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_.