_James Branch Cabell and the Escape to Poictesme_
Amidst the triumph of realism, James Branch Cabell’s romantic works
seem at first almost phenomenal in contemporary American fiction. They
are interesting as an attempt to restore the imaginative element to
the American novel. Although the romantic novel has never been extinct
in America, there had been a very thin line drawn between realism and
fiction. The growth of the realistic novel had been a natural reaction
against sentimentalism.[50]
As the puritanical tyranny became more strict and more imperious, the
distinction between the _genres_ was lost. Puritanism forbade the
painting of life as it is. Why should it be any more indulgent to
fiction? Based on a system of repression, it would seem _a priori_
destined to accord well with romanticism, which is of itself based on
statements contrary to fact and opposed to an exact and scientific
presentation of life--a presentation full of threats for the victims
of scruples, of floating anxiety and soul-fear. As I have shown, it
is mainly in W. D. Howells’ work that this confusion between realism
and fiction occurred. Howells, and the popular novelists after him, so
thoroughly confused the issues that it became impossible to distinguish
between the two. The American novelists, unencumbered with imaginative
powers, and moralists above all, tried to succeed in the impossible
task of giving to reality the semblance of fiction. The result of
their efforts is a bastard _genre_, still triumphant to-day in
countless magazines and in the “movies.” Fictitious realism would be an
appropriate definition for the greater number of writers who pander to
public taste in America.
The nearer we come to the present, the more we notice the inability
of American writers to imitate Hawthorne’s admirable realism in
psychology. It was James Branch Cabell’s ambition to restore
romanticism to its former rights, by ridding it of exaggerated realism
on the one hand, and of Puritanism on the other. From this point of
view his work is most significant. The attempt to give to American
literature a new romantic form of fiction could succeed only if
the ground were cleared. Cabell’s work presents itself in a double
aspect; first as a revolt against realism, secondly as an anti-Puritan
Declaration of Independence.
This effort was doubly heroic and it has been amply compensated for by
its success. On one hand, it was necessary to defend and maintain the
rights of imagination in a period of overflowing realism, and on the
other to claim for that very imagination all the rights usurped by the
realists in a Puritan country. That, then, is what the novelist has
been able to accomplish.
James Branch Cabell is of Southern origin. From an old local stock, he
was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1879. He was educated at William and
Mary College, where he taught Greek and French. Like most contemporary
American writers, he went through the journalistic mill and then began
doing literary work. He traveled in France, Ireland and England. Like
Anatole France, he is a genealogist and an antiquarian. His taste
for legends, for folklore and heraldry, turned him into an explorer
of archives. He began with short stories and poems, followed by two
or three novels whose scene is laid in his native land. Though his
first chronologically, these early books have been relegated to the
background by the author. He took them up again and revised them to
make them fit into the cycle of Dom Manuel and Jurgen, the most recent
form of epic cycles.
Here is at last an American novelist with a culture and a style of
his own, a conscious artist and a man of letters. Most of the new
American fiction writers are indifferent to style. They write badly.
They are often incorrect, trivial and obscure. Their last worry is the
attainment of the beautiful in writing.[51] Cabell, on the contrary, is
an adept at artistic writing, the only prose writer in American fiction
who cultivates style for its own sake. That alone would be enough to
make him original and interesting for the reader who has just plodded
drearily through the desert of “An American Tragedy,” for instance. He
was fed on the English classics, especially those of the Renaissance.
At times he is a deft imitator and parodist of Spenser, to whom he
owes much of his flowery and savory style, and a great admirer of
the English writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He
likes to call himself a classic, classic in style, though romantic in
inspiration. But, above all, his chief gift is imagination. At last we
are given a holiday from Theodore Dreiser’s triviality, Sinclair Lewis’
truculence and Anderson’s mystic stammering. Cabell’s ideal is harmony,
clearness and grace. He moves within fiction as if it were a natural
element and not as in a quarry where he is painfully hewing out stones.
