Figures of Earth: A Comedy of Appearances

by James Branch Cabell

  MY DEAR LEWIS:

  To you (whom I take to be as familiar with the Manuelian cycle ofromance as is any person now alive) it has for some while appeared, Iknow, a not uncurious circumstance that in the _Key to the Popular Talesof Poictesme_ there should have been included so little directlyrelative to Manuel himself. No reader of the _Popular Tales_ (as Irecall your saying at the Alum when we talked over, among so many othermatters, this monumental book) can fail to note that always Dom Manuellooms obscurely in the background, somewhat as do King Arthur andwhite-bearded Charlemagne in their several cycles, dispensing justiceand bestowing rewards, and generally arranging the future, for thesurvivors of the outcome of stories which more intimately concernthemselves with Anavalt and Coth and Holden, and with Kerin and Ninzianand Gonfal and Donander, and with Miramon (in his role of Manuel'sseneschal), or even with Sclaug and Thragnar, than with the liege-lordof Poictesme. Except in the old sixteenth-century chapbook (unknown toyou, I believe, and never reprinted since 1822, and not ever modernizedinto any cognizable spelling), there seems to have been nowhere anEnglish rendering of the legends in which Dom Manuel is really the mainfigure.

  Well, this book attempts to supply that desideratum, and is, so far asthe writer is aware, the one fairly complete epitome in modern Englishof the Manuelian historiography not included by Lewistam which has yetbeen prepared.

  It is obvious, of course, that in a single volume of this bulk therecould not be included more than a selection from the great body of mythswhich, we may assume, have accumulated gradually round the mighty thoughshadowy figure of Manuel the Redeemer. Instead, my aim has been to makechoice of such stories and traditions as seemed most fit to be cast intothe shape of a connected narrative and regular sequence of events; tolend to all that wholesome, edifying and optimistic tone which inreading-matter is so generally preferable to mere intelligence; andmeanwhile to preserve as much of the quaint style of the gestes as isconsistent with clearness. Then, too, in the original mediaevalromances, both in their prose and metrical form, there are occasionalallusions to natural processes which make these stories unfit to beplaced in the hands of American readers, who, as a body, attest theirrespectability by insisting that their parents were guilty ofunmentionable conduct; and such passages of course necessitateconsiderable editing.

  II

  No schoolboy (and far less the scholastic chronicler of those last finalupshots for whose furtherance "Hannibal invaded Rome and Erasmus wrotein Oxford cloisters") needs nowadays to be told that the Manuel of theselegends is to all intents a fictitious person. That in the earlier halfof the thirteenth century there was ruling over the Poictoumois apowerful chieftain named Manuel, nobody has of late disputed seriously.But the events of the actual human existence of this Lord ofPoictesme--very much as the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa has beenidentified with the wood-demon Barbatos, and the prophet Elijah, "caughtup into the chariot of the Vedic Vayu," has become one with the SlavonicPerun,--have been inextricably blended with the legends of the DirghicManu-Elul, Lord of August.

  Thus, even the irregularity in Manuel's eyes is taken by Vanderhoffen,in his _Tudor Tales_, to be a myth connecting Manuel with the VedicRudra and the Russian Magarko and the Servian Vii,--"and everybeneficent storm-god represented with his eye perpetually winking (likesheet lightning), lest his concentrated look (the thunderbolt) shouldreduce the universe to ashes.... His watery parentage, and thestorm-god's relationship with a swan-maiden of the Apsarasas (typifyingthe mists and clouds), and with Freydis the fire queen, are equallyobvious: whereas Niafer is plainly a variant of Nephthys, Lady of theHouse, whose personality Dr. Budge sums up as 'the goddess of the deathwhich is not eternal,' or Nerthus, the Subterranean Earth, which thewarm rainstorm quickens to life and fertility."

  All this seems dull enough to be plausible. Yet no less an authoritythan Charles Garnier has replied, in rather indignant rebuttal: "Qu'ontete en realite Manuel et Siegfried, Achille et Rustem? Par quelsexploits ont-ils merite l'eternelle admiration que leur ont vouee leshommes de leur race? Nul ne repondra jamais a ces questions.... MaisPoictesme croit a la realite de cette figure que ses romans ont faite sibelle, car le pays n'a pas d'autre histoire. Cette figure du ComteManuel est reelle d'ailleurs, car elle est l'image purifiee de la racequi l'a produite, et, si on peut s'exprimer ainsi, l'incarnation de songenie."

  --Which is quite just, and, when you come to think it over, proves DomManuel to be nowadays, for practical purposes, at least as real as Dr.Paul Vanderhoffen.

  III

  Between the two main epic cycles of Poictesme, as embodied in _LesGestes de Manuel_ and _La Haulte Histoire de Jurgen_, more or lesscomparison is inevitable. And Codman, I believe, has put the gist of thematter succinctly enough.

  Says Codman: "The Gestes are mundane stories, the History is a cosmicaffair, in that, where Manuel faces the world, Jurgen considers theuniverse.... Dom Manuel is the Achilles of Poictesme, as Jurgen is itsUlysses."

  And, roughly, the distinction serves. Yet minute considerationdiscovers, I think, in these two sets of legends a more profound, ifsubtler, difference, in the handling of the protagonist: with Jurgen allof the physical and mental man is rendered as a matter of course;whereas in dealing with Manuel there is, always, I believe, a certainperceptible and strange, if not inexplicable, aloofness. Manuel did thusand thus, Manuel said so and so, these legends recount: yes, but neveranywhere have I detected any firm assertion as to Manuel's thoughts andemotions, nor any peep into the workings of this hero's mind. He is"done" from the outside, always at arm's length. It is not merely thatManuel's nature is tinctured with the cool unhumanness of his father thewater-demon: rather, these old poets of Poictesme would seem, whether ofintention or no, to have dealt with their national hero as a person,howsoever admirable in many of his exploits, whom they have never beenable altogether to love, or entirely to sympathize with, or to viewquite without distrust.

  There are several ways of accounting for this fact,--ranging from thehurtful as well as beneficent aspect of the storm-god, to the naturalinability of a poet to understand a man who succeeds in everything: butthe fact is, after all, of no present importance save that it may wellhave prompted Lewistam to scamp his dealings with this always somewhatambiguous Manuel, and so to omit the hereinafter included legends, asunsuited to the clearer and sunnier atmosphere of the _Popular Tales_.

  For my part, I am quite content, in this Comedy of Appearances, tofollow the old romancers' lead. "Such and such things were said and doneby our great Manuel," they say to us, in effect: "such and such were theappearances, and do you make what you can of them."

  I say that, too, with the addition that in real life, also, such is thefashion in which we are compelled to deal with all happenings and withall our fellows, whether they wear or lack the gaudy name of heroism.

  Dumbarton Grange

  October, 1920

  PART ONE

  THE BOOK OF CREDIT

  TO

  WILSON FOLLETT

  Then _answered the Magician dredefully: Manuel, Manuel, now I shallshewe unto thee many bokes of_ Nygromancy, _and howe thou shalt cum byit lyghtly and knowe the practyse therein. And, moreouer, I shall sheweand informe you so that thou shall have thy Desyre, whereby my thynke itis a great Gyfte for so lytyll a doynge_.