These paragraphs, dignified by the revised edition of _Gallantry_ and
spuriously designated An Introduction, are nothing more than a series of
notes and haphazard discoveries in preparation of a thesis. That thesis,
if it is ever written, will bear a title something academically like _The
Psychogenesis of a Poet; or Cabell the Masquerader_. For it is in this
guise--sometimes self-declared, sometimes self-concealed, but always as the
persistent visionary--that the author of some of the finest prose of our
day has given us the key with which (to lapse into the jargon of verse) he
has unlocked his heart.
On the technical side alone, it is easy to establish Cabell's poetic
standing. There are, first of all, the quantity of original rhymes that
are scattered through the dozen volumes which Cabell has latterly (and
significantly) classified as Biography. Besides these interjections which
do duty as mottoes, chapter-headings, tailpieces, dedications, interludes
and sometimes relevant songs, there is the volume of seventy-five
"adaptations" in verse, _From the Hidden Way_, published in 1916. Here
Cabell, even in his most natural rôle, declines to show his face and amuses
himself with a new set of masks labelled Alessandro de Medici, Antoine
Riczi, Nicolas de Caen, Theodore Passerat and other fabulous minnesingers
whose verses were created only in the mind of Cabell. It has pleased him to
confuse others besides the erudite reviewer of the _Boston Transcript_ by
quoting the first lines of the non-existent originals in Latin, Italian,
Provençal--thus making his skilful ballades, sestinas and the less mediæval
narratives part of a remarkably elaborate and altogether successful hoax.
And, as this masquerade of obscure Parnassians betrayed its creator,
Cabell--impelled by some fantastic reticence--sought for more subtle
makeshifts to hide the poet. The unwritten thesis, plunging abruptly into
the realm of analytical psychology, will detail the steps Cabell has taken,
as a result of early associative disappointments, to repress or at least
to disguise, the poet in himself--and it will disclose how he has failed.
It will burrow through the latest of his works and exhume his half-buried
experiments in rhyme, assonance and polyphony. This part of the paper will
examine _Jurgen_ and call attention to the distorted sonnet printed as a
prose soliloquy on page 97 of that exquisite and ironic volume. It will
pass to the subsequent _Figures of Earth_ and, after showing how the
greater gravity of this volume is accompanied by a greater profusion of
poetry _per se_ it will unravel the scheme of Cabell's fifteen essays in
what might be called contrapuntal prose. It will unscramble all the rhymes
screened in Manuel's monologue beginning on page 294, quote the metrical
innovations with rhymed vowels on page 60, tabulate the hexameters that
leap from the solidly set paragraphs and rearrange the brilliant fooling
that opens the chapter "Magic of the Image Makers." This last is in itself
so felicitous a composite of verse and criticism--a passage incredibly
overlooked by the most meticulous of Cabell's glossarians--that it deserves
a paper for itself. For here, set down prosaically as "the unfinished Rune
of the Blackbirds" are four distinct parodies--including two insidious
burlesques of Browning and Swinburne--on a theme which is familiar to us
to-day in _les mots justes_ of Mother Goose. "It is," explains Freydis,
after the thaumaturgists have finished, "an experimental incantation in
that it is a bit of unfinished magic for which the proper words have not
yet been found: but between now and a while they will be stumbled on, and
then this rune will live perpetually." And thus the poet, speaking through
the mouth-piece of Freydis, discourses on the power of words and, in one of
Cabell's most eloquent chapters, crystallizes that high mood, presenting
the case for poetry as it has been pleaded by few of her most fervid
advocates.
Here the thesis will stop quoting and argue its main contention from
another angle. It will consider the author in a larger and less technical
sense: disclosing his characters, his settings, his plots, even the entire
genealogical plan of his works, to be the design of a poet rather than a
novelist. The persons of Cabell's imagination move to no haphazard strains;
they create their own music. And, like a set of modulated _motifs_, they
combine to form a richer and more sonorous pattern. With its interrelation
of figures and interweaving of themes, the Cabellian "Biography" assumes
the solidity and shapeliness of a fugue, a composition in which all the
voices speak with equal precision and recurring clarity.
And what, the diagnostician may inquire, of the characters themselves? They
are, it will be answered, motivated by pity and irony; the tolerant humor,
the sympathetic and not too distant regard of their Olympian designer
agitate them so sensitively that we seldom see what strings are twitched.