In an epoch when American writers hitched their wagons more and more to
matter-of-fact subjects, he cut the moorings and gave free play to his
fancy.
Everything in his books is fictitious, the subject, the style, the
characters, the costumes and the settings. He has invented a new
folklore, a new mythology. He has discovered unknown countries, the
land of Poictesme, a fabulous kingdom well devised to puzzle us as it
is located, on a map of Cabell’s making, halfway between reality and
dream. As fictitious as Spenser’s, Shakespeare’s or Honoré d’Urfé’s
cosmography, the land of Poictesme, where Dom Manuel and Jurgen deport
themselves in sadness or glee, is none the less presented to us as a
real country somewhere in Southern France. Its half fictitious, half
real boundaries are, on the north, England of Arthurian times, on
the south, the vague Asia Minor of Guy de Lusignan and Melissinda,
princess of Tripoli. The novelist has been kind enough to design for
the ignorant a map of Dom Manuel’s domains. According to the map,
the land of Poictesme stretches along the Mediterranean, between
Aigues-Mortes and Cette. Its physical frontiers are, to the west, the
city of Nîmes, and to the east, the town of Castres in Languedoc. Let
the professional geographer challenge James Branch Cabell’s topography
if he wants. Poictesme includes under fictitious names the foot-hills
of the Cévennes, where we may recognize the haunts and “high places”
of Florian de Puysange. The author was not content with inventing a
new land. He crowned a dynasty, which until then was little known to
historians. He made up a genealogy which I shall not follow in all of
its ramifications, and which stretches from Sorrisonde in Poictesme to
Lichfield, Virginia (U. S. A.). A genealogist by taste and profession,
the author has taken visible pleasure in linking together all his
novels with the chain of a pedigree beginning with Dom Manuel the Great
and ending with Felix Kennaston. In consequence his work presents
itself like a huge _Comédie humaine_ or a new Rougon-Macquart epic
issuing forth from an ancestry of mixed French, English and American
blood, a startling and most romantic alliance. History and legend are
fused and confused in an amazing manner in Cabell’s books. He revived
medieval chivalry in a modern travesty full of piquant anachronisms.[52]
It took all the erudition of a modern writer and the most refined humor
to brew folklore, legend and history together, and to embroil geography
and history with such an irreverent finesse. In the cycle of Dom Manuel
and Jurgen, the gods of ancient mythology, the saints of the Christian
calendar, the fairies, the magicians and the demons of the Fable, joust
pell-mell as in a masquerade. Cabell went even farther. Not content
with parodying legends he invented new ones to which his erudition
succeeded in giving all the signs of verisimilitude.
* * * * *
The inhabitants of Poictesme are medieval in garb and modern in
psychology. They went to school with Rabelais, Voltaire and Anatole
France. Here is at last an American writer who can think freely and who
does not ignore _gaie science_. Cabell’s philosophy is as attractive
and fanciful as the land of Poictesme but there is an acumen of truth
under his fancy. It is the philosophy of a man of imagination who
cannot digest truth without many bits of salt. It has been propounded
_ex professo_ in two suggestive books, “Beyond Life,” and “Straws and
Prayer-books.” Cabell does not lead a direct attack against Puritanism,
but he uses backhand Parthian arrows which are none the less deadly. He
leaves his visiting card in passing through Philistia and the Kingdom
of Mother Dunce. He speaks freely and little respectfully of Demagogy,
and makes frequent and transparent allusions to current events.
This poet is a satirist. His warfare against Philistinism has taken the
form of a defense of fiction.
