by Hugh Walpole
In England the case is fairly plain. The war has quite definitely marked off the novelists who began to fascinate us some time before 1895 as of an older generation. That does not mean that they no longer interest us — far from it — but Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, George Moore, Rudyard Kipling, and, in some degree, H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett, are now definitely accepted figures. We know what they can do. “The figure in the carpet” is, in each case, finally marked out for us. They have staked their claim for, at any rate, some fragments of immortality.
These men were followed in England by a group of writers who suffered the misfortune of definition when they were still in their literary cradles. Somewhere about 1912 Henry James critically delivered himself in the “Times Literary Supplement” concerning the younger generation of English novelists. After discussing the work of such seniors as Joseph Conrad, Arnold Bennett, and H. G. Wells, he grouped together comparative children like Compton Mackenzie, D. H. Lawrence, and Gilbert Cannan. This started a fashion. These unhappy ones, with certain reluctant additions, were, before they had escaped from their literary teens, christened the New Realists, or the Younger Novelists or the Neo-Romanticists. Until the war buried their youth in a common grave they were estimated with a critical seriousness that both their immaturity and their own hesitation should have forbidden. The war has at least destroyed that grouping, although I perceive, once and again, belated stragglers like Mrs. Gerould make lamentable attempts at some reassertion of it. Some of those younger novelists have already ceased to entertain us; two of the ablest of them, E. M. Foster and D. H. Lawrence, have published no fiction within the last five years. On the other hand, new and admirable examples of the younger fiction have appeared — Frank Swinnerton, Ethel Sidgwick, Brett Young, Frederick Niven (the best Scottish novelist since the author of “The House of the Green Shutters”), Clemence Dane, Virginia Woolf. Books so opposite as J. D. Beresford’s “God’s Counterpoint,” Swinnerton’s “Nocturne,” Brett Young’s “Crescent Moon,” Compton Mackenzie’s “Poor Relations,” and Clemence Dane’s “Legend” prove quite clearly at this moment both that no general grouping is possible and that much work is being done in England that is valuable and of important promise.
Camps are formed, battles are fought, criticism is active and alive. The future of the novel so far as England is concerned should be eventful and dramatic.
What of the novel in America? Here, also, there are pessimists. I believe there to be small justification for that pessimism. It seems to be true that the American novelists of the older school are, with the definite exceptions of Booth Tarkington and Ellen Glasgow, scarcely maintaining their earlier standards. Some of them, like Owen Wister and Mary Wilkins Freeman, have apparently said their say. Others, like Edith Wharton, have been interrupted by the recent war.
No visitor can be six months in America, however, without realizing with an eager sense of excitement the new literature which the country is now producing. It is not my province to speak of poetry or belles-lettres, but the novel offers examples enough. There is, for instance, Joseph Hergesheimer, who has received in England a more eager critical attention than any American novelist since Stephen Crane and Frank Norris. There is Miss Cather, whose “O Pioneers!” and “My Antonia” are masterpieces of American life and ideas. There is Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio,” and Mr. Fuessle’s “Flail.” Add the stories of Harvey O’Higgins and Fannie Hurst and Edna Ferber, and the humor, absolutely new, utterly American, of Don Marquis, Ring Lardner, and George Ade. I mention writers who have given me pleasure in the six months of my stay here; there must be many others whose work limitations of time have hindered me from approaching. Here, at any rate, is sufficient challenge to any pessimist, and such critics as H. L. Mencken, Burton Rascoe, Francis Hackett, and others are making the challenge sufficiently audible. There is a new American fiction — fiction that has burst the sentimental bonds that so long bound it. Foreigners need no longer hesitate in despair between the slushy stupidity of the imbecile Far Western story and the innocent melodramatics of the New York chronicle. Here is now God’s plenty at last, and it will be a happy thing for the world outside when the full discovery of this is made.
