_By_ JAMES BRANCH CABELL
To my taste, _Beyond Life_, an all-night soliloquy put into the
mouth of the author's _alter ego_ Charteris, is the most satisfying
of Mr. Cabell's books. Its point of view is deftly sharpened, its
manner is urbane and charming, without posture or allegorical
pseudo-romantics. From this book I have taken the two closing
sections, which form a beautiful and significant whole.
James Branch Cabell, born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1879, graduated
from William and Mary College in 1898. He had some newspaper
experience in Richmond and on the New York _Herald_, and began
publishing in 1904. Not until 1915, until Mr. McBride, the New York
publisher, and his untiring literary assistant, Mr. Guy Holt (to
whom much of Cabell's appreciation is due), began their work, did
critics begin to take him at all seriously. Since that time Mr.
Cabell's reputation has been enormously enhanced by the idiotic
suppression of his novel _Jurgen_. The Cabell cult has been almost
too active in zeal, but there can be no doubt of his very real and
refreshing imaginative talent.
I ask of literature precisely those things of which I feel the lack in
my own life. I appeal for charity, and implore that literature afford me
what I cannot come by in myself....
For I want distinction for that existence which ought to be peculiarly
mine, among my innumerable fellows who swarm about earth like ants. Yet
which one of us is noticeably, or can be appreciably different, in this
throng of human ephemeræ and all their millions and inestimable millions
of millions of predecessors and oncoming progeny? And even though one
mote may transiently appear exceptional, the distinction of those who
in their heydays are "great" personages--much as the Emperor of Lilliput
overtopped his subjects by the breadth of Captain Gulliver's nail--must
suffer loss with time, and must dwindle continuously, until at most the
man's recorded name remains here and there in sundry pedants' libraries.
There were how many dynasties of Pharaohs, each one of whom was absolute
lord of the known world, and is to-day forgotten? Among the countless
popes who one by one were adored as the regent of Heaven upon earth, how
many persons can to-day distinguish? and does not time breed emperors
and czars and presidents as plentiful as blackberries, and as little
thought of when their season is out? For there is no perpetuity in human
endeavor: we strut upon a quicksand: and all that any man may do for
good or ill is presently forgotten, because it does not matter. I wail
to a familiar tune, of course, in this lament for the evanescence of
human grandeur and the perishable renown of kings. And indeed to the
statement that imperial Cæsar is turned to clay and Mizraim now cures
wounds, and that in short Queen Anne is dead, we may agree lightly
enough; for it is, after all, a matter of no personal concern: but how
hard it is to concede that the banker and the rector and the
traffic-officer, to whom we more immediately defer, and we ourselves,
and the little gold heads of our children, may be of no importance,
either!... In art it may so happen that the thing which a man makes
endures to be misunderstood and gabbled over: yet it is not the man
himself. We retain the _Iliad_, but oblivion has swallowed Homer so deep
that many question if he ever existed at all.... So we pass as a cloud
of gnats, where I want to live and be thought of, if only by myself, as
a distinguishable entity. And such distinction is impossible in the long
progress of suns, whereby in thought to separate the personality of any
one man from all others that have lived, becomes a task to stagger
Omniscience....
I want my life, the only life of which I am assured, to have symmetry
or, in default of that, at least to acquire some clarity. Surely it is
not asking very much to wish that my personal conduct be intelligible to
me! Yet it is forbidden to know for what purpose this universe was
intended, to what end it was set a-going, or why I am here, or even what
I had preferably do while here. It vaguely seems to me that I am
expected to perform an allotted task, but as to what it is I have no
notion.... And indeed, what have I done hitherto, in the years behind
me? There are some books to show as increment, as something which was
not anywhere before I made it, and which even in bulk will replace my
buried body, so that my life will be to mankind no loss materially. But
the course of my life, when I look back, is as orderless as a trickle of
water that is diverted and guided by every pebble and crevice and
grass-root it encounters. I seem to have done nothing with
pre-meditation, but rather, to have had things done to me. And for all
the rest of my life, as I know now, I shall have to shave every morning
in order to be ready for no more than this!... I have attempted to make
the best of my material circumstances always; nor do I see to-day how
any widely varying course could have been wiser or even feasible: but
material things have nothing to do with that life which moves in me.
