction by Harold Ward. New York. 1922. (Revised edition of a work originally published in 1917.)</td> +</tr> +<tr> + <td class="tdlt">17.</td> + <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Townsend of Lichfield.</span> (<i>In Preparation.</i>)</td> +</tr> +<tr> + <td class="tdlt">18.</td> + <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Straws and Prayer-Books</span>: Dizain des Diversions. New York. 1924.</td> +</tr> +</table> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</span></p> + + +<h3><i>SCHOLIA</i></h3> + +<table class="autotable left"> +<tr> + <td class="tdlt">1.</td> + <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Judging of Jurgen.</span> Chicago. 1920.</td> +</tr> +<tr> + <td class="tdlt">2.</td> + <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Taboo</span>: A Legend Retold from the Dirghic of Sævius Nicanor, with prolegomena, notes and a preliminary memoir. New York. 1921.</td> +</tr> +<tr> + <td class="tdlt">3.</td> + <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Joseph Hergesheimer</span>: An Essay in Interpretation. Chicago. 1921.</td> +</tr> +<tr> + <td class="tdlt">4.</td> + <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Jewel Merchants</span>: A Comedy in One Act. New York. 1921.</td> +</tr> +<tr> + <td class="tdlt">5.</td> + <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Lineage of Lichfield</span>: An Essay in Eugenics. New York. 1922.</td> +</tr> +</table> + + + +<h3><i>GENEALOGY</i></h3> + +<table class="autotable left"> +<tr> + <td class="tdlt">1.</td> + <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Branch of Abingdon.</span> Richmond. 1911.</td> +</tr> +<tr> + <td class="tdlt">2.</td> + <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Branchiana.</span> Richmond. 1907.</td> +</tr> +<tr> + <td class="tdlt">3.</td> + <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Majors and Their Marriages.</span> Richmond. +1915.</td> +</tr> +</table> + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> +<div class="transnote"> + <h2 class="nobreak" id="Transcribers_Notes"> + Transcriber’s Notes + </h2> +<p> + <span style="margin-left: 1.0em;">Minor typographical and formatting errors have been corrected.</span><br> + <span style="margin-left: 1.0em;">(Descriptive/Alt text) has been added to the illustration.</span> +</p> +</div> +</main> +<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79393 ***</div> +</body> +</html> diff --git a/79393-h/images/cover.jpg b/79393-h/images/cover.jpg Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..70be13a --- /dev/null +++ b/79393-h/images/cover.jpg diff --git a/79393-h/images/poictesme-map.jpg b/79393-h/images/poictesme-map.jpg Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..f4698bf --- /dev/null +++ b/79393-h/images/poictesme-map.jpg diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6c72794 --- /dev/null +++ b/LICENSE.txt @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +This book, including all associated images, markup, improvements, +metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be +in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES. + +Procedures for determining public domain status are described in +the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org. + +No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in +jurisdictions other than the United States. 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