There is also James Branch Cabell. No one travelling around the United States of America during these last months, no one at least who is interested in literature, can escape the persistent echo of that name. It may be since the stupid and entirely ludicrous censorship of “Jurgen” that Mr. Cabell has floated into a new world of discussion. I don’t know. I am definitely speaking of the period anterior to that censorship. I had not been two weeks in the United States before someone said to me: “Well, at any rate, there is Cabell.” That was a new name to me. I was given “Beyond Life” to read. My excitement during the discovery of that perverse and eloquent testament was one of the happiest moments of my American stay. I spent then a wild and eccentric search after his earlier masterpieces. Inside the cover of “Beyond Life” there were the titles of no less than fourteen books. I could see from the one which I held in my hand that Mr. Cabell was no careless writer. He had been writing then for many years and he was unobtainable! “No, he has never had any success,” a bookseller told me. “No one ever asks for his books.”
That situation is now changed. There are, I imagine, a great many more persons in the United States of America asking for “Jurgen” than are likely to obtain it. That good, at any rate, an idiotic censorship has done.
I have now, after six months’ hard work, secured all the works of James Branch Cabell save only the records of his Virginian ancestors and relations, the chronicle of whose nativities and mortalities is not intended for a visiting stranger. I have read them all, and I am amazed that this remarkable and original talent has been at America’s service for nearly twenty years, its patient waiting entirely unrewarded whether by the public or the critics or even the superior cranks.
Let it be said at once that Cabell’s art will always be a sign for hostilities. Not only will he remain, in all probability, forever alien to the general public, but he will also, I suspect, be to the end of time a cause for division among cultivated and experienced readers.
His style is also at once a battleground. It is the easiest thing in the world to denounce it as affected, perverse, unnatural, and forced. It would be at once an artificial style were it not entirely natural to the man. Anyone who reads the books in their chronological sequence will perceive the first diffident testing of it in such early works as “Chivalry” and “Gallantry”; then the acquiescence in it, as though the writer said to himself— “Well, this is what I am — I will rebel against it no longer”; and the final triumphant perfection of it in “Beyond Life” and “Jurgen.”
Mr. Cabell began to write when the romantic movement was in full swing. Stevenson had left behind him a fine crop of cloak and sword artifices. These were the days of Crockett and Weyman. Of “When Knighthood was in Flower,” of “The Heart of Princess Osra,” of “Richard Carvel,” and “Janice Meredith,” and finally of “The Forest Lovers.” In the fierce swing back towards realism that followed we were carried, it may be, too far in the opposite direction. It is probable that Cabell was conscious in the very beginning of this impending reaction. In both “Chivalry” and “Gallantry” there is a note of irony far indeed from the innocent sentimentalities of his romantic competitors, but it is, as yet, irony very slightly enforced. “Chivalry” need not detain us, although it seems most strange that there were so few readers of that volume to detect in the swing of the prose, the brilliance of the coloring, and the gay movement of the figures something exceptional and arresting.
“Gallantry” is a more serious affair. At first sight, with its “Proems” and pictures by Howard Pyle and “Explicits” and the rest, it seems to be of the Maurice Hewlett school. Cabell has inherited these paraphernalia, and it looks now as though he will always retain them. A kind of defiant flag flung against the camp of the realists — irritating them, indeed
, quite as sufficiently as the author can ever have expected.
“Gallantry” is in its inception a string of stories about the Jacobean period in England and France. It has all the right furniture; the masculine heroine scorning the effeminate hero, the eavesdropping behind screens, the duel in the woods, the magnanimous man of iron, the flippant exquisite, the last moment’s rescue. Cabell uses these with a delightful gusto, but they are old tricks, and some of them are allowed a too frequent repetition. Nevertheless, here for the first time some of the author’s peculiar gifts are apparent. The stories are quite definitely independent, with the very slightest links connecting them, and yet, in these links and in the abundant and amusingly mock serious politics scattered about the pages, there is Cabell’s first hint to the reader that he is building something more than a merely imposing erection.
If the reader will follow all the stories in the volume in their given sequence, he will gradually perceive that a world of politics and permanent history is passing before him, and behind this world there is a deeper world still, a world that has no boundary of material time, a background against which the figures of the mythology of Greece and Rome and Egypt and the Middle Ages, of the eighteenth century and the twentieth, mingle with equal sight and equal blindness.
