by Hugh Walpole
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.