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THE LINE OF LOVE
BY
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
1921
TO
ROBERT GAMBLE CABELL I
"He loved chivalrye, Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisye. And of his port as meek as is a mayde, He never yet no vileinye ne sayde In al his lyf, unto no maner wight. He was a verray parfit gentil knyght."
_Introduction_
The Cabell case belongs to comedy in the grand manner. For fifteen yearsor more the man wrote and wrote--good stuff, sound stuff, extremelyoriginal stuff, often superbly fine stuff--and yet no one in the whole ofthis vast and incomparable Republic arose to his merit--no one, that is,save a few encapsulated enthusiasts, chiefly somewhat dubious. It wouldbe difficult to imagine a first-rate artist cloaked in greater obscurity,even in the remotest lands of Ghengis Khan. The newspapers, reviewinghim, dismissed him with a sort of inspired ill-nature; the critics of amore austere kidney--the Paul Elmer Mores, Brander Matthewses, HamiltonWright Mabies, and other such brummagem dons--were utterly unaware ofhim. Then, of a sudden, the imbeciles who operate the Comstock Societyraided and suppressed his "Jurgen," and at once he was a made man. Oldbook-shops began to be ransacked for his romances and extravaganzas--manyof them stored, I daresay, as "picture-books," and under the name of theartist who illustrated them, Howard Pyle. And simultaneously, a greatgabble about him set up in the newspapers, and then in the literaryweeklies, and finally even in the learned reviews. An Englishman, HughWalpole, magnified the excitement with some startling _hochs_; a single_hoch_ from the Motherland brings down the professors like firemensliding down a pole. To-day every literate American has heard of Cabell,including even those presidents of women's clubs who lately confessedthat they had never heard of Lizette Woodworth Reese. More of his booksare sold in a week than used to be sold in a year. Every flapper in theland has read "Jurgen" behind the door; two-thirds of the grandmotherseast of the Mississippi have tried to borrow it from me. Solemn _PrivatDozenten_ lecture upon the author; he is invited to take to thechautauqua himself; if the donkeys who manage the National Institute ofArts and Letters were not afraid of his reply he would be offered itsgilt-edged ribbon, vice Sylvanus Cobb, deceased. And all because a fewpornographic old fellows thrust their ever-hopeful snouts into the man'stenth (or was it eleventh or twelfth?) book!
Certainly, the farce must appeal to Cabell himself--a sardonic mocker,not incapable of making himself a character in his own _revues_. But Idoubt that he enjoys the actual pawing that he has been getting--any morethan he resented the neglect that he got for so long. Very lately, in themidst of the carnival, he announced his own literary death and burial,and even preached a burlesque funeral sermon upon his life and times.Such an artist, by the very nature of his endeavors, must needs standabove all public-clapper-clawing, pro or con. He writes, not to pleasehis customers in general, nor even to please his partisans in particular,but to please himself. He is his own criterion, his own audience, his ownjudge and hangman. When he does bad work, he suffers for it as no holyclerk ever suffered from a gnawing conscience or Freudian suppressions;when he does good work he gets his pay in a form of joy that only artistsknow. One could no more think of him exposing himself to the stealthy,uneasy admiration of a women's club--he is a man of agreeable exterior,with handsome manners and an eye for this and that--than one couldimagine him taking to the stump for some political mountebank or gettingconverted at a camp-meeting. What moves such a man to write is theobscure, inner necessity that Joseph Conrad has told us of, and whatrewards him when he has done is his own searching and accurate judgment,his own pride and delight in a beautiful piece of work.