These puppets seem to act of their own conviction--possibly because their
director is careful not to have too many convictions of his own. It may
have been pointed out before this that there are no undeviating villains
in his masques and, as many an indignant reviewer has expostulated, few
untarnished heroes. Cabell's, it will be perceived, is a frankly pagan
poetry. It has no texts with which to discipline beauty; it lacks moral
fervor; it pretends to no divinity of dogmatism. The image-maker is willing
to let his creatures ape their living models by fluctuating between
shifting conventions and contradictory ideals; he leaves to a more positive
Author the dubious pleasure of drawing a daily line between vice and
virtue. If Cabell pleads at all, he pleads with us not to repudiate a
Villon or a Marlowe while we are reviling the imperfect man in a perfect
poet. "What is man, that his welfare be considered?" questions Cabell,
paraphrasing Scripture, "an ape who chatters to himself of kinship with the
archangels while filthily he digs for groundnuts.... Yet do I perceive that
this same man is a maimed god.... He is under penalty condemned to compute
eternity with false weights and to estimate infinity with a yardstick--and
he very often does it."
This, the thesis will contend, is the only possible attitude to the mingled
apathy and abandon of existence--and it is, in fine, the poetic attitude.
Romantic it is, without question, and I imagine Cabell would be the last
to cavil at the implication. For, mocked by a contemptuous silence gnawing
beneath the howling energy of life, what else is there for the poet but the
search for some miracle of belief, some assurance in a world of illimitable
perplexities? It is the wish to attain this dream which is more real than
reality that guides the entire Cabell _epos_--"and it is this will that
stirs in us to have the creatures of earth and the affairs of earth, not as
they are, but as 'they ought to be.'"
Such a romantic vision, which concludes that glowing testament, _Beyond
Life_, is the shining thread that binds the latest of Cabell's novels
with the earliest of his short stories. It is, in effect, one tale he is
telling, a tale in which Poictesme and the more local Lichfield are, for
all their topographical dissimilarities, the same place, and all his people
interchangeable symbols of the changeless desires of men. Whether the
allegory is told in the terms of _Gallantry_ with its perfumed lights, its
deliberate artifice and its technique of badinage, or presented in the
more high-flying mood of _Chivalry_ with its ready passions and readier
rhetoric, it prefigures the subsequent pageant in which the victories might
so easily be mistaken for defeats. In this procession, amid a singularly
ordered riot of color, the figure of man moves, none too confidently but
with stirring fortitude, to an unrealized end. Here, stumbling through the
mazes of a code, in the habiliments of Ormskirk or de Soyecourt, he passes
from the adventures of the mind (Kennaston in _The Cream of the Jest_,
Charteris in _Beyond Life_) through the adventures of the flesh (_Jurgen_)
to the darker adventures of the spirit (Manuel in _Figures of Earth_).
Even this _Gallantry_, the most candidly superficial of Cabell's works, is
alive with a vigor of imagination and irony. It is not without significance
that the motto on the new title-page is: "Half in masquerade, playing the
drawing-room or garden comedy of life, these persons have upon them, not
less than the landscape among the accidents of which they group themselves,
a certain light that we should seek for in vain upon anything real."
The genealogically inclined will be happy to discover that _Gallantry_,
for all its revulsion from reality, deals with the perpetuated life of
Manuel in a strangely altered _milieu_. The rest of us will be quicker to
comprehend how subtly this volume takes its peculiar place in its author's
record of struggling dreams, how, beneath, a surface covered with political
finery and sentimental bric-à-brac, the quest goes on, stubbornly and often
stupidly, in a forgotten world made suddenly animate and as real as our
own.
And this, the thesis will conclude, is because Cabell is not as much a
masquerader as he imagines himself to be. None but a visionary could wear
so constantly upon his sleeve the desire "to write perfectly of beautiful
happenings." None but the poet, shaken with the strength of his vision,
could cry to-day, "It is only by preserving faith in human dreams that
we may, after all, perhaps some day make them come true." For poetry, to
which all literature aspires, is not the shadow of reality but the image of
perfection, the light of disembodied beauty toward which creation gropes.
And that poetic consciousness is the key to the complex and half-concealed
art of James Branch Cabell.