He considers fiction as a semi-divine impulse, or what he calls a
_demi-urge_. In the invention of fiction he sees the starting point
of all human activities. According to him, civilization proceeded
from this impulse which makes us wish to dream and to create a world
more beautiful, more just, than, or at least different from, the one
in which we are living. In the name of this romantic instinct, he hit
simultaneously the Puritans and the realists, the former because they
fear and try to suppress fiction and imagination, the latter because
they limit them and their rights. This is an interesting reaction and a
timely one. It should be remembered by all those among us who feel that
realism has almost overdone itself and that a revival of imagination
would best serve the aims of art. Is not the coupling of the words
_realism_ and _fiction_ a contradiction in terms? Cabell suggests
that we take the novel back to its heroic and adventurous origins. He
refuses to believe in realism, in the first place because the romantic
instinct causes men to dislike life as it is, and to dream of it as
being different in an effort to escape from it. Furthermore, according
to him, the essential process of realistic fiction is in obvious
contradiction with facts.
“You assume,” says Cabell to the veritists, “that any literature
worthy of the name must be faithful to reality and reproduce it
without any further increment. Yet you refuse to life one of its most
outstanding characteristics, the taste, the deep need of conceiving
itself different from what it is. Are you being _real_ and scientific
in grasping and reproducing only physical facts, in a world where
everything, even the reception of a letter or the arrangement of a
dinner, is subjective? There are no facts without an emotion around
them, no circumstances without a personal preference expressed on their
account. What is true of life is still truer of literature. Realism
in writing cannot exist and never existed. Take the most hardened and
the most convinced of all realists, Gustave Flaubert. His Emma Bovary
is minutely observed and that is just why she is unreal, as unreal as
was Flaubert’s perception of the outside world. The realists assume
the task of presenting to us, in a so-called objective and detached
manner the incidents of life as seen from the intellectual angle, but
there are no such incidents. Realism as a literary method is unreal.
Whilst trying to present our contemporaries as they are, it is far
from resembling real life. Life is more charitable than the realists.
It presents things and people to us as we wish that they might be.
Fiction is faithful to life because it does not accept it as it is. It
looks upon it with grave misgivings, as an extremely commonplace and
worthless event. Beauty can only be attained by an elimination of the
trivial. Life is such a bore! Imagination alone can give a value to the
world. The solution of the problem of life is not understanding, but
escape, and the more romantic the escape the better. Not to live, but
to dream, is the question. Fiction is the only source of those blessed
illusions which Ibsen called _vital lies_ and which he thought it his
duty as a realist to challenge.”
It would be worth while to dwell on this original defense of fiction.
As I have attempted to show in the different chapters of this book,
romantic evasion plays a primordial part in the American novel to-day.
It is the natural result of the inhibitions which torture the Puritans.
Like the characters of Hawthorne, Dreiser, Anderson and Sinclair
Lewis, those of Cabell are runaways. The escape from moral and social
tyranny forms the chief theme of all his books. They contain a long
list of evasions. Dom Manuel, count of Poictesme, suffered from a fit
of self-conceit which caused him to spend his time giving life to
those figures of earth which he made in his own image. But, little by
little, an obscure instinct took him away from his selfish occupation.
He withdrew from his mistresses, his sorcerers, his family, and
finally tired of the government of his country. He gladly mounted
the black charger of Death and went to see if he could find at last
a true picture of himself in the water of the Styx. Perion de la
Forest, Demetrios and Ashaverus, took a similar flight in “Domnei.”
The three lovers of Melisande lost their faith in love and deserted
their dame to marry Freedom. Florian de Puysange, in “The High Place,”
obtained the favors of Melior, a fairy, at the peril of his life, but
he soon declared that all amorous gratifications were idle and died
disenchanted. The most famous evasion, since the days of Latude, was
that of Jurgen, the pawnbroker turned emperor and pope, and who finally
evades heaven and hell in order to return to his shrew and to his
pawnshop. Evasion through passion, or evasion through dreams, the one
bitter, the other a sham but a peace-bringer,--what else is there in
life, except routine?