The two chief masculine figures of these tales, the Duke of Ormskirk and the dastardly Vanringham, demonstrate the first placing upon the stage of Cabell’s two dominant actors. These figures are recurrent through all the later books, and I have heard it urged in adverse criticism that the author is monotonous in his use of them. I believe the exact opposite to be the truer judgment. The author, as is apparent in his later inclusion of all his novels under the single term “Biography,” is engaged in the history of the human soul. His books, the reader gradually perceives, are simply varying chapters of the Wandering Jew. He may appear as Ormskirk or Vanringham, as Wycherley or Pope or Sheridan, as Jurgen or Falstaff, as the modern Charteris or Felix Kennaston; behind the ephemeral body the features of the longing, searching, questing soul are the same. There is here, as I think there has never so deliberately been in the work of any single novelist before, the history of an eternal, ceaseless quest.
So soon as the reader discovers this intention, the books fall quite simply into line. From “The Soul of Melicent,” one of the most beautiful and moving of the books, to “The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck,” the most modern of the novels, it is scarcely so much a series of stories as a succession of instalments in one long history. The volume of tales known as “The Certain Hour” gives this most plainly. Outwardly and for the casual reader, these are stories concerned with the hour when the poet comes into sudden, flashing, blinding contact with beauty. From the mists and bizarre splendors of the Middle Ages, through the Elizabethan seventeenth and the Queen Anne eighteenth centuries, through the humors of Sheridan and nineteenth-century Grub Street to the modern Virginian world the poet’s quest of beauty persists, hoping, suddenly exultant, ultimately defeated. The stories are told with varying success. The Shakespeare story, like all Shakespeare stories, is disappointing; the Sheridan episode definitely poor; the Herrick chronicle, to one reader at any rate, puzzling and obscure. But the two mediaeval histories are excellent, the Wycherley comedy delightful, and the Pope adventure surely one of the best short stories in the English language. “The Certain Hour” is, I believe, the only book by Mr. Cabell yet published in England. It fell, I am informed, dead at its birth. Was there not a single critic in England aware of that chronicle of Mr. Pope’s love affair, and were the bookshops of London and Edinburgh so overloaded with masterpieces that there was no room for a new one? And, more serious thought, are we now missing, year by year, other books that would do credit to our literary history? And yet I am told continually that never has there been a time when original talent was so easily recognized. I wonder.
The most casual reader, at the close of “The Certain Hour,” must feel that he has been reading something more than a series of pleasant stories. Mr. Charteris, dreaming under the battered statue on the green campus of his Alma Mater, has obviously some kinship with the figures of the distant centuries that have preceded him. It has been then a story of reincarnation — Kipling’s “Brushwood Boy,” Arnold’s “Phra the Phoenician,” and the rest. And yet not that entirely. In most reincarnation stories it is the contrast of the backgrounds that gives the interest to the performance. Here, it is the central figure that matters. The pathos of the poet, his frustration and still, at the very last, his persistent hope, makes the varying centuries of scarcely any effect, so immortal is it.
“It is only by preserving faith in human dreams that we may, after all, perhaps some day make them come true.” This text from “The Cream of the Jest” is at the very heart of all this long chronicle. In spite of its qualifying clauses it is Cabell’s final assertion of immortality. His hero is, after all, even now, only in the midst of his quest.
We come, then, to the modern novels, the modern fragments in the long, as yet uncompleted history. These are “The Eagle’s Shadow,”
“The Cords of Vanity,” and “The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck.” These three of all the books are the most vulnerable to attack. They must seem to the reader who picks them up casually, confused, unpleasant, and uncompleted. “The Eagle’s Shadow,” which is an early work, need not detain us. “The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck” remains a very admirable example of Cabell’s modern work. It is, superficially, the familiar story of the old husband and the young wife. It has pathos, humor, a pleasant background of modern Virginia; but, when it is read without any sense of the general scheme of which it forms a part, it must appear unsatisfactory. Mr. Cabell is always more deeply interested in the stream of life that flows beneath his characters than in the characters themselves. In the accepted, conventional sense of the word he is scarcely a novelist at all. He takes shocking liberties with his individuals as human beings. He is not, I think, very deeply aware of the motives that move ordinary minds. He is not, in the debased Freudian sense, a modern psychologist; we may thank heaven that he is not — there are plenty of others. It follows that the heroine of “The Rivet” is irrational and spasmodic.
