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.)