Why, then, should they direct and heighten and provoke and curb every
action of life? It is against the tyranny of matter I would
rebel--against life's absolute need of food, and books, and fire, and
clothing, and flesh, to touch and to inhabit, lest life perish.... No,
all that which I do here or refrain from doing lacks clarity, nor can I
detect any symmetry anywhere, such as living would assuredly display, I
think, if my progress were directed by any particular motive.... It is
all a muddling through, somehow, without any recognizable goal in view,
and there is no explanation of the scuffle tendered or anywhere
procurable. It merely seems that to go on living has become with me a
habit....
And I want beauty in my life. I have seen beauty in a sunset and in the
spring woods and in the eyes of divers women, but now these happy
accidents of light and color no longer thrill me. And I want beauty in
my life itself, rather than in such chances as befall it. It seems to me
that many actions of my life were beautiful, very long ago, when I was
young in an evanished world of friendly girls, who were all more lovely
than any girl is nowadays. For women now are merely more or less
good-looking, and as I know, their looks when at their best have been
painstakingly enhanced and edited.... But I would like this life which
moves and yearns in me, to be able itself to attain to comeliness,
though but in transitory performance. The life of a butterfly, for
example, is just a graceful gesture: and yet, in that its loveliness is
complete and perfectly rounded in itself, I envy this bright flicker
through existence. And the nearest I can come to my ideal is
punctiliously to pay my bills, be polite to my wife, and contribute to
deserving charities: and the program does not seem, somehow, quite
adequate. There are my books, I know; and there is beauty "embalmed and
treasured up" in many pages of my books, and in the books of other
persons, too, which I may read at will: but this desire inborn in me is
not to be satiated by making marks upon paper, nor by deciphering
them.... In short, I am enamored of that flawless beauty of which all
poets have perturbedly divined the existence somewhere, and which life
as men know it simply does not afford nor anywhere foresee....
And tenderness, too--but does that appear a mawkish thing to desiderate
in life? Well, to my finding human beings do not like one another.
Indeed, why should they, being rational creatures? All babies have a
temporary lien on tenderness, of course: and therefrom children too
receive a dwindling income, although on looking back, you will recollect
that your childhood was upon the whole a lonesome and much put-upon
period. But all grown persons ineffably distrust one another.... In
courtship, I grant you, there is a passing aberration which often mimics
tenderness, sometimes as the result of honest delusion, but more
frequently as an ambuscade in the endless struggle between man and
woman. Married people are not ever tender with each other, you will
notice: if they are mutually civil it is much: and physical contacts
apart, their relation is that of a very moderate intimacy. My own wife,
at all events, I find an unfailing mystery, a Sphinx whose secrets I
assume to be not worth knowing: and, as I am mildly thankful to narrate,
she knows very little about me, and evinces as to my affairs no morbid
interest. That is not to assert that if I were ill she would not nurse
me through any imaginable contagion, nor that if she were drowning I
would not plunge in after her, whatever my delinquencies at swimming:
what I mean is that, pending such high crises, we tolerate each other
amicably, and never think of doing more.... And from our blood-kin we
grow apart inevitably. Their lives and their interests are no longer the
same as ours, and when we meet it is with conscious reservations and
much manufactured talk. Besides, they know things about us which we
resent.... And with the rest of my fellows, I find that convention
orders all our dealings, even with children, and we do and say what
seems more or less expected. And I know that we distrust one another all
the while, and instinctively conceal or misrepresent our actual thoughts
and emotions when there is no very apparent need.... Personally, I do
not like human beings because I am not aware, upon the whole, of any
generally distributed qualities which entitle them as a race to
admiration and affection. But toward people in books--such as Mrs.
