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 disparity 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...
All these stories are throbbing with that commingling of love and hate, forgiveness and vengeance, passion and purity, childlikeness and craft selfishness and self-sacrifice, which gloried in its sincerity in those lost seasons when might was right, and each man stood ready to prove it, to his own and his lady’s satisfaction. Whatever else may be his or her fault, the hero of each of these fascinating tales is a man; the heroine, a woman. — Boston Transcript.
JURGEN
(A Comedy of Justice)
All the fabulous loveliness that has drugged men with rapture and death returns in the magic of Jurgen: Guenevere in a robe of flame colored silk; the pallid charm of Queen Sylvia Tereu vanishing at the cock’s crow; Anaitis, in Cocaigne, drawing desire into shuddering ecstasies of sensation; a brown and dimpled Hamadryad; Dolores of Philistia, beautiful as a hawk, but tenderer in the cloak of night; Florimel — in a quiet cleft by the Sea of Blood — who knew what to do with small unchristened children; and Phyllis, Satan’s wife, an enchanting slip of devilishness with the wings of a bat They sway and smile with half closed eyes, and beckon; naked limbs slide from under embroidery and breasts are bare as the moon; perfumed sights float from the scarlet flames of their mouths. They drift on a higher nebulous cloud, but below them are the evil obscenities of hell, a blackness with the reflections of coppery embers, the gleam of red eyes, the swift passage and repassage of unutterable things with thickly dripping Angers and members of stone.
The gauzy drapery of Anaitis, opening in twenty-two places, flows into the murk, while her crown of coral is held in the half light; but far above her is the white and gold immortality, the airy shape of men’s eternal longing, Helen of Troy. Palpable, yet forever beyond attainment, visible in the manner of an irradiated dream, she gazes downward with a tender loveliness of veiled eyes. She is the supreme celestial incentive, the guarded secret, of men fast in the corruption of flesh, of Anaitis, but with their faces desperately lifted to the perfection of beauty.
However — and here is the potency of Mr. Cabell’s magic — there is reach on reach above even the purity of the Trojan Helen... up, up to the part of Heaven which smelt of mignonette, with a starling singing. And at the end, at the dissolving of the vapors, while the pits of hell and painted rosy flesh are consumed, when desire has died of satiety, there is the reality of Lisa, the transcending sanity of human companionship, the goodness of the heart and the peace, the wisdom, of understanding.
The enchantment of Jurgen, conveyed in pulp and ink, rising from the gold vessel of Mr. Cabell’s imagination, is both a figment and a reality; the gesture of a hand, the shrill or bland pitch of a voice, holds all of life, the belly and the instinct of propagation are the mechanical gods of existence; and, at the same time, they are less than nothing; for the amazing jangle of fate, of chance, has its sweep not from the sample needs of animals but from the tyranny of that vision of the flawless Helen, the shining of the farther ineffable blueness.
The actuality of to-day, authentic history, is solid with fact and reality, but it is no more potent, no more inwoven in the heart, than the myths and legends of before Sumeria. Jurgen riding on a centaur into the past is fantastic, yet compared with the journeyings of the mind, the dark corridors and lands and beasts of thought, it is all as ordinary as any street of the present. And as long as men are touched with hopes beyond their reach they will see back of any woman a universal changeless mystery of desire, at once pure and possessed. — JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER, in The New York Sun.
THE LINE OF LOVE
(Dizain des Mariages)
Like Aucassin and Nicolete, Mr. Cabell’s story is now told in prose and now in poetry, the poetry coming from the mouths of love-lorn troubadours or of that “sad, bad, glad, mad” poet of “Paris town,” François Villon. To what extent these chansons, lais and virelais are translations from the old French, done with the finest flavor of the translator’s artistry, and to what degree they are the invention of Mr. Cabell, is not a matter to concern us now.
The inevitable sentiments and phrases of the time are in these formal yet spontaneous, childish yet wise, poems of troubadours, and whether they were indeed writ five centuries ago or yesterday matters little. They are fragrant with the fragrance of love and roses, rhyme and dreams, and the potpourri is one for which all who delight in old time romances must be thankful.
The thread that holds Mr. Cabell’s tales together is the thread or the “line” of love. From generation to generation the compelling madness drives these men and women on to their joy or their doom, and they leave behind them children who also know their “hour of madness and of joy.” It is a love-like thing to have the entrée to some poet’s Olympus and watch the impassioned procession of lovers pass like that, and to view their disasters and their delights with an impersonal eye and an unfailing interest....
