Chivalry

TO
ANNE 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."

Few of the more astute critics who have appraised the work of James
Branch Cabell have failed to call attention to that extraordinary
cohesion which makes his very latest novel a further flowering of the
seed of his very earliest literary work. Especially among his later
books does the scheme of each seem to dovetail into the scheme of the
other and the whole of his writing take on the character of an
uninterrupted discourse. To this phenomenon, which is at once a fact and
an illusion of continuity, Mr. Cabell himself has consciously
contributed, not only by a subtly elaborate use of conjunctions, by
repetition, and by reintroducing characters from his other books, but by
actually setting his expertness in genealogy to the genial task of
devising a family tree for his figures of fiction.

If this were an actual continuity, more tangible than that fluid
abstraction we call the life force; if it were merely a tireless
reiteration and recasting of characters, Mr. Cabell's work would have an
unbearable monotony. But at bottom this apparent continuity has no more
material existence than has the thread of lineal descent. To insist
upon its importance is to obscure, as has been obscured, the epic range
of Mr. Cabell's creative genius. It is to fail to observe that he has
treated in his many books every mainspring of human action and that his
themes have been the cardinal dreams and impulses which have in them
heroic qualities. Each separate volume has a unity and harmony of a
complete and separate life, for the excellent reason that with the
consummate skill of an artist he is concerned exclusively in each book
with 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 the
beginning was the Word." That animating idea is the assumption that if
life may be said to have an aim it must be an aim to terminate in
success and splendor. It postulates the high, fine importance of excess,
the choice or discovery of an overwhelming impulse in life and a
conscientious dedication to its fullest realization. It is the quality
and intensity of the dream only which raises men above the biological
norm; and it is fidelity to the dream which differentiates the
exceptional figure, the man of heroic stature, from the muddling,
aimless mediocrities about him. What the dream is, matters not at
all—it may be a dream of sainthood, kingship, love, art, asceticism or
sensual pleasure—so long as it is fully expressed with all the
resources of self. It is this sort of completion which Mr. Cabell has
elected to depict in all his work: the complete sensualist in
Demetrios, the complete phrase-maker in Felix Kennaston, the complete
poet in Marlowe, the complete lover in Perion. In each he has shown that
this complete self-expression is achieved at the expense of all other
possible 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 the
romanticists; but from the evidence at hand it is the banner to which
life also bears allegiance. It is in humanity's records that it has
reserved its honors for its romantic figures. It remembers its Caesars,
its saints, its sinners. It applauds, with a complete suspension of
moral judgment, its heroines and its heroes who achieve the greatest
self-realization. And from the splendid triumphs and tragic defeats of
humanity's individual strivings have come our heritage of wisdom and of
poetry.

Once we understand the fundamentals of Mr. Cabell's artistic aims, it is
not easy to escape the fact that in
Figures of Earth
he undertook the
staggering and almost unsuspected task of rewriting humanity's sacred
books, just as in
Jurgen
he gave us a stupendous analogue of the
ceaseless quest for beauty. For we must accept the truth that Mr. Cabell
is not a novelist at all in the common acceptance of the term, but a
historian of the human soul. His books are neither documentary nor
representational; his characters are symbols of human desires and
motives. By the not at all simple process of recording faithfully the
projections of his rich and varied imagination, he has written thirteen
books, which he accurately terms biography, wherein is the bitter-sweet
truth about human life.

Among the scant certainties vouchsafed us is that every age lives by its
special catchwords. Whether from rebellion against the irking monotony
of its inherited creeds or from compulsions generated by its own
complexities, each age develops its code of convenient illusions which
minimize cerebration in dilemmas of conduct by postulating an
unequivocal cleavage between the current right and the current wrong. It
works until men tire of it or challenge the cleavage, or until
conditions render the code obsolete. It has in it, happily, a certain
poetic merit always; it presents an ideal to be lived up to; it gives
direction to the uncertain, stray impulses of life.

