by Hugh Walpole
“Beyond Life” directs this gospel especially towards literature, and in a series of statements, Charteris, the author’s mouthpiece, examining the art of Marlowe, Congreve, Sheridan, Dickens, Thackeray, brings us finally to our own day. In his indictment of modern realism he goes, as the author is delightfully aware, beyond the bounds of truth and plausibility, and the later chapters of the book may be read side by side with Frank Swinnerton’s indictment of romance in his study of Robert Louis Stevenson. Here is a piquant study in contrasts. But Mr. Cabell knows well enough that his Charteris is going too far; a delightful irony pervades the book and involves Charteris himself in its atmosphere. In his final pages he is concerned perhaps too closely with ephemeral literature. Need Mr. Charteris disturb himself so deeply over the popularities of Mr. Harold Bell Wright and Mr. Zane Grey? Moreover, towards the last, the crabbed and irritable personality of the little jaundiced author separates itself quite deliberately from its creator. Charteris, in these determinate paragraphs, is the villain of “The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck.” We are aware of his earlier history and are uncomfortable in contemplation of him.
“Romance,” we are told here, “is an expression of an attitude which views life with profound distrust, as a business of exceeding dulness, and of very little worth.”
That was never Mr. Cabell’s judgment, and we cannot but feel that at the last it is the author rather than Charteris that we would prefer to hear.
And, after all, it is in the final paragraph Mr. Cabell himself to whom we are listening:
“We are being made into something quite unpredictable, I imagine; and through the purging and 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.
“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.”
After finishing “Beyond Life,” the reader should at once move on to “The Cream of the Jest” to observe how precept “may be turned into practice.” This work, although “Jurgen” is more entertaining, more various, more complete, and more humorous, is the best summary of Mr. Cabell’s art that we have.
In scheme it amplifies the machinery of “Chivalry” and “The Line of Love” and reminds us of Wells’s “Time Machine” and many another less able fairy story. Kennaston, the author, whom we have met before, from whose works Mr. Cabell has frequently quoted, adequately but unromantically married, finds a piece of metal that transports him, through dreams, back into certain existences. The metal is the Nessus shirt of “Jurgen,” the talisman that Mr. Cabell must always carry with him in order that dreams may begin as soon as possible.
In this story there is nothing very striking and, as always in Mr. Cabell’s books, the story is most certainly “not the thing.” What is the thing here is Kennaston’s passionate, poignant longing for the active realizing of his fugitive dreams. Again and again, as I have said before, this longing has been Mr. Cabell’s theme, but he has never in any other work expressed it so clearly, so dramatically, so beautifully, so truthfully.
From the merely technical point of view the little cameos of vanished moments in past civilizations are admirable. So often this has been attempted, so often the attempt has failed. How vivid for instance such a vignette as this:
“Again Kennaston stood alone before a tall window, made up of many lozenge-shaped panes of clear glass set in lead framework. He had put aside one of the two great curtains — of a very fine stuff like gauze, stitched over with transparent, glittering beetle-wings and embroidered with tiny seed pearls — which hung before this window.
“Snow covered the expanse of housetops without, and the sky without was glorious with chill stars. That white city belonged to him, he knew, with a host of other cities. He was the strongest of kings. People dreaded him, he knew; and he wondered why anyone should esteem a frail weakling such as he to be formidable. The hand of this great king — his own hand — that held aside the curtain before him, was shrivelled and colorless as lambs’ wool. It was like a horrible bird claw.”
Kennaston, his hero, thus pursues through the centuries his dreams and so resolves himself as another manifestation of the eternal Cabell figure.
The physical trappings do not matter. In himself he is less than nothing, in his purpose everything. Of him the author says: “He could face no decision without dodging; no temptation without compromise; and he lied, as if by instinct, at the threatened approach of discomfort or of his fellows’ disapproval: yet devils, men, and seraphim would conspire in vain in any effort to dissuade him from his self-elected purpose.”
So when we come to Mr. Cabell’s final and at present most famous figure, Jurgen, we find him to be a dirty little paunch-bellied pawnbroker of the Middle Ages, tied to a shrew of a wife, of a niggardly, cowardly nature.
Jurgen’s history has been accused of many ancestries. From Rabelais to Lord Dunsany authorities have been quoted and emphasized. I don’t think that any reader of the book need worry over this. Jurgen is born of a mind teeming with literature; he is the descendant of many centuries, many libraries, many stories and chronicles, but at the last he is his author’s own child, original and defiant in his own right, owing no man anything for his ultimate personality.