Millamant, and Helen of Troy, and Bella Wilfer, and Mélusine, and
Beatrix Esmond--I may intelligently overflow with tenderness and
caressing words, in part because they deserve it, and in part because I
know they will not suspect me of being "queer" or of having ulterior
motives....
And I very often wish that I could know the truth about just any one
circumstance connected with my life.... Is the phantasmagoria of sound
and noise and color really passing or is it all an illusion here in my
brain? How do you know that you are not dreaming me, for instance? In
your conceded dreams, I am sure, you must invent and see and listen to
persons who for the while seem quite as real to you as I do now. As I
do, you observe, I say! and what thing is it to which I so glibly refer
as I? If you will try to form a notion of yourself, of the sort of a
something that you suspect to inhabit and partially to control your
flesh and blood body, you will encounter a walking bundle of
superfluities: and when you mentally have put aside the extraneous
things--your garments and your members and your body, and your acquired
habits and your appetites and your inherited traits and your prejudices,
and all other appurtenances which considered separately you recognize to
be no integral part of you,--there seems to remain in those
pearl-colored brain-cells, wherein is your ultimate lair, very little
save a faculty for receiving sensations, of which you know the larger
portion to be illusory. And surely, to be just a very gullible
consciousness provisionally existing among inexplicable mysteries, is
not an enviable plight. And yet this life--to which I cling
tenaciously--comes to no more. Meanwhile I hear men talk about "the
truth"; and they even wager handsome sums upon their knowledge of it:
but I align myself with "jesting Pilate," and echo the forlorn query
that recorded time has left unanswered....
Then, last of all, I desiderate urbanity. I believe this is the rarest
quality in the world. Indeed, it probably does not exist anywhere. A
really urbane person--a mortal open-minded and affable to conviction of
his own shortcomings and errors, and unguided in anything by irrational
blind prejudices--could not but in a world of men and women be regarded
as a monster. We are all of us, as if by instinct, intolerant of that
which is unfamiliar: we resent its impudence: and very much the same
principle which prompts small boys to jeer at a straw-hat out of season
induces their elders to send missionaries to the heathen. The history of
the progress of the human race is but the picaresque romance of
intolerance, a narrative of how--what is it Milton says?--"truth never
came into the world but, like a bastard, to the ignominy of him that
brought her forth, till time hath washed and salted the infant, declared
her legitimate, and churched the father of his young Minerva." And I,
who prattle to you, very candidly confess that I have no patience with
other people's ideas unless they coincide with mine: for if the fellow
be demonstrably wrong I am fretted by his stupidity, and if his notion
seem more nearly right than mine I am infuriated.... Yet I wish I could
acquire urbanity, very much as I would like to have wings. For in
default of it, I cannot even manage to be civil to that piteous thing
called human nature, or to view its parasites, whether they be
politicians or clergymen or popular authors, with one-half the
commiseration which the shifts they are put to, quite certainly, would
rouse in the urbane....
So I in point of fact desire of literature, just as you guessed,
precisely those things of which I most poignantly and most constantly
feel the lack in my own life. And it is that which romance affords her
postulants. The philtres of romance are brewed to free us from this
unsatisfying life that is calendared by fiscal years, and to contrive a
less disastrous elusion of our own personalities than many seek
dispersedly in drink and drugs and lust and fanaticism, and sometimes in
death. For, beset by his own rationality, the normal man is goaded to
evade the strictures of his normal life, upon the incontestable ground
that it is a stupid and unlovely routine; and to escape likewise from
his own personality, which bores him quite as much as it does his
associates. So he hurtles into these very various roads from reality,
precisely as a goaded sheep flees without notice of what lies ahead....
