"Such star-gazings show you indeed a bluer heaven and bigger stars
and a sun rising out of the night: yet neither Athos will reveal to
those who climb up to it, nor Olympos, so much extolled by the poets,
in what way God cares for the human race, nor make plain the nature
of virtue and of justice and temperance, unless the soul scans these
matters narrowly; and the soul, if it engages on the task, pure and
undefiled, will soar much higher than this summit of Caucasus."
_2._
_The Way of Wizardry_
§ 17
The literary artist plays, I had said, with common-sense.... But here I
harked back, compunctious. For only a moment since I had admitted that
"travel with Marco Polo to Cathay" was, after all, not the sole end of
our art: such romanticizing was merely one of the two avenues which,
equally, afforded escape from the tediousness of familiar material
surroundings. Yet it was the only avenue I was in train to recommend.
And so I paused here to reflect that in the Biography I had always
ignored the very real and solid claims of "realism."
Well, of that other method of escape, just indicated by my
concession of the possibilities of "travel with the Kennicotts to
Gopher Prairie"--of the type of diversion which is furnished by
the "realist,"--I could but admit the existence and the potency,
restricted, to be sure, to an unenvied class of minds; and must so
pass on, with no too obvious shuddering. "Realism" simply did not
divert me, that was all: and thus in my mind ranked with dancing and
The Literary Digest[1] and golf, as aberrancies of dullness that I
could profitably avoid without reprehending.... Indeed, it had been
my droll luck to have some pre-compository insight into the shaping
of, if not the most notable, certainly the wideliest talked about,
of this century's "realistic" novels; so that I still cherish a
peculiar leniency for these Kennicotts whom I first met in manuscript;
and I read their family history with a double sense of guilt. Here
is the marriage I suggested between the school-teacher and Ramie
Wutherspoon: and I recall, with qualms describable as second cousins
to remorse, that in a "realistic" novel no marriage can ever turn
out really happily. Here, murdered by me, I am afraid, in the middle
of another man's book, is the unoffending Scandinavian girl, Bea
Sorgenson, who, but for my lethal intervention, might perhaps have
thrived and have utilized the resources, and have educed the covert
virtues and nobilities of Gopher Prairie, overlooked by the less
practical heroine in chief; for this was to have been coincidently
the story of Bea's success and of Carol's failure as an exponent of
general social uplift: and would so have converted the whole affair
into a feminized and unreadable down-to-date version of the Idle and
Industrious Apprentices. I might, I reflect with a troubled spirit, I
might perhaps have here struck "realism" a shrewd blow by heartening
Lewis in his first suicidal plan.... To the other side, here is Carol's
technical virtue preserved unmarred, in the teeth of my lewd urgings:
for I was resolute to have her fall from grace, duly escorted by Eric
Valborg, and then to find that nothing whatever came of it. And here
is not one of the suggested remedies for the Middle West's regrettable
provincialism, of which, but for my protestations and scoffings upon
bended knees, the reader might have had full benefit. I recall rather
vaguely the nature, but vividly the great number, of these possible
remedies which Lewis, once, planned to suggest: and I guiltily
speculate if it would not have been the part of true kindliness, as
well as of æsthetic morality, to have encouraged the launching of that
avalanche of constructive criticism upon the unsuspecting reader of
_Main Street_. He, paralyzed, engulfed, demolished, would probably
not ever again, my conscience whispers, have opened another "realistic"
novel.... At all events, I too had been in this matter of "realism" at
least once, tinily, a _particeps criminis_. I confessed it, and
resumed my epilogue.
For all this seemed remarkably remote from my introductory remark
about Marco Polo. I had in mind, then, not _The Travels of Marco
Polo the Venetian_, but the small novel called _Messer Marco
Polo_ which Donn Byrne published now some years ago. And it is of
this fiction that I wish here to speak more specifically, because of my
personal involvement in its fortunes.
