CHIVALRY
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
1921
TOANNE BRANCH CABELL
"AINSI A VOUS, MADAME, A MA TRES HAULTE ET TRES NOBLE DAME, A QUI J'AYME A DEVOIR ATTACHEMENT ET OBEISSANCE, J'ENVOYE CE LIVRET."
Introduction
Few of the more astute critics who have appraised the work of JamesBranch Cabell have failed to call attention to that extraordinarycohesion which makes his very latest novel a further flowering of theseed of his very earliest literary work. Especially among his laterbooks does the scheme of each seem to dovetail into the scheme of theother and the whole of his writing take on the character of anuninterrupted discourse. To this phenomenon, which is at once a fact andan illusion of continuity, Mr. Cabell himself has consciouslycontributed, not only by a subtly elaborate use of conjunctions, byrepetition, and by reintroducing characters from his other books, but byactually setting his expertness in genealogy to the genial task ofdevising a family tree for his figures of fiction.
If this were an actual continuity, more tangible than that fluidabstraction we call the life force; if it were merely a tirelessreiteration and recasting of characters, Mr. Cabell's work would have anunbearable monotony. But at bottom this apparent continuity has no morematerial existence than has the thread of lineal descent. To insistupon its importance is to obscure, as has been obscured, the epic rangeof Mr. Cabell's creative genius. It is to fail to observe that he hastreated in his many books every mainspring of human action and that histhemes have been the cardinal dreams and impulses which have in themheroic qualities. Each separate volume has a unity and harmony of acomplete and separate life, for the excellent reason that with theconsummate skill of an artist he is concerned exclusively in each bookwith one definite heroic impulse and its frustrations.
It is true, of course, that like the fruit of the tree of life, Mr.Cabell's artistic progeny sprang from a first conceptual germ--"In thebeginning was the Word." That animating idea is the assumption that iflife may be said to have an aim it must be an aim to terminate insuccess and splendor. It postulates the high, fine importance of excess,the choice or discovery of an overwhelming impulse in life and aconscientious dedication to its fullest realization. It is the qualityand intensity of the dream only which raises men above the biologicalnorm; and it is fidelity to the dream which differentiates theexceptional figure, the man of heroic stature, from the muddling,aimless mediocrities about him. What the dream is, matters not atall--it may be a dream of sainthood, kingship, love, art, asceticism orsensual pleasure--so long as it is fully expressed with all theresources of self. It is this sort of completion which Mr. Cabell haselected to depict in all his work: the complete sensualist inDemetrios, the complete phrase-maker in Felix Kennaston, the completepoet in Marlowe, the complete lover in Perion. In each he has shown thatthis complete self-expression is achieved at the expense of all otherpossible selves, and that herein lies the tragedy of the ideal.Perfection is a costly flower and is cultured only by an uncompromising,strict husbandry.
All this is, we see, the ideational gonfalon under which surge theromanticists; but from the evidence at hand it is the banner to whichlife also bears allegiance. It is in humanity's records that it hasreserved its honors for its romantic figures. It remembers its Caesars,its saints, its sinners. It applauds, with a complete suspension ofmoral judgment, its heroines and its heroes who achieve the greatestself-realization. And from the splendid triumphs and tragic defeats ofhumanity's individual strivings have come our heritage of wisdom and ofpoetry.
Once we understand the fundamentals of Mr. Cabell's artistic aims, it isnot easy to escape the fact that in _Figures of Earth_ he undertook thestaggering and almost unsuspected task of rewriting humanity's sacredbooks, just as in _Jurgen_ he gave us a stupendous analogue of theceaseless quest for beauty. For we must accept the truth that Mr. Cabellis not a novelist at all in the common acceptance of the term, but ahistorian of the human soul. His books are neither documentary norrepresentational; his characters are symbols of human desires andmotives. By the not at all simple process of recording faithfully theprojections of his rich and varied imagination, he has written thirteenbooks, which he accurately terms biography, wherein is the bitter-sweettruth about human life.
