When imperturbable the gentle moon
Glides above war and onslaught through the night,
When the sun burns magnificent at noon
On hate contriving horror by its light,
When man, for whom the stars were and the skies,
Turns beast to rend his fellow, fang and hoof
Shall we not think, with what ironic eyes
Nature must look on us and stand aloof?
But not alone the sun, the moon, the stars,
Shining unharmed above man’s folly move;
For us three beacons kindle one another
Which waver not with any wind of wars:
We love our children still, still them we love
Who gave us birth, and still we love each other.
_James Branch Cabell_
James Branch Cabell was born at Richmond, Virginia, April 14, 1879.
He taught French and Greek for two years at William and Mary College
(1896-7), worked in the pressroom of the Richmond _Times_ (1898),
was on the staff of the New York _Herald_ (1899-1901) and began
contributing to the magazines in 1902, writing over sixty short
stories as well as scattered essays, translations and papers on
historical and biographical subjects.
Although Cabell likes to describe himself as a genealogist, he is
the author of some of the most exquisite prose in contemporary
literature. But it is a prose that rises high above its own beauty
of style. In books like _The Certain Hour_ (1916), _The Cream of the
Jest_ (1917), _Jurgen_ (1919) and the poetry-crammed “comedy of
appearances,” _Figures of Earth_ (1921), the composite Cabell hero
emerges, triumphant in the midst of his defeats—the eternally
disillusioned, eternally hopeful Jurgen-Charteris-Kennaston: a
symbol of the human soul seeking some sort of finality, some
assurance in a world of illimitable perplexities.
Though Cabell is best known as a novelist, his books are liberally
dotted with original verses that do duty as chapter-headings,
mottoes, tail-pieces, interpolated songs and epilogues. A complete
volume of his verse, _From the Hidden Way_ (1916), bore the subtitle
“Being Seventy-Five Adaptations.” It purported to be paraphrases
from forgotten troubadours like Allesandro de Medici, Antoine Riczi,
Charles Garnier and half a dozen other obscure Parnassians. Cabell
even quoted the first lines of each of their poems in the original
Latin, French or Provençal. Even after the hoax was exposed, it was
difficult for most readers to believe that the entire
collection—names, references, first lines in the “original” and
all—were the creation of Cabell, the masquerader.
In _From the Hidden Way_, the romancer has added another story to
that gem-studded ivory tower in which Cabell lives and escapes the
modern world. Whether he echoes the mediæval ballata or the more
modern rondeau, roundel and sonnet, his is an artifice solidly
erected upon art.