§ 18
Not often does one sustain the sense of having long awaited the book
which time and chance and a kindred desire in another's being have
combined to produce at last, and to make at last a vended commodity, as
easy now to come by as blotting-paper or bad whiskey. I had this sense
about _Messer Marco Polo_. It was, to me, the most delightful of
surprises, a bit of unanticipatable flotsam washed up from the wide
sunless sea of "realism." For we were, at just that time, being edified
rather remorselessly. Sinclair Lewis had, via the book to which I
have but now referred, detected several flaws in the cultural life of
the Middle West; John Dos Passos had discovered that the Wilson War
had been conducted not altogether as a pleasure trip for the private
soldier; and Upton Sinclair was in his customary low spirits. Nobody, I
think, could have looked for the coming of a _Messer Marco Polo_
through the auctorial welter,--whose susurrus was after all but a more
literate, vast "Ain't it awful, Mabel?"--among those fretful waves of
indignation over the dreariness of small-town life and the loneliness
of the artist in this unappreciative country, and over how terribly our
army swore in Flanders, and over the venality of our press and pulpit
and every other institution, and (lone lisper of good yet to come) over
the imminence of several more stupendous wars that would wipe out us
and all our sordid existence. And yet, through these gray floods of
portentous information (here neatly to round off my simile) floated
this carved spar of loveliness, with absolutely startling irrelevance.
That _Messer Marco Polo_ should have "happened" at this precise
moment seemed a small miracle so pleasure-giving that I hastily waived
all consideration as to the book's ultimate value. I only knew I had
joyed in the reading of it, somewhat as the partially starved might
rejoice in an unexpected windfall of savory food, without any need to
deliberate the viands' durability.
None the less does the tale, some years after that first keen greedy
gulping of its delights, and after a more leisured third reading,
remain a very fine and beautiful strange book. I sincerely hope you
are familiar with it: even if you are not, here is no need for me
to summarize this tale of how young Marco Polo, loitering through
youth's amiable adulteries in thirteenth century Venice, became
enamored, through report, of the Khan of Tartary's daughter, and of his
adventuring as he crossed Asia to win to her. It suffices to report
that here, in brief, we have a variant of the old high tale of Geoffrey
Rudel and his Far Princess, adorned with very vivid, curious ornament,
and brought to a dénouement no less sad but more soul-contenting.
Yet the essential thing about this book, I thought at my first reading,
was its prodigality in the transforming magic which--heaven knows, in
how few books!--quite incommunicably lends romantic beauty to this
or that not necessarily unusual or fertile theme, somewhat as sunset
tinges the wooded and the barren mountain with equal glamour. To me
this book at once exposed Donn Byrne as a practitioner of that rare and
unteachable wizardry without which one writes only words, and without
which the most carefully made sentences tend but to bury one another
like neat undertakers.
Technically, though, the construction of _Messer Marco Polo_ must
remain always to any novelist peculiarly interesting. To Mr. Byrne,
in Westchester, N.Y., "at the second check of the hunt, came the
message that a countryman and a clansman needed me," in the person of
Malachi Campbell of the Long Glen: and it is the old Celt who tells of
what, in a far-off golden yesterday, Marco Polo the Venetian saw and
encountered in Cataia. So then does Mr. Byrne set about his magicking,
to lure you from the prosaic to the wonderful, at last to leave you
contentedly cuddled in the lap of the incredible. He raises for you, to
begin, the milieu of his Westchester,--"the late winter grass, sparse,
scrofulous, the jerry-built bungalows, the lines of uncomely linen, the
blatant advertising boards." It is in, seen through, and continuously
colored by, this almost Gopher Prairean atmosphere that Malachi evokes
the old time and the great plenty of Ireland in the days of her
championship, and the gleaming world of tall Dermot and Granye of the
Bright Breasts and amorous fierce Maeve and Cuchulain in whose heroic
looks were love and fire; and evokes too, seen as if beyond and colored
by the glow of this Celtic wonderland, not merely the opulent sleek
life of the heyday and prime of Venice, "that for riches and treasures
was the wonder of the world"; since past even that, illuminate and
tinged by all, is evoked also the Venetian's notion of the inscrutable,
good-tempered, shining, evil East.