In spite of their disillusionments and their romantic failures,
Cabell’s heroes never repented their waking dreams. They would do it
all over again, if they could. They fail in their search but the thrill
was worth the trouble of the journey. They hug only ghosts in the dark,
but they went through the dark, and enjoyed the trip.
The author of “Jurgen” connects this craving for fiction with a
primordial human instinct which he considers as being the same force
which actuates all life. The world in which his people move is not
a world for the Puritans. Everything in it is sensually refined and
steeped in voluptuousness. The Jurgens, the Dom Manuels and the
Florian de Puysanges are little troubled with their consciences. Does
not Jurgen go so far as to make of conscience an attribute of the
damned? Cabell opposes to the grim universe of the Puritans the land
of Courtesy, and what he calls the Utopia of Gallantry. This Cabellian
country resembles Rabelais’ Abbey of Thélème whose door flashed with
the radiant motto “Do just as you please.” In this delectable country,
we are told:
The wisest may well unbend occasionally, to give conscience a
half-holiday, and procure a passport to this delectable land. True,
there are, as always in travel, the custom-house regulations to
be observed: in this realm exist no conscientious scruples, no
probity, no religion, no pompous notions about altruism, not any
sacred tie of any sort, and such impedimenta will be confiscated at
the frontier. We are entering a territory wherein ethics and ideals
are equally contraband.... It is a carefree land, where life,
untrammeled by the restrictions of moral codes, untoward weather,
limited incomes or apprehension of the police, has no legitimate
object save the pursuit of progress and refinement.
Let us now enter Cocaigne.
The suzerain lord of the estate is the great sire Dom Manuel, count
of Poictesme. We find him enthroned on the threshold of the Cabellian
saga, in a book called “Figures of Earth.” It is difficult to summarize
Cabell’s novels. In epic fashion they are composed of a long string of
episodes and cantos. Before he became the lord of Poictesme, Manuel
began life as a plain herder of pigs. In his leisure moments he used
to model little clay figures. One day a stranger passed by and admired
Manuel’s handsome countenance. How could such a fine fellow be a pig
herder? Let him arise and march to adventure. Upon a mountain, guarded
by monsters, the magician Miramon Lluagor holds the princess Gisele
captive. She awaits a Saint George to free her and by loving her to
inherit the treasures of Miramon. So Manuel departs like another
Siegfried. He climbs the mountain, frees Gisele and ... does not marry
her. At the foot of the enchanted castle he had met the mysterious
Niafer who helped him to fight Miramon’s enchantments. He marries
Niafer instead of the beautiful princess. It is not easy to say why,
for Cabell’s allegories are often obscure, and I leave the trouble to
pick their precise meaning to scholars. Did the author want to suggest
that between what Emerson called _first_ and _second_ thoughts, between
_tuitions_ and _intuitions_, a wise man will “think twice” and choose
the latter, and so did Manuel? Whatever may be the case, Dom Manuel has
now started on his crusade.
We follow him in wonderland among the most pleasant gambols of the
writer’s fancy. After being delayed at the foot of the mountain by
Miramon’s enchantments, they come to the magic castle on the top. And
then the tale tells how Manuel freed princess Gisele; how he gave her
up for his good companion Niafer; how selfish Manuel surrendered Niafer
to the rider of the Pale Horse; how he made Figures of Earth; how, in
order to give them life, he conquered the magician Freydis; how he
missed Niafer; how he brought her back to life with the help of the
Head of Misery; how he won back the kingdom of Poictesme; how he had a
daughter named Melisande; how he escaped the witchcraft of Alienor and
Freydis; and how he finally surrendered himself to Grandfather Death
who took him over to the river Styx on his black charger, that he might
see his real image in the water.