And romance tricks him, but not to his harm. For, be it remembered that
man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams. Romance it is
undoubtedly who whispers to every man that life is not a blind and
aimless business, not all a hopeless waste and confusion; and that his
existence is a pageant (appreciatively observed by divine spectators),
and that he is strong and excellent and wise: and to romance he listens,
willing and thrice willing to be cheated by the honeyed fiction. The
things of which romance assures him are very far from true: yet it is
solely by believing himself a creature but little lower than the
cherubim that man has by interminable small degrees become, upon the
whole, distinctly superior to the chimpanzee: so that, however
extravagant may seem these flattering whispers to-day, they were
immeasurably more remote from veracity when men first began to listen to
their sugared susurrus, and steadily the discrepancy lessens. To-day
these things seem quite as preposterous to calm consideration as did
flying yesterday: and so, to the Gradgrindians, romance appears to
discourse foolishly, and incurs the common fate of prophets: for it is
about to-morrow and about the day after to-morrow, that romance is
talking, by means of parables. And all the while man plays the ape to
fairer and yet fairer dreams, and practice strengthens him at
mimickry....
To what does the whole business tend?--why, how in heaven's name should
I know? We can but be content to note that all goes forward, toward
something.... It may be that we are nocturnal creatures perturbed by
rumors of a dawn which comes inevitably, as prologue to a day wherein we
and our children have no part whatever. It may be that when our
arboreal propositus descended from his palm-tree and began to walk
upright about the earth, his progeny were forthwith committed to a
journey in which to-day is only a way-station. Yet I prefer to take it
that we are components of an unfinished world, and that we are but as
seething atoms which ferment toward its making, if merely because man as
he now exists can hardly be the finished product of any Creator whom one
could very heartily revere. We are being made into something quite
unpredictable, I imagine: and through the purging and the smelting, we
are sustained by an instinctive knowledge that we are being made into
something better. For this we know, quite incommunicably, and yet as
surely as we know that we will to have it thus.
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," which
we call romance. But when we note how visibly it sways all life we
perceive that we are talking about God.
THE FISH REPORTER
_By_ ROBERT CORTES HOLLIDAY
This informal commentary on the picturesque humors of trade
journalism is typical of Mr. Holliday's great skill in capturing
the actual vibration of urban life. He has something of George
Gissing's taste for the actuality of city scenes and characters,
with rather more pungent idiosyncrasy in his manner of
self-expression. Careful observers of the art of writing will see
how much shrewd skill there is in the apparently unstudied manner.
One of Mr. Holliday's favorite discussions on the art of writing is
a phrase of Booth Tarkington's--"How to get the ink out of it." In
other words, how to strip away mere literary and conscious
adornment, and to get down to a translucent portraiture of life
itself in its actual contour and profile.
We are told that Mr. Holliday, in his native Indianapolis (where he
was born in 1880), was a champion bicycle rider at the age of
sixteen. That triumph, however, was not permanently satisfying, for
he came to New York in 1899 to study art; lived for a while,
precariously, as an illustrator; worked for several years as a
bookseller in Charles Scribner's retail store, and passed through
all sorts of curious jobs on Grub Street, among others book
reviewer on the _Tribune_ and _Times_. He was editor of _The
Bookman_ after that magazine was taken over by the George H. Doran
Company, and retired to the genteel dignity of "contributing
editor" in 1920, to obtain leisure for more writing of his own.
Mr. Holliday has the genuine gift of the personal essay, mellow,
fluent, and pleasantly eccentric. His _Walking-Stick Papers_,
Broome Street Straws, Turns about Town and _Peeps at People_ have
that charming rambling humor that descends to him from his masters
in this art, Hazlitt and Thackeray. When Mr. Holliday was racking
his wits for a title for _Men and Books and Cities_ (that odd
Borrovian chronicle of his mind, body and digestion on tour across
the continent) I suggested _The Odyssey of an Oddity_. He
deprecated this; but I still think it would have been a good title,
because strictly true.
Men of genius, blown by the winds of chance, have been, now and then,
mariners, bar-keeps, schoolmasters, soldiers, politicians, clergymen,
and what not. And from these pursuits have they sucked the essence of
yarns and in the setting of these activities found a flavor to stir and
to charm hearts untold. Now, it is a thousand pities that no man of
genius has ever been a fish reporter. Thus has the world lost great
literary treasure, as it is highly probable that there is not under the
sun any prospect so filled with the scents and colors of story as that
presented by the commerce in fish.