The charm of those ardent days in which men and women were at once primitive and elegant, exquisite and brutal, learned and naive, is perfectly portrayed in this revival of old tales, which drift “as a blown leaf across the face of time.” — ELIA W. PEATTIE, in The Chicago Tribune.
Purporting to be translations from old French, these stories of poets and chivalry, of fair ladies and gallant knights, have in them all the flavor of Middle Age adventure, passionate romantic love and the lyricism of poets who rise to no greater occasion in their songs than the kissing of my lady’s white hand or the praising of some one of her many personal charms. But they are not translations; they are not resurrected from long forsaken, musty parchments: they are the children, a very creditable offspring, by the way, of Mr. Cabell’s imagination. Counterfeits, one may say, but there are counterfeits and counterfeits in literature, and some of them may under the law be deemed forgivable. The Line of Love is one of these.
In the richly colored tapestry that Mr. Cabell, like some Eastern fakir, unrolls before our view, tapestry thick-woven with threads of gold and intricately patterned with a host of figures, the one figure that remains most fixed in our memory is that of the poet Villon. A picturesque figure, whose story has commended itself, time and again, to novelists and poets, Villon has suffered more through a persistent process of idealization than it would ever have been possible for him to suffer through a plain statement of the facts. To these facts, fragmentary and unsatisfactory though they be, Mr. Cabell has confined himself, and the result is a mixture of poetic beauty with pathetic realism: it is a strong characterization, yet it lacks nothing in the romantic element. ‘NORMA BRIGHT CARSON, in Book News.
GALLANTRY
(Dizain des Fêtes Galantes)
Mr. Cabell’s group of eighteenth century scenes has been wrought with cleverness, tact and invention. He is frankly superficial, and paints his pictures of George the Second’s England, and France under Louis Quinze, rather in snuff box style than with any complicated probing after the eternal human heart.
Of course, it is not every one who cares to collect snuff boxes, but, granted the taste, The Casual Honeymoon, all the adventures of Captain Audaine and Miss Allonby, April’s Message, the whole history, in fact, of Ormskirk’s courtings, form as satisfactory specimens as are likely to be manufactured at the present day. Moreover, in the plots, counter plots, and intrigues, there is a grateful amount of lively movement Unlike Thomas Hardy (in his biting eighteenth century studies) or Maurice Hewlett, Mr. Cabell does not attempt to reconstruct character, to create trenchant personalities. He busies himself about the satin-clad courtier, the airy fine lady, and the gallant. His miniatures are careful: though the touch is so light, the style seldom halts, and in the few instances where it lapses from that of his chosen period, it at least never ceases to be properly suited to the bloody or amorous minuets through which his puppets are stepping.
In fact (never losing sight of the scale), no more discerning estimate of Gallantry need be sought than that furnished by Mr. Cabell’s own epilogue, where Ormskirk pleads:
The author’s obdurate, and bids me say
That — since the doings of our Georgian day
Smack less of Hippocrene than of Bohea, —
His tiny pictures of that tiny time
Aim little at the lofty or sublime,
Nor paint a peccadillo as a crime.
Since, though illegally all midges mate,
And flies purloin, and gnats assassinate,
They are not haled before a magistrate.
This is Mr. Cabell’s aim, and in large measure he attains it. If it be objected that life was not then composed exclusively of dispatch boxes, robbers, spies, masqueraders, duels, and evening parties, without a second’s breathing space between, the answer is that exciting rather than commonplace moments have been selected, as better suited to fiction; and not only selected: they have been trimmed, polished, and refined to a version suggesting the school of Watteau rather than Hogarth. — The Nation.
We have not latterly come upon a more delightful work of fiction than is Gallantry. Mr. Cabell’s fine art is attaining a rarer finish as time rounds his capacities. To a lustrous and dramatic style he unites the vivid abilities of the born story teller, and while his tragic climaxes often bring up his readers breathless, the delicacy of his comedy is also infinitely alluring and provocative.... It is the best fiction of its sort in covers in many a day. — St. Louis Times.
THE CERTAIN HOUR
(Dizain des Poetes)
It is not often that the work of an American writer attracts attention because of beauty of style. That, unhappily, is a quality which our “reading public” does not desire of its favorites. Mr. James Branch Cabell, however, has this attribute to such a degree that, were he not a master story-teller, still his work must command the enthusiasm of the discriminating reader. In The Certain Hour, he has selected an idea which requires his utmost artistry with words.