Nor do I think that the reader need worry himself here about symbols, metaphors, and philosophies. “The High History of Jurgen” is precisely what any reader chooses to make it. It is not for every reader any more than are the earlier Cabell books. Some will find it heavy, some tedious, some puzzling and wayward; and some, as it appears according to the Comstockians, find it improper. This censorship quarrel is an old one, but while the Bible, Rabelais, Gautier, Fielding, and the rest are open before us, and while the latest Midnight Revues are delighting New York, it seems something absurd and not a little pathetic that one of the few original works of literature that the English language has furnished us lately should be taken away from us. This, however, is a matter of no lasting importance. Jurgen will survive no matter what the Comstockians may do to him. He has the gaiety and beauty of permanence about him; the Nessus shirt is not easily destroyed by a policeman’s baton.
This at least may be said: If “Jurgen” is read simply for amusement, for the humor and brilliance of its episodes, for the drama of chapters, like the adventure with Guenevere, the fall of Pseudopolis, the episodes in hell, and, above all, the meeting with his grandmother’s God in heaven, there is benefit and happiness enough to be got from the book. Nothing can be harder to write than fantasy of this kind, and yet for one reader, at least, the story never flags, the interest is never dropped, the humor and beauty and very gentle irony are everywhere present.
Finally, it is the crown of Mr. Cabell’s work. He is, as writers go, a young man. He has, in all probability, many years of fine and successful labor in front of him, but, were he never to publish another line, he has, with three books, staked his claim and taken his place. Jurgen is the most triumphant manifestation of that travelling soul who remains, from first to last, his unfaltering subject.
And, with the ending of Jurgen’s chronicle, we can acclaim with no uncertain voice the definite arrival of a talent as original and satisfying as anything that our time has seen.
BOOKS BY MR. CABELL
In Genealogical Sequence, with Some Description and Comment
BEYOND LIFE
(Dizain des Démiurges)
The row over James Branch Cabell, intermittently breaking out, with gradually increasing choler, for a year or so past, should be vastly stimulated by Beyond Life, for in it, instead of attempting to placate his detractors, he deliberately has at them with all arms.
Is art representation? A thousand times, Pish! Art is a dream of perfection, art is a projection of fancy, art is a
“rumor of dawn,” art is an escape from life! Down with all the dolts who merely set up cameras and squeeze bulbs! Down, again, with the donkeys who mount soap-boxes and essay to read morals into life, to make it logical and mathematical, to rationalize it, to explain it The thing is not to be rationalized and explained at all — that is the eternal charm of it.
It is to be admired, experimented with, toyed with, wondered at. Itself a supreme adventure, it is the spring and end of all other adventure — especially of the ever-entrancing adventure into ideas. And, above all, let us not get into wraths about it — let us not torture ourselves with the maudlin certainties that make for indignation.
Life is a comedy to him, etc., etc.... Say that the Walpolean spirit is in Cabell, and you have described him perhaps as accurately as it may be done. His frequent ventures into the eighteenth century are not accidental, but inevitable. It was the century of sentiment, but it was also, in its top layers, the century of a fine and exhilarating skepticism.
This skepticism is what chiefly gives character to Cabell, and sets him off so sharply from an age of oafish faiths, of imbecile enthusiasms, of unearthly and innumerable sure cures, of incredible credulities. This is the thing in him that outrages the simple-minded, and causes them to fall upon him furiously, not merely for what they conceive to be sins æsthetical, but also for what appears to their disordered ire as a vague and sinister inner depravity. To laugh at certainty as he laughs at it is inordinately offensive to the right-minded, and in the course of time, as the war upon intelligence makes progress, it will probably become jailable.
Yet there he holds the fort, disdainfully convinced that artificiality, is the only true reality. And there he fashions books in a hard and brilliant style — the last word in artful and arduous craftsmanship among us — Paterism somehow humanized and made expansive.
I wonder what the amazed old maids, male and female, of the newspapers will call Beyond Life — novel, book of essays, or apologia pro vita sua? If novel, then it is a strange novel indeed, for there is but one character, and he talks steadily from page 23 to the end. If book of essays, then where are the essays? — surely these rolling discourses are nothing of the sort And if apologia, then why not an occasional apology? The college professors of the literary weeklies, with their dusty shelf of pigeon-holes, have work for them here. As for the rest of us, all we need do is read on, enjoying the fare as we go.
What is it? In brief, excellent reading — shy, insinuating learning; heterodoxy infinitely gilded; facts rolled out to fragile thinness and cut into pretty figures; above all a sure and delicate sense of words, a style at once exact and undulate, very caressing writing. In detail, much shrewd discussion of this and that, with many a flash of sound criticism.... A singular and fascinating book! — H. L MENCKEN, in The Smart Set.
DOMNEI
(A Comedy of Woman-Worship)
Alluring as the spirit of youth may be, it is not possible to admire all the novels into which the glory of that spirit is poured. There is a youth wholly without charm; there is another youth so overflowing with that divine essence that one forgives all its other shortcomings because of it In writing, and particularly in writing of young love, there is no quality so necessary as this indefinable charm; no quality that brings a swifter reward of laughter or tears from the reader; no quality that is at once so apparent and so gratefully recognized.
Now in Domnei I find this spirit prodigally in evidence... Here is a man with an individual style, who can recast and reilluminate the ancient forms and shadows, and make a glory and a dream.