Take whale oil. Take the funny old buildings on Front Street, out of
paintings, I declare, by Howard Pyle, where the large merchants in whale
oil are. Take salt fish. Do you know the oldest salt-fish house in
America, down by Coenties Slip? Ah! you should. The ghost of old Long
John Silver, I suspect, smokes an occasional pipe in that old place. And
many are the times I've seen the slim shade of young Jim Hawkins come
running out. Take Labrador cod for export to the Mediterranean lands or
to Porto Rico via New York. Take herrings brought to this port from
Iceland, from Holland, and from Scotland; mackerel from Ireland, from
the Magdalen Islands, and from Cape Breton; crabmeat from Japan;
fishballs from Scandinavia; sardines from Norway and from France; caviar
from Russia; shrimp which comes from Florida, Mississippi, and Georgia,
or salmon from Alaska, and Puget Sound, and the Columbia River.
Take the obituaries of fishermen. "In his prime, it is said, there was
not a better skipper in the Gloucester fishing fleet." Take disasters to
schooners, smacks, and trawlers. "The crew were landed, but lost all
their belongings." New vessels, sales, etc. "The sealing schooner
_Tillie B._, whose career in the South Seas is well known, is reported
to have been sold to a moving-picture firm." Sponges from the Caribbean
Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. "To most people, familiar only with the
sponges of the shops, the animal as it comes from the sea would be
rather unrecognizable." Why, take anything you please! It is such stuff
as stories are. And as you eat your fish from the store how little do
you reck of the glamor of what you are doing!
However, as it seems to me unlikely that a man of genius will be a fish
reporter shortly I will myself do the best I can to paint the tapestry
of the scenes of his calling. The advertisement in the newspaper read:
"Wanted--Reporter for weekly trade paper." Many called, but I was
chosen. Though, doubtless, no man living knew less about fish than I.
The news stands are each like a fair, so laden are they with magazines
in bright colors. It would seem almost as if there were a different
magazine for every few hundred and seven-tenth person, as the
statistics put these matters. And yet, it seems, there is a vast, a very
vast, periodical literature of which we, that is, magazine readers in
general, know nothing whatever. There is, for one, that fine, old,
standard publication, Barrel and Box, devoted to the subjects and the
interests of the coopering industry; there is too, _The Dried Fruit
Packer and Western Canner_, as alert a magazine as one could wish--in
its kind; and from the home of classic American literature comes _The
New England Tradesman and Grocer_. And so on. At the place alone where
we went to press twenty-seven trade journals were printed every week,
from one for butchers to one for bankers.
_The Fish Industries Gazette_--Ah, yes! For some reason not clear
(though it is an engaging thing, I think) the word "gazette" is the
great word among the titles of trade journals. There are _The Jewellers'
Gazette_ and _The Women's Wear Gazette_ and _The Poulterers' Gazette_
(of London), and _The Maritime Gazette_ (of Halifax), and other gazettes
quite without number. This word "gazette" makes its appeal, too,
curiously enough, to those who christen country papers; and trade
journals have much of the intimate charm of country papers. The "trade"
in each case is a kind of neighborly community, separated in its parts
by space, but joined in unity of sympathy. "Personals" are a vital
feature of trade papers. "Walter Conner, who for some time has conducted
a bakery and fish market at Hudson, N. Y., has removed to Fort Edward,
leaving his brother Ed in charge at the Hudson place of business."
_The Fish Industries Gazette_, as I say, was one of several in its
field, in friendly rivalry with _The Oyster Trade and Fisherman_ and
_The Pacific Fisheries_. It comprised two departments: the fresh fish
and oyster department, and myself. I was, as an editorial announcement
said at the beginning of my tenure of office, a "reorganization of our
salt, smoked, and pickled fish department." The delectable, mellow
spirit of the country paper, so removed from the crash and whirr of
metropolitan journalism, rested in this, too, that upon the _Gazette_ I
did practically everything on the paper except the linotyping. Reporter,
editorial writer, exchange editor, make-up man, proof-reader,
correspondent, advertisement solicitor, was I.