The Chivalric code is no worse than most and certainly it is prettier
than some. It is a code peculiar to an age, or at least it flourishes
best in an age wherein sentiment and the stuff of dreams are easily
translatable into action. Its requirements are less of the intellect
than of the heart. It puts God, honor, and mistress above all else, and
stipulates that a knight shall serve these three without any
reservation. It requires of its secular practitioners the holy virtues
of an active piety, a modified chastity, and an unqualified obedience,
at all events, to the categorical imperative. The obligation of poverty
it omits, for the code arose at a time when the spiritual snobbery of
the meek and lowly was not pressing the simile about the camel and the
eye of the needle. It leads to charming manners and to delicate
amenities. It is the opposite of the code of Gallantry, for while the
code of Chivalry takes everything with a becoming seriousness, the code
of Gallantry takes everything with a wink. If one should stoop to pick
flaws with the Chivalric ideal, it would be to point out a certain
priggishness and intolerance. For, while it is all very well for one to
cherish the delusion that he is God's vicar on earth and to go about his
Father's business armed with a shining rectitude, yet the unhallowed may
be 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 many
graceful words in delectable and poignant proof of just that lamentable
tendency of man to make a mess of even his most immaculate conceivings.
When he wrote
Chivalry
, Mr. Cabell was yet young enough to view the
code less with the appraising eye of a pawnbroker than with the ardent
eye of an amateur. He knew its value, but he did not know its price. So
he made of it the thesis for a dizain of beautiful happenings that are
almost flawless in their verbal beauty.

It is perhaps of historical interest here to record the esteem in which
Mark Twain held the genius of Mr. Cabell as it was manifested as early
as a dozen years ago. Mr. Cabell wrote
The Soul of Melicent
, or, as it
was 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 knowledge
mitigates the pleasure, no doubt, of those who still, after his fifteen
years of writing, encounter him intermittently with a feeling of having
made a great literary discovery. The truth is that Mr. Cabell has been
discovered over and over with each succeeding book from that first fine
enthusiasm with which Percival Pollard reviewed
The Eagle's Shadow
to
that generous acknowledgment by Hugh Walpole that no one in England,
save perhaps Conrad and Hardy, was so sure of literary permanence as
James Branch Cabell.

With
The Cream of the Jest, Beyond Life
, and
Figures of Earth
before
him, 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 oblivion
for such a thesaurus of ironic wit and fine fantasy, mellow wisdom and
strange beauty as
Jurgen
. But to appreciate the tales of
Chivalry
is, it seems, a gift more frequently reserved for the general reader
than for the professional literary evaluator. Certainly years before
discussion of Cabell was artificially augmented by the suppression of
Jurgen
there were many genuine lovers of romance who had read these
tales with pure enjoyment. That they did not analyse and articulate
their enjoyment for the edification of others does not lessen the
quality of their appreciation. Even in those years they found in
Cabell's early tales what we find who have since been directed to them
by the curiosity engendered by his later work, namely, a superb
craftsmanship in recreating a vanished age, an atmosphere in keeping
with the themes, a fluid, graceful, personal style, a poetic ecstasy, a
fine sense of drama, and a unity and symmetry which are the hall-marks
of literary genius.

BURTON RASCOE. New York City, September, 1921.

Imprimis, as concerns the authenticity of these tales perhaps the less
debate may be the higher wisdom, if only because this Nicolas de Caen,
by common report, was never a Gradgrindian. And in this volume in
particular, writing it (as Nicolas is supposed to have done) in 1470, as
a dependant on the Duke of Burgundy, it were but human nature should he,
in dealing with the putative descendants of Dom Manuel and Alianora of
Provence, be niggardly in his ascription of praiseworthy traits to any
member of the house of Lancaster or of Valois. Rather must one in common
reason accept old Nicolas as confessedly a partisan writer, who upon
occasion will recolor an event with such nuances as will be least
inconvenient to a Yorkist and Burgundian bias.

The reteller of these stories needs in addition to plead guilty of
having abridged the tales with a free hand. Item, these tales have been
a trifle pulled about, most notably in "The Story of the Satraps," where
it seemed advantageous, on reflection, to put into Gloucester's mouth a
history which in the original version was related
ab ovo
, and as a
sort of bungling prologue to the story proper.