She loves and she loves not, she accepts and she rejects, and the reader must simply take the author’s word for it. Mr. Cabell here is too ready to cover up weak spots with a motto, an epigram, a footnote. “This is really not my game at all,” he seems to say to us. “I don’t understand the stupid female. I have to include her because my Eternal Hero meets her at this moment, but I know very little about her and she is not important.”
All this is simply to emphasize that Cabell is not a modern realist. In “Beyond Life,” which is his magnificent, unequivocal, defiant testament, he proclaims again and again that he is not. We have had quite enough in modern criticism of the determination of critics to force writers into some shape or form that they could never possibly support. There is no need to commit this crime over Cabell, but it is a legitimate criticism, I think, that, being what he is, he would be wiser to leave alone themes that demand realism and psychological analysis for true revelation. Nevertheless, the very limitations of “The Cords of Vanity” and “The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck” make them remarkable books. They are unlike any other novels in the English language. The nearest in kind are the “Halfway House” and the “Open Country” of Maurice Hewlett, but those comedies have nothing of Cabell’s peculiar qualities ‘ and are orderly and straightforward histories compared with these odd Virginian ironies.
“The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck” concluded Cabell’s middle period. It is with these latest works— “The Cream of the Jest,”
“Beyond Life,” and “Jurgen” — that he has reached the full command of his talent. Among many true and many false things that George Moore has said in the course of his self-revealing history there is that admirable verity: “All except an emotional understanding is worthless in art.” That is so true that it is astonishing that so many hon
est critics should be able to forget it. But the converse is also true, namely, that there is nothing so blinding to true criticism as an emotional understanding.
I am very conscious of this same converse in my estimation of these three books of Mr. Cabell’s. I know that they are not perfect. I am aware that greater than they have been written in the past and that, in all probability, greater than they will be written again. I am aware also that contemporary criticism must be, nine times out of every ten, a case of blind leading the blind. Nevertheless, with the single exception of Joseph Hergesheimer’s work, I know of no three books by one and the same author written in the last ten years that have given me so vivid a sense of a new, defiant, and genuine personality, whose arrival on the scene must make a definite impression upon English literature. Whom have we had within the last ten years? Mr. E. M. Forster ceased to write with “Howard’s End,” which was published, I think, in 1910. Mr. D. H. Lawrence? The impression made by “Sons and Lovers” was not confirmed. Edgar Lee Masters? To me, at any rate, the author of one book. Mr. Lytton Strachey? So far only one book. James Joyce? “Ulysses” is surely a poor second to “The Portrait of an Artist.” Virginia Woolf? “Night and Day” is not quite so good as “The Voyage Out”; it ought to have been better. Sporadic works of individual talent, quite a number; and there are the poets — Robert Nichols, Sassoon, Vachel Lindsay, Robert Frost, and many others. But I am only the more strongly confirmed in my confidence after such a retrospect that no writer, new to us in the last ten years, has revealed, in English, so arresting a personality as has James Branch Cabell in these three books.
What do we ask for in a new writer? Individuality, independence of thought, courage, and above all what George Moore (to quote him once again) has called “the great realism of the idea.” All these things are in the three books absolutely displayed. You may dislike “Beyond Life”; it may irritate you profoundly. You may curse the man’s affectations and poses (they are of course not affectations and poses at all). You may condemn him as narrow and pedantic and far from life as it is. He acknowledges all these things. He calls his book “Beyond Life,” and it is on the world beyond life that his gaze is resolutely fixed. That will naturally irritate you whose duty it is to number the holes in the spout of your neighbor’s gardening watering-can. But at least you must admit that he has been truthful with you. His man Charteris says at once: “It is by the grace of romance that man has been exalted above the other animals,” and in close connection with this: “The cornerstone of chivalry I take to be the idea of vicarship; for the chivalrous person is, in his own eyes at least, the child of God, and goes about this world as his Father’s representative in an alien country.”