The tale, thus, seems a fantastic and gracious pageant, saddened
somehow by the known evanescence of its beauty, regarded through
three opalescent veils: or, rather, all that happens--just as we upon
reflection prefer to have had it happen,--in the Chinese jasmine
garden by the Lake of Cranes, is viewed through a rose-tinted gauze
of mediæval fancies seen through thin aureate Celtic mists observed
through the unhued but glazing window-panes of a Westchester, N.Y.,
drawing-room. I am by no means sure this curious tour de force was
worth performing; but I am unshakably convinced that Mr. Byrne "brings
it off" to a nicety.
Well, such was the romance which appeared some years ago without much
heralding, and which, when I first read it, had existed as a book for a
month or two without attracting any particular attention. And, reading,
I wondered. For this tale, in itself delightful--for a reason to which
I shall recur,--seemed to me to be told in words so "warm and colored,"
and so adroitly marshalled as to drive any honest-minded reader to the
confessional. I confessed, then, to being uncritically seduced by the
fact that Mr. Byrne, without apparent effort or shame, wrote perfectly
of beautiful happenings and seemed no whit afraid of elaborated
diction. I confessed to thinking that many of the episodes, perhaps
most notably the efforts of Marco Polo to convert to Christianity the
pagan girl who while he talks is merely conscious of the fact that she
loves the talker, have a queer and heart-wringing loveliness that is
well-nigh intolerable. And I confessed to finding the brief chapter
which bridges seventeen years, and winds up the story to "the true
rhythm of life," a small masterpiece of art and wisdom.
Above all, I now confess this is the only contemporary book that ever
I actually sought the privilege of reviewing. And when this task was
entrusted to me, by The Nation, I indited every word of _Messer Marco
Polo's_ encomium with a teasing faint suspicion that I was almost
certainly writing high-pitched nonsense which I would some day re-read
with embarrassment.
At all events, while the first rapture lasts, said I, let me profess
that I most cordially admire this story, and seem to find no praise too
exquisite. You, I advised potential readers, may derive from it a more
temperate pleasure, you may not even enjoy what my more sophisticated
juniors, I confess, are deprecating as "this pseudo-Celtic stuff":
and, in fact, the tale can hardly appeal to any considerable audience,
just now, since it "exposes" and "arraigns" nothing whatever. With
that I had no concern. It was merely my affair to tell everybody who
would listen that, to my finding, _Messer Marco Polo_ was a very
magically beautiful book.
§ 19
So I said all this in a review which I have here more or less exactly
iterated. I count myself to-day fortunate that this review achieved
a brief bewildering sort of fame. Virtuosi thought well of it, it was
quoted with approval by the literary editors of the leading papers
of Des Moines and Walla Walla and Mobile. It seemed, indeed, to be
reprinted illimitably in papers everywhere throughout the country, so
that The Nation's honorarium but visited me in transit to the bank
account of my clipping bureau. And the publishers reproduced this
review at full length in their advertisements, and reproduced it,
again virtually at full length, upon the novel's dust jacket.... I
could open no periodical wherein reading-matter was advertised without
encountering the proclamation, "James Branch Cabell says _Messer
Marco Polo_ is a very magically beautiful book." At first the phrase
read like a ukase, it had the full and final ring of an imperial
decree: later, with so constant repetition, it began to take on somehow
the flavor of a taunt, and I would read on a bit further, in the next
advertisement, hurriedly.... And people wrote to me about my pæans,
some to thank me for, as they put it, "discovering" the novel for them,
and some of course to rebuke me as the member of a petty clique of
assassins, atheists and tomb-defilers who combined thus shamelessly
to puff one another's books. And in fine there was rarely seen so
much bombilation over any one brief and not especially remarkable
criticism, whose only striking characteristics were the dubious ones
of enthusiasm and sincerity.
But this to-do had the merit of drawing people's attention to _Messer
Marco Polo_ and of provoking people to read this small novel. And
many thousands joyed in the reading of it, very much as I had done.
