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+.”
]