The volume consists of ten sketches which, as he points out in a prefatory essay of rare irony anent the public, are not short-stories. Perhaps they might be described as fragments patterned upon the same psychological situation in the lives of various poets, finding their individual color in that of the personalities involved. The idea of selecting that certain hour in which a man comes face to face with himself revealing the temper of his spirit, is one which would only occur to the inspired artist.
There is in these sketches a wistful and magical quality of sentiment and a delicacy of workmanship which cannot fail to arouse pleasurable emotions in anyone who recognizes the master touch. And as stories, many of them are no less than thrilling, and that without the trickery of the magazine writer. — MARTYN JOHNSON, in The Dial.
The Certain Hour I heartily commend to the student of letters. Mr. Cabell’s gallant and wholesome reaction from the popular school of “vital” fiction carries him, I think, into self-conscious perversities. He writes with one eye open toward teasing the bourgeois.... What are we to say of one who calls a preface an “auctorial induction”? His love of a cavalierish past leads him into strange byways of life and passion that are outlandish to the humble reader.
But it is refreshing to find a writer announcing it as his creed “To write perfectly of beautiful happenings.... One finds in his pages an exquisite quality of craftsmanship that in its self-conscious splendor recalls Oscar Wilde. One meets a mind that has lovingly brooded over the pageant of English literature, and reproduced with fantastic cunning the color of bygone days.
Mr. Cabell condemns our machine-made fiction of to-day. “Indisputably the most striking defect of this modern American literature”(he says) “is the fact that anything at all resembling literature is scarcely anywhere apparent. The nineteenth century by making education popular has produced the curious spectacle of a reading public with essentially non-literary tastes.”
Mr. Cabell does not relish the fact that thousands of plain Americans really enjoy the treacle of Mrs. Gene Stratton Porter and the brimstone of Mr. Harold Bell Wright. He turns lovingly in thought to the days when books were the delight of a chosen few; when the country gentleman of Virginia, after a long day with the hounds, would spend the evening by his log fire with port wine on the table and a spaniel at his feet, savoring Montaigne or Sir Thomas Browne.
Mr. Cabell is really an Elizabethan who finds himself something at odds with our hubble-bubble democracy. And those who delight in the finer sensations of literature will find an inordinate satisfaction in his very delicate stories of the loves of men of letters. Shakespeare, Herrick, Wycherley, Pope, Sheridan, and some others whom you will not find in the textbooks are the heroes of his stories, and in his pages they speak in their own manner and are set about with language daintily phrased and of a rare cadence. — CHRISTOPHER MORLEY, in Educational Foundations.
THE CORDS OF VANITY
(A Comedy of Shirking)
The Cords of Vanity, by James Branch Cabell, is a brilliantly written story of a hero who degenerates progressively, a hero whom we follow through a litany of love affairs, and whom we leave at the end in a very unstable equilibrium of virtue. The book is one more study of the “artistic temperament,” that convenient term under which genius or near-genius often finds shelter to indulge its selfishness and caprice.
Mr. Cabell gives an airy chronicle of the love affairs of his hero, Robert Townsend — a continuous performance extending from childhood to the thirties, although the irresponsible “Bobby” is described as one who has adopted “infancy” as a profession, and never gets out of boyhood. Townsend is also described as one of the self-hypnotized persons who, in the moment of saying it, believes everything that he says, and thus romances alluringly of himself with no regard to the fetters of fact — truly a captivating liar.
In this “higher carelessness” all his contradictions and repetitions are merged into a fine unity. By playing at emotion so long he finally breaks down the inward integrities, so that he is not able to realize when he is acting a part and when he is sincere. And his sin overtakes him in the circumstance that, having played at love so long, he finally is not able to love anybody in reality. He is punished terribly: “for the saddest punishment of all is something that happens in us, not something that happens to us.”
As the author omits to cite in good round terms the moral that we may learn from this story, some people seem to think that the book carries no moral. Now, a book to be artistic must be moral, for life is moral, and art is only life focussed and colored by the lens of personality. Moreover, it is a principle of literature that a moral is preached most loudly without hymn or homily. It should be pressed in upon the reader through the happenings of the story. We never fail to get the moral impression if the author is veracious and unfolds life in the iron law of consequences.