The novelist never allows humor and parody to conceal his serious
purpose. Dom Manuel is a most dramatic and suggestive figure, half
fictitious, half real. He impersonates Cabell’s views on the conflict
between life and dreams. The last chapters of “Figures of Earth” recall
some of the most beautiful medieval allegories. I quote as an example
the scene where Grandfather Death calls on Dom Manuel to take him away
to the subterranean world:
“It is strange,” says Dom Manuel, “to think that everything I am
seeing was mine a moment since, and it is queer too to think of
what a famous fellow was this Manuel the Redeemer, and of the fine
things he did, and it is appalling to wonder if all the other
applauded heroes of mankind are like him. Oh, certainly, Count
Manuel’s achievements were notable and such as were not known
anywhere before, and men will talk of them for a long while. Yet,
looking back--now that this famous Count of Poictesme means less
to me--why I seem to see only the strivings of an ape reft of his
tail, and grown rusty at climbing, who has reeled blunderingly from
mystery to mystery, with pathetic makeshifts, not understanding
anything, greedy in all desires, and always honeycombed with
poltroonery. So in a secret place his youth was put away in
exchange for a prize that was hardly worth the having; and the fine
geas which his mother laid upon him was exchanged for the common
geas of what seems expected.”
“Such notions,” replied Grandfather Death, “are entertained by many
of you humans in the lightheaded time of youth. Then common sense
arises like a light, formless cloud about your doings, and you half
forget these notions. Then I bring darkness.”
“In that quiet dark, my friend, it may be I shall again become
the Manuel whom I remember, and I may get back again my own
undemonstrable ideas, in place of the ideas of other persons, to
entertain me in that darkness. So let us be going thither.”
“Very willingly,” said Grandfather Death; and he started toward the
door.
“Now pardon me,” says Manuel, “but in Poictesme the Count of
Poictesme goes first in any company. It may seem to you an affair
of no importance, but nowadays I concede the strength as well as
the foolishness of my accustomed habits, and all my life long I
have gone first. So do you ride a little way behind me, friend, and
carry this shroud and napkin, till I have need of them.”
Then the Count armed and departed from Storisende, riding on the
black horse, in gold armor, and carrying before him his shield
whereon was blazoned the rampant and bridled stallion of Poictesme
and the motto _Mundus vult decipi_. Behind him was Grandfather
Death on the white horse, carrying the Count’s grave-clothes in a
neat bundle. They rode toward the sunset, and against the yellow
sunset each figure showed jet black.
Dom Manuel is dead, but we shall meet his lineage in every hero of the
cycle. The head of the Poictesme dynasty will outlive himself in his
descendants. His daughter Melicent or Melisande, is the heroine of
the second part of the saga called “Domnei,” or “the Cult of Ladies.”
This is the most perfect collection of stories ever written by the
author. It is once more a fairy tale, a very fine legend embellished
with ironic traits. Rémy de Gourmont would have called it a masterpiece
of dissociation. The American novelist, like Anatole France, has the
talent of being at the same time ironic and naïve, and of dressing a
disillusioned wisdom in fairy garb. “Domnei,” like “Figures of Earth,”
tells of a great love ending in disappointment.
Perion de la Forest is in love with Melisande. Both travel to far-away
countries in pursuit of adventure and they fight many fights in pagan
lands. Are these lands Byzantine or Saracenic; are we in Constantinople
or in Palestine; in the Middle Ages or during the Renaissance? Who can
tell? Perion and Melisande recall to mind Geoffroy Rudel and Melissinde
in Edmond Rostand’s “Princesse Lointaine,” but “Domnei” ends in
sarcasms and not in romantic embraces. It is the story of three men,
a Christian, a pagan, and a Jew, all in love with the same woman, or
rather with the idea which they form of her. Each of them voluntarily
wrecks his chances of happiness as soon as he sees that he can attain
it. This again seems paradoxical and a little confusing. Had not the
author decisively taken the side of romance against everything else
in the world? Why should the romantic impulse thus abandon the three
lovers? And why should Cabell weave these beautiful legends just to
take pleasure in ruining them with his own hands? Doubtless evasion
is better than repression, but the artificial heavens created by the
author’s imagination are somewhat too attractive to be rejected with
such light-heartedness. Yet with what zest these heroes of his run away
from them! But let us return to Melisande and Perion de la Forest.
