The Certain Hour (Dizain des Poëtes)

by James Branch Cabell

  V

  So much for the plea of us average-novel-readers; and our plea, wethink, is rational. We are "in the market" for a specified article;and human ingenuity, co-operating with human nature, will inevitablyinsure the manufacture of that article as long as any general demandfor it endures.

  Meanwhile, it is small cause for grief that the purchaser of Americannovels prefers Central Park to any "wood near Athens," and is more athome in the Tenderloin than in Camelot. People whose tastes happen tobe literary are entirely too prone to too much long-faced prattle aboutliterature, which, when all is said, is never a controlling factor inanybody's life. The automobile and the telephone, the accomplishmentsof Mr. Edison and Mr. Burbank, and it would be permissible to add ofMr. Rockefeller, influence nowadays, in one fashion or another, everymoment of every living American's existence; whereas had Americaproduced, instead, a second Milton or a Dante, it would at most havecaused a few of us to spend a few spare evenings rather differently.

  Besides, we know--even we average-novel-readers--that America is infact producing her enduring literature day by day, although, as rarelyfails to be the case, those who are contemporaneous with the makers ofthis literature cannot with any certainty point them out. To voice ahoary truism, time alone is the test of "vitality." In our presentflood of books, as in any other flood, it is the froth and scum whichshows most prominently. And the possession of "vitality," here aselsewhere, postulates that its possessor must ultimately perish.

  Nay, by the time these printed pages are first read as printed pages,allusion to those modern authors whom these pages cite--the pre-eminentliterary personages of that hour wherein these pages were written--willinevitably have come to savor somewhat of antiquity: so that sundryreferences herein to the "vital" books now most in vogue will rousemuch that vague shrugging recollection as wakens, say, at a mention of_Dorothy Vernon_ or _Three Weeks_ or _Beverly of Graustark_. And whileat first glance it might seem expedient--in revising the lastproof-sheets of these pages--somewhat to "freshen them up" bysubstituting, for the books herein referred to, the "vital" and morewidely talked-of novels of the summer of 1916, the task would be butwasted labor; since even these fascinating chronicles, one comprehendsforlornly, must needs be equally obsolete by the time theseproof-sheets have been made into a volume. With malice aforethought,therefore, the books and authors named herein stay those which all ofthree years back our reviewers and advertising pages, with perfectgravity, acclaimed as of enduring importance. For the quaintness ofthat opinion, nowadays, may profitably round the moral that there isreally nothing whereto one may fittingly compare a successfulcontribution to "vital" reading-matter, as touches evanescence.

  And this is as it should be. _Tout passe.--L'art robust seul al'eternite_, precisely as Gautier points out, with bracingcommon-sense; and it is excellent thus to comprehend that to-day, asalways, only through exercise of the auctorial virtues of distinctionand clarity, of beauty and symmetry, of tenderness and truth andurbanity, may a man in reason attempt to insure his books againstoblivion's voracity.

  Yet the desire to write perfectly of beautiful happenings is, as thesaying runs, old as the hills--and as immortal. Questionless, therewas many a serviceable brick wasted in Nineveh because finicky personsmust needs be deleting here and there a phrase in favor of its cuneaticsynonym; and it is not improbable that when the outworn sun expires inclinkers its final ray will gild such zealots tinkering with their"style." This, then, is the conclusion of the whole matter. Some fewthere must be in every age and every land of whom life claims nothingvery insistently save that they write perfectly of beautifulhappenings. And even we average-novel-readers know it is such folk whoare to-day making in America that portion of our literature which mayhope for permanency.

  Dumbarton Grange 1914-1916