Now, in reading the record of this rather shameless hero we cannot fail to note and deplore the gradual unmanning of this inveterate sensation-seeker, Mr. Robert Townsend; nor can we fail to close the book with a lively desire to have no closer acquaintance with his kind. This is the moral driven home to our hearts. — EDWIN MARKHAM, in the N. Y. American.
There is a sort of inward satisfaction gained in reading such a book as Mr. Cabell’s Cords of Vanity. No one ever talks with the flippant irony, the satiric humor, the fantastic brilliance of these characters. In our more prosaic conversation of the day how often we think of the quick retort when the chance for displaying our rhetorical fireworks has just slipped by. But in Mr. Cabell’s pages all this is remedied. Those quips and subtle turns of meaning come from the mouths of the characters as the most spontaneous utterances in the world — and we delight in the conceit of it.... For the sophisticated the book will be a real delight — Boston Transcript.
FROM THE HIDDEN WAY
(Selections in Verse from the Private Papers of R. E. Townsend)
Love and springtime were the two great subjects of the troubadours. Simple dreamers, they spent their days in an idealization of the two forces that are still the most beautiful things in life. They sought no tortuous paths of involved intellectual struggle. Life they accepted mutely, and the fair things in life won them to unpremeditated song. To-day the thrill that lay in their poetry is not a dead one. Although the sun has burst forth in ruddy splendor on the world through multitudes of poems the rapture that held the troubadours still holds us. It is of love and springtime that James Branch Cabell sings in his volume of verse, From the Hidden Way.
One who has read the previous books of Mr. Cabell knows that it is ancient France and Italy that have his heart. Naturally it is to those older poets that sang in those lands that he turns. Ostensibly each poem is a translation or a paraphrase of some song of a dead poet, but the spirit of James Branch Cabell finds its expression, too, in the verses. How much is translation, and how much is Cabell, it is hard to say, but it is a free guess that the translator has freely paraphrased his originals.
He finds his inspiration from all sources. Among some of the writers that he seeks material from are Antoine Riczi, Alessandro de Medici, Theodore Passerat, Charles Gamier, Nicolas de Caen, François Villon, Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, Paul Ver ville, and Alphonse Moreau. A number are attributed to no writer and are the author’s own.
It is the spirit of the past that Mr. Cabell is especially fortunate in capturing. One may easily believe that the poems are the original unpremeditated efforts of the authors whose names are attached to the head of them. They are more than translations. They are reconstructions of long-dead moods as authentic and as touching as they were in the days when the fiery-hearted singers felt them....
Taken all in all, From the Hidden Way is a decidedly pleasing book. Its quality is unquestioned, and the recapturing of a bygone age is remarkable. Mr. Cabell has written a book that every poetry lover should have. — A. L. S. WOOD, in the Springfield Union.
Mr. Cabell makes seventy-five adaptations from mediæval rhymers, Moreau, Passerat, Alessandro de Medici, Nicolas de Caen, Paul Verville and others. In rendering, or rather adapting, these mediæval poets into English, Mr. Cabell has made the art his own. The sprightliness, color and spirit of a romantic age are revived in these poems. — WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE, in The Bookman.
In a collection so thronged with vibrant chords all resonant of the ages-old themes of love and life and death, it is not possible in this limited space to convey to the reader the subtlety of Mr. Cabell’s art. He has sensed the power of the minnesingers as if to the period born, as, perhaps, he was in some previous incarnation. Possibly, Passerat or Moreau, or even Alessandro de Medici, was his former habitat. At any rate, they live again in him, which is more to the point. Whether it is Villon musing in prison, with the rope awaiting him at dawn for his sins, or the Dark Venus is invoked, or Ronsard returns with one of his half-forgotten rhymes, the touch is sure, the craft is ever present — SAMUEL TRAVERS CLOVER, in the Richmond Journal.
THE RIVET IN GRANDFATHER’S NECK
(A Comedy of Limitations)
If you see on the bookstands a volume entitled The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck, buy it and read it; for it’s good stuff. James Branch Cabell wrote it It is done in ironic “highfalutinese” and the impassioned “Southron” will writhe as he reads, even though he laugh at the same time, for here the chivalries aristocratic superstition of the South is ridiculed with a gay contempt, the worse for its being shot through with tenderness for the victims of the tradition.