They have been made prisoners by the pagan consul Demetrios. Perion
is free, but Demetrios keeps Melisande. She bought Perion’s freedom
by giving herself to the pagan. She is to be Demetrios’ captive for
many long years. This Demetrios is not an altogether disagreeable
pagan. He really loves Melisande who tries her best to tame him. But
one day he tears himself away from her. Through a sudden intuition
he feels the uselessness of love-making, and goes away. Melisande
had a third lover, the Jew Ashaverus; he too is caught for a while by
the allurement of the Eternal Feminine, and he too, in the end, is
a runaway from love. Perion has won over his rivals. After a bloody
encounter he finds Melisande still faithful to his memory and both
try to love each other according to courtly etiquette. But, alas! how
little reality resembles dreams! Perion has found Melisande, but the
Faraway Princess has vanished to make place for the rather commonplace
woman whom Perion marries, because if you cannot have the entire ideal
you may just as well be content with a few crumbs. “Domnei” preaches
the same lesson that we find in “Jurgen.”
“Domnei” is a book deep with meaning and very artistic in form. The
three lovers of Melisande make a very dramatic group. The narrative
never lags and spread through it are such charming bits of fantasy as
the following, which deals with Melisande’s gardens in a singing style,
mellow as the sound of a lute:
Indeed the Women’s Garden on this morning lacked nothing to delight
each sense. Its hedges were of flowering jessamine; its walkways
were spread with new sawdust tinged with crocus and vermilion,
and with mica beaten into a powder: and the place was rich in
fruit-bearing trees and welling waters. The sun shone, and birds
chaunted merrily to the right hand and to the left. Dog-headed
apes, sacred to the moon, were chattering in the trees. There was
a statue in this place, carved out of black stone, in the likeness
of a woman, having enamelled eyes and three rows of breasts, with
the lower part of her body confined in a sheath; and upon the
glistening pedestal of this statue chameleons sunned themselves
with distended throats. Around about Melicent were nodding
armaments of roses and gillyflowers and narcissi and amaranths,
and many violets and white lilies, and other flowers of all kinds
and colors.
To Melicent the world seemed very lovely. Here was a world created
by Eternal Love that people might serve love in it not at all
unworthily. Here were anguishes to be endured, and time and human
frailty and temporal hardship--all for love to mock at; a sea or
two for love to sever, a man-made law or so for love to override,
a shallow wisdom for love to deny, in exultance that these ills at
most were only corporal hindrance. This done, you have earned the
right to come--come hand-in-hand--to heaven whose liege-lord was
Eternal Love.
Thus Melicent, who knew that Perion loved her.
She sat on a stone bench. She combed her golden hair, not heeding
the more coarse gray hairs which here and there were apparent
nowadays. A peacock came, and watched her with bright, hard, small
eyes; and he craned his glistening neck this way and that way, as
though he were wondering at this other shining and gaily colored
creature, who seemed so happy.
She did not dare to think of seeing Perion again. Instead, she made
because of him a little song, which had not any words, so that it
is not possible here to retail this song.
Thus Melicent, who knew that Perion loved her.
I now come to “Jurgen.” It is Cabell’s great book, published in
1919; it was censored almost immediately and eagerly sought by book
collectors. Jurgen was born in Poictesme in the time of Dom Manuel, but
the scene of the novel is laid in dreamland. It recalls the voyages of
Saint Brendan and Dante. I shall try my best to disentangle the real
from the fanciful in the book. “Jurgen” is the story of a youth of
Poictesme by that name. He was full of ambition. Everybody predicted
for him a career of great deeds and amorous exploits. Instead, Jurgen
settled down; he married dame Lisa, a matter-of-fact woman, and he
opened a pawnshop. One day dame Lisa disappeared and as he missed his
domestic comfort Jurgen made up his mind to go after her. He came to a
cave on Amneran Heath and here the fantastic story begins.