II
Among the scant certainties vouchsafed us is that every age lives by itsspecial catchwords. Whether from rebellion against the irking monotonyof its inherited creeds or from compulsions generated by its owncomplexities, each age develops its code of convenient illusions whichminimize cerebration in dilemmas of conduct by postulating anunequivocal cleavage between the current right and the current wrong. Itworks until men tire of it or challenge the cleavage, or untilconditions render the code obsolete. It has in it, happily, a certainpoetic merit always; it presents an ideal to be lived up to; it givesdirection to the uncertain, stray impulses of life.
The Chivalric code is no worse than most and certainly it is prettierthan some. It is a code peculiar to an age, or at least it flourishesbest in an age wherein sentiment and the stuff of dreams are easilytranslatable into action. Its requirements are less of the intellectthan of the heart. It puts God, honor, and mistress above all else, andstipulates that a knight shall serve these three without anyreservation. It requires of its secular practitioners the holy virtuesof an active piety, a modified chastity, and an unqualified obedience,at all events, to the categorical imperative. The obligation of povertyit omits, for the code arose at a time when the spiritual snobbery ofthe meek and lowly was not pressing the simile about the camel and theeye of the needle. It leads to charming manners and to delicateamenities. It is the opposite of the code of Gallantry, for while thecode of Chivalry takes everything with a becoming seriousness, the codeof Gallantry takes everything with a wink. If one should stoop to pickflaws with the Chivalric ideal, it would be to point out a certainpriggishness and intolerance. For, while it is all very well for one tocherish the delusion that he is God's vicar on earth and to go about hisFather's business armed with a shining rectitude, yet the unhallowed maybe moved to deprecate the enterprise when they recall, with discomfort,the zealous vicarship of, say, the late Anthony J. Comstock.
But here I blunder into Mr. Cabell's province. For he has joined manygraceful words in delectable and poignant proof of just that lamentabletendency of man to make a mess of even his most immaculate conceivings.When he wrote _Chivalry_, Mr. Cabell was yet young enough to view thecode less with the appraising eye of a pawnbroker than with the ardenteye of an amateur. He knew its value, but he did not know its price. Sohe made of it the thesis for a dizain of beautiful happenings that arealmost flawless in their verbal beauty.
III
It is perhaps of historical interest here to record the esteem in whichMark Twain held the genius of Mr. Cabell as it was manifested as earlyas a dozen years ago. Mr. Cabell wrote _The Soul of Melicent_, or, as itwas rechristened on revision, _Domnei_, at the great humorist's request,and during the long days and nights of his last illness it was Mr.Cabell's books which gave Mark Twain his greatest joy. This knowledgemitigates the pleasure, no doubt, of those who still, after his fifteenyears of writing, encounter him intermittently with a feeling of havingmade a great literary discovery. The truth is that Mr. Cabell has beendiscovered over and over with each succeeding book from that first fineenthusiasm with which Percival Pollard reviewed _The Eagle's Shadow_ tothat generous acknowledgment by Hugh Walpole that no one in England,save perhaps Conrad and Hardy, was so sure of literary permanence asJames Branch Cabell.
With _The Cream of the Jest, Beyond Life_, and _Figures of Earth_ beforehim, it is not easy for the perceptive critic to doubt this permanence.One might as sensibly deny a future to Ecclesiastes, _The Golden
Ass,Gulliver's Travels_, and the works of Rabelais as to predict oblivionfor such a thesaurus of ironic wit and fine fantasy, mellow wisdom andstrange beauty as _Jurgen_. But to appreciate the tales of _Chivalry_is, it seems, a gift more frequently reserved for the general readerthan for the professional literary evaluator. Certainly years beforediscussion of Cabell was artificially augmented by the suppression of_Jurgen_ there were many genuine lovers of romance who had read thesetales with pure enjoyment. That they did not analyse and articulatetheir enjoyment for the edification of others does not lessen thequality of their appreciation. Even in those years they found inCabell's early tales what we find who have since been directed to themby the curiosity engendered by his later work, namely, a superbcraftsmanship in recreating a vanished age, an atmosphere in keepingwith the themes, a fluid, graceful, personal style, a poetic ecstasy, afine sense of drama, and a unity and symmetry which are the hall-marksof literary genius.
BURTON RASCOE. New York City, September, 1921.