How utterly unrelated to and unfit for this workaday world the old cult of “blood” has become, was never so grindingly yet so gracefully shown as in the middle-aged hero of this tale who marries the daughter of a rich contractor and practically loses her because he does nothing for her but vaporize sentimentally while living on her money, and remains unconsciously, ridiculously selfish in his idealism. The “blood” tradition is the rivet in the toy grandfather’s neck that prevents his resilience.
The girl in the story isn’t quite loveable, but she’s human in the same way as her husband, and between them they make a sad boggle of life. There’s another murderously dextrous portraiture in the book — that of the autolatrous successful novelist who thinks his genius demands disregard of moral inhibitions; a viler Sentimental Tommy.
James Branch Cabell in this book has done something Cervantesque — there’s no other word for it — in smiling a false chivalry away. And it’s deadlier for that the writer does it with mockery of the courtier grace of which his victims have ever been enamored in life and in literature, and with the hurtfullest thing of all in a wound-inflicter — pity. A romanticist exposing romanticism’s hollowness and sham; such is Mr. James Branch Cabell in this cavalier comedy of acid satire. — WILLIAM MARION REEDY, in Reedy’s Mirror.
Speaking of names of novels, how about The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck? This is the title of James Branch Cabell’s gallant yet biting comedy of satirical realism, in which, under the guise of telling the story of a marriage contracted back in the 90’s between a middle-aged Southern aristocrat and the spoiled daughter of a rich contractor, he strips the “old South after the war” of its last rag of chivalrous tradition and exposes it, a likable but ludicrous figure, to the cold light of literalness.
The thing is done not only with amazing cleverness, but with fine feeling. For to unmask so hallowed and huge a hypocrisy with such absolute ruthlessness, yet to avoid in the doing even the appearance of malice, is a triumph of the spirit as well as of technique. — J. B. KERFOOT, in Life.
Certainly The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck is a most unusual book; and one that does not yield up its significance upon a single reading. That Mr. Cabell has elected to show love as a flame only, and never as a star is to be regretted, but he has written a brilliant and powerful novel, and he has written it with a sure touch, a keen insight, and a wealth of suggestion, — N. Y. Times.
THE EAGLE’S SHADOW
(A Comedy of Purse-Strings)
It is quite true that Margaret Hugonin descended into slang — after having duly received permission — and told one of her suitors to “cut it out.” She went farther, she called another suitor “a tipsy old beast.” More dreadful yet, she swore, yes, swore both loud and deep. Swore with a d — , a very big d — ; she said, “Damn you! damn you! God in heaven damn you!”
A fine fierce mouthful of an oath, for a beauty, a belle, of the chivalrous South! Yes, already I can hear the sniffs. Up rises the noble army of the poor in humor, the rich in pomp and prejudice, the barnacled with conventions, and announces that Margaret is no lady. This is no prophecy I am going in for; it is an accomplished fact.
Purposely have I waited, so that the chorus of the shocked might rise the mightier, that the uplifted hands and eyebrows might swell the more in volume, and that, in fine, there might go up a more and more astounding revelation of the sadly humorous side there is to this supposedly so laughter-loving people of ours. I have heard more about “true womanliness,” about what “women of breeding” do and do not do, and what is considered fit for “decent society” than would fill a volume on moral philosophy. And all because Margaret swore!...
A pest upon these conscientious objectors! They lead one into almost taking them seriously, and that were to commit their own folly. The key to their folly is always to take seriously what was never meant so.
Margaret is not to be taken seriously. She is far too delightful. In that delicious comedy is she not the most delicious figure? It is a long time since we have had so lovable a heroine as Margaret. She is compound, by her author, so deftly of all the fascinations and the futilities that go to the making of the real feminine. To her author, James Branch Cabell, one feels a debt of real gratitude. He has given us a real girl.
And how the serious Sunday school folks succeeded in finding this charming young creature of flesh and blood “no lady” — well, other flesh-and-blood people must give up the dream of trying to guess that riddle.
.. The objector, and the schoolmaster, and the referee as to what is “ladylike” and what is not, are still abroad in the land, and we must all of us, even be we so clever and merry as Mr. James Branch Cabell, grin our best, and buck up, and bear it.
Clever and merry: yes, the man who wrote The Eagle’s Shadow is that, and much more. He tells us quite frankly that he means only a comedy, but there is fine irony in his comics, and there is true real understanding of human nature. His picture of the house-party in the South, with a young heiress surrounded by a blood-sucking company of persons all after her money — philanthropists, lecturers, poets — is quite delightful fooling....