It appears that dame Lisa was a witch, and Jurgen suspected the Devil
as being her kidnaper. Jurgen enters the cave and for several hundred
pages we follow him in the subterranean world. The author’s imagination
winds round and round. It is impossible to follow it in all its
meanderings. Led by the centaur Nessus, Jurgen travels in the nether
world. He is taken back to his heyday and, younger by twenty years,
he soon forgets dame Lisa to explore the land of the dead on his own
account. Loved by witches, vampires and queens, he marries a Hamadryad
and flirts with Helen of Troy. From escapade to escapade he finally
finds himself in hell, where he meets the shadow of his father. He
interviews Koshchei, the master “who made things as they are.” Quiet at
last after so many marvelous adventures, he comes back to his Penelope,
to his slippers and his hearth.
“Jurgen” caused a scandal in America. It reads like the sixth book of
the “Æneid” adapted by Casanova. Eroticism dominates the book, but it
is so mingled with humor that it is inoffensive. There are lengthy
digressions, but the interest never flags. Jurgen is a most sympathetic
rogue. It is hard to see him surrender to the commonplace at the end of
his long journey, like an ordinary Carol Kennicott or a George Babbitt.
From being emperor and pope he descends to a pawnbroker again without
much ado. But let us judge Jurgen on his faith and not on his works.
When he finds dame Lisa he cannot believe that he ever dreamed. But
dream he did for a very long while and he will never forget it. Jurgen
had dreamed enough to find out that, after all, there was not such
great difference between dreaming and staying awake. In wonderland he
met with the same petty passions, cares and prejudices which mark this
world. Why go so far for so little? And yet, romance is better than
routine and who knows if Jurgen will not start again?
The allegories in “Jurgen” are most suggestive, in particular those
which deal with Jurgen’s voyage to hell. Neither Voltaire nor Anatole
France could have surpassed Cabell in conveying a moral lesson through
a piquant anecdote. Jurgen has nothing of the Puritan in him. He is as
heathenish as Don Juan. He never loses his good humor or his temper
amidst his thousand and one adventures. His wit resembles Figaro’s.
The conclusion of the book, where Jurgen interviews both Satan and
Koshchei, is a pert satire on human frailty.
Cabell’s poetic irony displayed itself best in “Jurgen.” As a
representative man, Jurgen embodies in his person both Don Quixote and
Sancho Panza. The romantic instincts are checked by his robust and
plebeian common sense, which he cannot help venting amidst his most
wonderful adventures. A Yankee afoot on Mount Parnassus, he may very
well be introduced, such as he is, in the episode where he launches on
his subterranean expedition astride the centaur Nessus:
The cave stretched straight forward, and downward, and at the
far end was a glow of light. Jurgen went on and on, and so came
presently to a centaur: and this surprised him not a little,
because Jurgen knew that centaurs were imaginary creatures.
Certainly they were curious to look at: for here was the body of a
fine bay horse, and rising from its shoulders, the sunburnt body of
a young fellow who regarded Jurgen with grave and not unfriendly
eyes. The Centaur was lying beside a fire of cedar and juniper
wood: near him was a platter containing a liquid with which he was
anointing his hoofs. This stuff, as the Centaur rubbed it in with
his fingers, turned the appearance of his hoofs to gold.
“Hail, friend,” says Jurgen, “if you be the work of God.”
“Your protasis is not good Greek,” observed the Centaur, “because
in Hellas we did not make such reservations. Besides, it is not so
much my origin as my destination which concerns you.”
“Well, friend, and whither are you going?”
“To the garden between dawn and sunrise, Jurgen.”
“Surely, now, but that is a fine name for a garden! and it is a
place I would take joy in seeing.”