For here again was the true formula and the hero with whom mankind
peculiarly delights in imagination to identify itself,--the hero
who wanders footloose and at adventure through lands which are to
him and to the reader in nothing familiar. It is the formula of the
_Odyssey_, the formula of picaresque romance, and of all fairy
stories properly equipped with quests and an indomitable third prince.
It is of course precisely the one formula which cannot ever lose its
charm so long as men retain that frame of mind which seems coeval
with recorded history, of being bored by the routine of their daily
living.... And people also found in _Messer Marco Polo_ just the
quality I had ascribed to this book, the quality which I have vaguely
indicated as wizardry.
§ 20
Wizardry is, we know, one of the very oldest of human avocations....
Yet I recall how my friend Richard Harrowby, of Montevideo, once told
me that, to his mind, the most strange feature of wizardry was the
adroit consistency with which truth here has always been distorted or
concealed. For it stays an indisputable fact, as Harrowby pointed out,
that many persons still believe wizardry, in common with its sister
branch of witchcraft, to have been a delusion; and that the majority
of those who are wiser remain at considerable pains not actively to
dispute this quite common belief. The art of censorship had, in fact,
here achieved its oldest and capital triumph.
"Well, you," I admitted, "know more about such matters than I even
pretend to. So far as I can judge, your friends the wizards have
just emulated the family doctor and all business men, in their usual
endeavors, to prolong life and to change less rare materials into
gold. Their sagas, from the history of Geber to that of Cagliostro,
present--in so far, anyhow, as the tale is formally told,--mighty dull
and sordid reading: and each of these ancient fakirs would seem to have
got little enough out of the powers and privileges of the mage who, in
that jolly old sonorous phrase, holds in his left hand the branch of
the blossoming almond, and in his right hand the clavicles of Solomon."
To which Harrowby replied quite gravely: "Cabell, you tempt me. You
really should distinguish between wizards and sorcerers-- But, no!
I shall not voice any indiscretions. The day is not yet come, I
too concede, for wise persons to speak candidly about magic, though
already, I believe, the day dawns."
His faith in that day is perennial, and at times rather pathetic....
"For one thing, though," I urged him on, "I am ready to argue that,
just on material grounds, much of the fabulous wonder-working which our
long-headed fathers used to dismiss with a shrug, to-day is taking on a
different aspect; and that it becomes increasingly difficult to reject
as a popular delusion performances which our own senses note to the
right and left of us every day."
"And what," asked Harrowby, "imply these rolling periods?"
"Well, I mean that, when I was younger, no intelligent person for one
instant saw more than nonsense in the legend that Simon Magus had
ridden visibly through the air in a winged car or that Apollonius of
Tyana could be acquainted with remote events within a minute or two
after they happened. Such old wives' tales were outgrown superstitions,
and that was all there was to it. But to-day--"
"In this enlightened age," he suggested, with a small smile.
"--To-day, with the manufacture of aeroplanes ranking as a standardized
business, and with radios in every third home, these miracles, as
you see for yourself, do not sound a bit remarkable. To-day, with one
precaution, nobody need question that Pietro d'Apone actually did hold
imprisoned, each in his separate metal vase, seven spirits to instruct
him audibly in astronomy, alchemy and philosophy, in painting, physic,
poetry and music. The needful precaution is, of course, merely to call
these vases phonographs."
"I see, I see," said Harrowby, quietly. He was still smiling, for some
reason or another. "They were crystal vases, by the way. And they were
not phonographs."
"Anyhow," I answered, in the dismissory large manner of Mrs. Nickleby,
"the principle is the same. And beyond just such material suggestions
I, for one, would not venture--"
"I think," Harrowby stated, "that you will very soon hear others going
farther. Men begin to perceive, in a great many other ways, that for
some two thousand years has existed covertly a vast fund of knowledge
and philosophy and religious teaching, not necessarily at odds with the
more popular tenets of Christendom, but not sharing anything with these
tenets nor at all reverencing them."