To detail the story of The Eagle’s Shadow would be unfair to all concerned. Hardly possible, moreover, since it were but re-sketching what is already the most delicate, airiest of pencilings. But one cannot sufficiently emphasize the charm of Margaret, or warmly enough welcome her amid the ranks of those made to be loved and remembered, or too heartily congratulate her author upon having told her story.
Margaret swore? She certainly did. Read the story and if after that you do not say “Well, what of it?” you are fit for treasons, stratagems and letters to the newspapers. — PERCIVAL POLLARD, in the St. Louis Mirror.
THE CREAM OF THE JEST
(A Comedy of Evasions)
I say with profound conviction that you will obtain such joy out of The Cream of the Jest as you have obtained out of the writings of no modern author unless it be Anatole France or James Stephens. It is, without question, the one book of the period in English most certain to enjoy permanent favor with those to whom delicate whimsey, irony, an intelligent point of view, nuance and subtleties of expression are the highest desiderata in an author.
While the book makes some jesting pretence to the novel form, it is not a novel at all. Ostensibly Mr. Cabell tells the story of a novelist who finds life such a drab and aimless business that he takes refuge from it and in fancy ranges the empyrean. Actually, it is a series of essays containing the impressions of a sensitive, kindly and disillusioned artist, ever intrigued by the eternal human tragi-comedy.
Mr. Cabell’s literary creed is “to write perfectly of beautiful happenings.” Says he, “I quite fail to see why, in books or elsewhere, any one should wish to be reminded of what human life is actually like. For living is the one art in which mankind has never attained distinction.” Yet with this profession of romanticism, he writes with finer reality than did Zola or does Dreiser with all their realism. He is selective rather than photographic. He omits the obvious details of factual reporting to treat realistically of human motives.
The productions of the modern realists, says he, have this in common with the best-sellers of the fiction counter: they make no demand upon the reader’s imagination, and they assume that the reader possesses no particular information on any subject whatever. When, as a matter of fact, the average man is woefully aware of the handicaps under which he lives, has, at least secretly, a fair knowledge of his own shortcomings, and is decently conscious that all is not entirely right with the world.
Furthermore, the average man like myself has some faint yearning for an apperception and realization of beauty. He is, moreover, able to laugh at his own foibles as well as at the foibles of others if they are not too arrogantly pointed out. And to anyone who can suggest a way that he may forget his petty troubles, short of alcohol and opiates, he is extremely grateful.
This Mr. Cabell does. He is a satirist whose chief object for satirical thrusts is himself, the only satirist who really counts. He escapes every illusion that he may the more easily embrace them all, kindly, knowingly, resignedly. A chuckle now and then is the supreme anodyne, especially if it is over one’s own stupidity, littleness, and distressing humanness. The apostle of revolt is the most thoroughly chained of slaves, a prisoner indeed of his dreams: a moujik become a Bolshevik, abandoning a complacent poverty to be a penniless rattle-brain. But, essentially, dreams count The idea is not to take them too seriously.
All these are platitudes, of course, but they are cullings from what I take to be the point of view of a man who ambi-diverts upon that point of view in the most exquisite language. Even Mr. Cabell’s dialogue is not the average speech of average persons, but it has the advantage of being the speech he would infinitely prefer them to use. But if you suppose from what I have said Mr. Cabell’s characters are, like Mr. Shaw’s, mere mouth-pieces for the author’s views you could not well be more mistaken.
There is some seductive method, which minute analysis might yet explain, by which Mr. Cabell gives you a definite, four-dimensional portrait of his characters. I suspect it is because he, better than most men who write books, understands people and himself. — BURTON RASCOE, in the Chicago Tribune.
THE TOY-MAKER
From the dawn of the day to the dusk he toiled,
Shaping fanciful playthings with tireless hands, —
Useless trumpery toys; and, with vaulting heart,
Gave them unto all peoples — who mocked at him,
Trampled on them, and soiled them, and went their way.
Then he toiled from the morn to the dusk again,
Gave his gimcracks to people who mocked at him,
Trampled on them, deriding, and went their way.
Thus he labors, and loudly they jeer at him; —
That is, when they remember he still exists.
Who, you ask, is this fellow? — What matter names?
He is only a scribbler who is content.