“Up upon my back, Jurgen, and I will take you thither,” says the
Centaur, and heaved to his feet. Then said the Centaur, when the
pawnbroker hesitated: “Because, as you must understand, there is
no other way. For this garden does not exist, and never did exist,
in what men humorously called real life; so that of course only
imaginary creatures such as I can enter it.”
“That sounds very reasonable,” Jurgen estimated: “but as it
happens, I am looking for my wife, whom I suspect to have been
carried off by a devil, poor fellow!”
And Jurgen began to explain to the Centaur what had befallen.
The Centaur laughed. “It may be for that reason I am here. There
is, in any event, only one remedy in this matter. Above all
devils--and above all gods, they tell me, but certainly above all
centaurs--is the power of Koshchei the Deathless, who made things
as they are.”
“It is not always wholesome,” Jurgen submitted, “to speak of
Koshchei. It seems especially undesirable in a dark place like
this.”
“None the less, I suspect it is to him you must go for justice.”
“I would prefer not doing that,” said Jurgen, with unaffected
candor.
“You have my sympathy: but there is no question of preference
where Koshchei is concerned. Do you think, for example, that I am
frowzing in this underground place by my own choice? And knew your
name by accident?”
Jurgen was frightened a little. “Well, well! but it is usually the
deuce and all, this doing of the manly thing. How, then, can I come
to Koshchei?”
“Roundabout,” says the Centaur. “There is never any other way.”
“And is the road to this garden roundabout?”
“Oh, very much so, inasmuch as it circumvents both destiny and
common sense.”
“Needs must, then,” says Jurgen: “at all events, I am willing to
taste any drink once.”
“You will be chilled, though, traveling as you are. For you and I
are going a queer way, in search of justice, over the grave of a
dream and through the malice of time. So you had best put on this
shirt over your other clothing.”
“Indeed it is a fine snug shining garment, with curious figures on
it. I accept such raiment gladly. And whom shall I be thanking for
this kindness, now?”
“My name,” said the Centaur, “is Nessus.”
“Well, then, friend Nessus, I am at your service.” And in a trice
Jurgen was on the Centaur’s back, and the two of them had somehow
come out of the cave, and were crossing Amneran Heath. So they
passed into a wooded place, where the light of sunset yet lingered,
rather unaccountably. Now the Centaur went westward. And now about
the pawnbroker’s shoulders and upon his breast and over his lean
arms glittered like a rainbow the many-colored shirt of Nessus.
James Branch Cabell took a flight into _gaie science_ when he wrote
“Jurgen.” The world, according to him, is shaped by our thoughts. In
the course of his earthly, infernal and celestial pilgrimage, Jurgen
passed through several superimposed spheres: first that of reality from
which he escaped, then that of fancy and dreams, where he lingered a
long while. This upper world is not purely ideal, nor is it entirely
fictitious. It is still human, too human, as Nietzsche said. It is made
of the same stuff as our dreams. Above and below there are heaven and
hell. If I understand “Jurgen” aright, neither the one nor the other
is entirely unreal. Heaven and hell are man-made fictions. Hell is the
creation of our pride and of our scruples. When he meets his father in
the burning pit, Jurgen asks the demons why they torment the old man.
They tell him that they cannot help it because he insists on being
wicked and getting an appropriate punishment for his sins. Heaven also
is filled with our pride. It is the abode of our highest expectations,
a tribute of Koshchei to our high idea of ourselves. The only real
universe is that of Koshchei. It is the world of things as they are,
and Jurgen does not dwell very long in it. He needs his earthly
comfort, his warm flannels and his carefully prepared soup. So he falls
back into the world of common sense, the only one where the majority of
us mortals can live, because _gaie science_ is out of the common reach.
Once more the author seems to deny us the right to enter the land of
fiction, which, however, he shows us as the only interesting one to
live in. Let us see if the rôle which he assigned to art in his general
outlook of things cannot help us to clear the contradiction.