Melicent, of noble birth, falls in love with Perion, an outlaw, and, unable to conquer this man of iron, finally, in the very beginning of the romance, proposes to him. Mr. Cabell handles this queer scene with all the delicacy and deftness of the consummate artist, and makes it convincing and beautiful, difficult as it must have been to do so.
Soon Melicent is robbed of her lover, and is forced to be the chattel of the evil and powerful Demetrios. How the latter is first uppermost in the struggle for the maid, and then overpowered by Perion; how the Jew Ahasuerus connives against her, and how Melicent and Perion, after years of waiting and longing, are thrown again into each other’s arms — these contrivances are made to serve — but in how new and wonderful a way!
When the story is finished one wonders how Mr. Cabell, despite the beautiful trick of forcing the reader to believe that the tale has been evolved from old French sources, has contrived such glowing color. This is no sickly effeminate tale, but a vigorous rush and roar of splendid action that sweeps you on to a quiet but brilliant conclusion. A man has learned to write when he can throw in a poetic passage like this (and how crowded with them the story is!): “She sat erect in bed, and saw him cowering over a lamp which his long glistening fingers shielded, so that the lean face of the man floated upon a little golden pool in the darkness.”
No artist can really help one who has mastered the use of words as Mr. Cabell has done. Each sentence is a picture. It is a charming book, a passionate romance that should have an abiding place upon one’s shelves. — CHARLES HANSON TOWNE, in Cincinnati Enquirer.
The love of Melicent and Perion, brought together from scattered fragments in old chronicles and retold by James Branch Cabell, is a very perfect specimen of mediæval love. The real content of mediæval love is objective, the service rendered to the beloved....
The logical climax is the instant when Perion and Melicent come face to face at last, after long hardships suffered, death outfaced and dishonor endured in the name of their young love, and Perion, seeing in her another than the wondrous girl whose image he had cherished through hard years, is disappointed first, and then is swiftly smitten with a new and finer love, reward of his suffering and hers, which may safely be counted on to recompense the faithful and unselfish servants of an ideal.
The solid value of romance, its actual worth in increasing the efficiency and stability of human nature, is very clearly indicated.... Mr. Cabell is more than a very cunning artificer in lovely words and a student of old chronicles. He knows, one guesses, why God made artists — that high deeds may not be quite forgotten, that high loves may be kept alive, that the way of the flesh may sometimes be shown as a sun-path to us, not always as a dull morass beneath the moon. — The Atlantic Monthly.
CHIVALRY
(Dizain des Reines)
Chivalry is a sequence of studies of the code whose root is ‘“the assumption that a gentleman will serve his God, his honor, and his lady without any reservation.”...
And what, ultimately, is Mr. Cabell’s sense of this way to high individual adventure? It is wholly characteristic of him that whatever guidance he offers is the guidance of an artist, never of a moralist. His one inclusive and continuous interest is in the artistic or poetizing temper — a narrow enough interest in seeming, when so phrased, but expanded by his tacit definition until it is not only the centre but also the circumference of everything.
The duality of the world is essentially that of the artistic against the mediocre; for the essential part of every being, the one part that can turn the single life from a sorry jest into a brave spectacle, is the poetic. The artist in each man requires that he give up every cherished thing for the sake of one thing cherished most. Under this tyranny the lover, the fighter, the chivalrous gentleman, the quixotic fool, the artist in words, all sacrifice everything to their own kinds of self-completion; for selfcompletion is the law, and attainment of it the only success.
Mr. Cabell’s ideal of success is to reach the consummation of this something central in one’s self, and incidentally to miss everything else that one might have had. His ideal of heroism is to sacrifice all for one’s own kind of perfection and then fail to gain even that, for this is the one kind of failure that has moral dignity enough to be tragic.
He is at heart, then, a prophet of that austere aesthetic doctrine, the single-mindedness of the artist. He has made up his mind, it seems, to the tragic disp
arity which condemns the perfect writer to be a wretched bungler at the art of living, the perfect lover a fool in relation to all affairs save those of the heart, and the man of executive might always “more or less mentally deficient.”
To be perfectly oneself means to miss being everybody else. Whence Mr. Cabell’s two recurrent characters: the artist lover who is an inferior citizen, and the writing artist who is an inferior lover. His tales are populated with lovers who must say with Antoine Riczi: “Love leads us, and through the sunlight of the world he leads us, and through the filth of it Love leads us, but always in the end, if we but follow without swerving, he leads upward. Yet, O God upon the Cross! Thou that in the article of death didst pardon Dysmas! as what maimed warriors of life, as what bemired travelers in muddied byways, must be presently come to Thee!” — WILSON FOLLETT, in The Dial.
All the stories are love episodes in the lives of long-dead queens of England, and none ever more emphasized the truth that although civilizations, with their creeds and customs, change, human nature is the same throughout...