At once, I suppose, you visualize a somewhat smug fellow, loftilycomplacent and superior--in brief, the bogus artist of Greenwich Village,posturing in a pot-hat before a cellar full of visiting schoolmarms, alldreaming of being betrayed. If so, you see a ghost. It is the curse ofthe true artist that his work never stands before him in all its imaginedcompleteness--that he can never look at it without feeling an impulse toadd to it here or take away from it there--that the beautiful, to him, isnot a state of being, but an eternal becoming. Satisfaction, like thepraise of dolts, is the compensation of the aesthetic cheese-monger--thepopular novelist, the Broadway dramatist, the Massenet and Kipling, theMaeterlinck and Augustus Thomas. Cabell, in fact, is forever fussing overhis books, trying to make them one degree better. He rewrites almost aspertinaciously as Joseph Conrad, Henry James, or Brahms. Compare "Domnei"in its present state to "The Soul of Melicent," its first state, circa1913. The obvious change is the change in title, but of far moreimportance are a multitude of little changes--a phrase made more musical,a word moved from one place to another, some small banality tracked downand excised, a brilliant adjective inserted, the plan altered in smallways, the rhythm of it made more delicate and agreeable. Here, in "TheLine of Love," there is another curious example of his high capacity forrevision. It is not only that the book, once standing isolated, has beenbrought into the Cabellian canon, and so related to "Jurgen" and "Figuresof Earth" at one end, and to the tales of latter-day Virginia at theother; it is that the whole texture has been worked over, and the colorsmade more harmonious, and the inner life of the thing given a freshenergy. Once a flavor of the rococo hung about it; now it breathes andmoves. For Cabell knows a good deal more than he knew in 1905. He is anartist whose work shows constant progress toward the goals he aimsat--principally the goal of a perfect style. Content, with him, is alwayssecondary. He has ideas, and they are often of much charm andplausibility, but his main concern is with the manner of stating them. Itis surely not ideas that make "Jurgen" stand out so saliently from thedreadful prairie of modern American literature; it is the magnificentwriting that is visible on every page of it--writing apparently simpleand spontaneous, and yet extraordinarily cunning and painstaking. Thecurrent notoriety of "Jurgen" will pass. The Comstocks will turn to newimbecilities, and the followers of literary parades to new marvels. Butit will remain an author's book for many a year.
By author, of course, I mean artist--not mere artisan. It was certainlynot surprising to hear that Maurice Hewlett found "Jurgen" exasperating.So, too, there is exasperation in Richard Strauss for ploddingmusic-masters. Hewlett is simply a British Civil Servant turned author,which is not unsuggestive of an American Congressman turned philosopher.He has a pretty eye for color, and all the gusto that goes withbeefiness, but like all the men of his class and race and time he canthink only within the range of a few elemental ideas, chiefly of asentimental variety, and when he finds those ideas flouted he ishorrified. The bray, in fact, revealed the ass. It is Cabell'sskepticism that saves him from an Americanism as crushing as Hewlett'sBriticism, and so sets him free as an artist. Unhampered by a mission,happily ignorant of what is commended by all good men, disdainful of thepetty certainties of pedagogues and green-grocers, not caring a damnwhat becomes of the Republic, or the Family, or even snivelizationitself, he is at liberty to disport himself pleasantly with his nouns,verbs, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions and pronouns,arranging them with the same free hand, the same innocent joy, the samesuperb skill and discretion with which the late Jahveh arranged carbon,nitrogen, sulphur, hydrogen, oxygen and phosphorus in the sublime formof the human carcass. He, too, has his jokes. He knows the arch effectof a strange touch; his elaborate pedantries correspond almost exactlyto the hook noses, cock eyes, outstanding ears and undulating Adam'sapples which give so sinister and Rabelaisian a touch to the
humanscene. But in the main he sticks to more seemly materials and designs.His achievement, in fact, consists precisely in the success with whichhe gives those materials a striking newness, and gets a novel vitalityinto those designs. He takes the ancient and mouldy parts of speech--theliver and lights of harangues by Dr. Harding, of editorials in the NewYork _Times_, of "Science and Health, with a Key to the Scriptures," ofdepartment-store advertisements, of college yells, of chautauqualoratory, of smoke-room anecdote--and arranges them in mosaics thatglitter with an almost fabulous light. He knows where a red noun shouldgo, and where a peacock-blue verb, and where an adjective as darklypurple as a grape. He is an imagist in prose. You may like his story andyou may not like it, but if you don't like the way he tells it thenthere is something the matter with your ears. As for me, his experimentswith words caress me as I am caressed by the tunes of old JohannesBrahms. How simple it seems to manage them--and how infernally difficultit actually is!
H. L. MENCKEN.
_Baltimore, October 1st, 1921_.
The Line of Love; Dizain des Mariages Page 1
