The Modernism of Mr. Cabell

Showing That Virginia Still Shares the Everyday Sun

JOHN PEALE BISHOP

I HAVE no desire to rediscover James. Branch Cabell, though to do so is now so customary as almost to amount to a profession. Mr. Cabell must by now be a little wary whenever a figure of stoutness with eagle eyes approaches, lest he prove another Cortez. From the days of Percival Pollard, who greeted The Eagle's Shadow, Mr. Cabell's first volume, admiringly, they have been at it, champions as various as Mark Twain, Theodore Roosevelt, and Hugh Walpole, who have stood momently with trumpets before one or another entrance to the Cabellian gardens, blowing praises. And before one gate, Mr. Summer of the Society for the Suppression of Vice still stands, a self righteous angel with an unwavering, flaming sword, lest any venture in to delight in the art of the topiarist and the gross features of the garden god. Hunc lucum tibi dedico consecroque Priape! And even he must, I suppose, be reckoned among the discoverers.

Mr. Cabell has never lacked for judicious praise, no, not in all those many times drawn-out years, when one by one he was adding to his bookshelf the precursors of Jurgen, without appreciable increase in his royalties. Yet always there seems a glint of pitying generosity in the eyes of his admirers. He is regarded a little wistfully, as though he were a graceful anachronism, a beautiful trifler with romance at a time when all right-minded novelists were about their proper business of social criticism. He is hailed as a perfect craftsman in romance, with the after thought that romance is probably an outworn mode.

From an Enchanter Fleeing

AND Mr. Cabell has himself contributed to this impression that he is but raising ghosts from crumbled tombs; ghosts of brave ingenuous boys who had their one hour of wholehearted love before the inevadable compromises came with time, ghostly impeccable girls in a trailing shimmer of silken stuff, their hair antiquely coiffed and frosty with gold in a light that never was from star or sun, centaurs, witches and devils; flawless queens of Troy and Provence, queens indefatigably perverse, with crowns of coral on their heads, and other creatures of a past which has no record on the clock. He has credited his volumes to one and another medieval person, to Nicolas de Caen and such imaginary scribes. He has, in Beyond Life, where more than elsewhere his views on life and letters are made explicit, expressed his evident misprision of realism and other modern modes of literature. He has not hesitated to point out that while books written after the realistic formula have a certain contemporary value, they are not much read after the author's death. And even more in life than in art he holds with romance.

And yet granted that Cabell stands clear of all modern cliques, he is not without his points of contact with the modernists. If he has steeped himself in the literature of Provence' and preRenaissance Italy, why so has Ezra Pound who has instigated several modern movements and is not generally regarded as a reactionary. If he has dehumanized his actors in an effort to make them conform more completely to a general human experience, he is in this at one with Gordon Craig who is usually spoken of as belonging to the future. If he has endeavored to deal with the realities behind the object rather than with the readily observed facts, I understand that the expressionists have a similar aim.

Nor in retiring to his library at Dunbarton Grange has Mr. Cabell so completely cut himself off from American life as he would have us believe. His tales of present day Virginia do, it is true, deal with a scene where every gentleman is armigerous, and it is still possible to find a Robert Etheridge Townsend subscribing somewhat boyishly to the code of gallantry and a Colonel Musgrave directing his life according to a Virginian conception of chivalry. But a man cannot well rid himself of his first twenty years, and the Virginia of Mr. Cabell's youth presents a scene which has little in common with the raucous vigor of Chicago or the pretentious commercialism of New York. It is rather a land where the XXth century followed too closely upon the heels of the XVIIIth, where decay set in before the first fine strength of the pioneer was wasted, a land gracefully faded, intellectually moribund. It was but necessary that Mr. Cabell, in order not to starve, should turn to neglected books and legends already written in impeccable speech. And yet there is ample proof in his writings of his power of appraisal in the world of actual happenings. Consider, for example that satire of the popular mind and the doings of public officers during the recent international conflict in Jurgen, where the scene is laid in Hell, whose religion is patriotism and whose government an enlightened democracy. Compare the estimate of an ex-president in The Cream of the Jest with Mr. E. A. Robinson's poem on Roosevelt written on a similar occasion, and it will be seen how far Mr. Cabell's skepticism passes that of the New England poet, who, for all his pessimism, behind every cloud still finds a wan exhalation shining.

Rhetoric and Speech

IT is in his style that he seems most to savour of antiquation. For Mr. Cabell is much given to rhetoric, not only that fine rhetoric which results from a character viewing himself dramatically, but also that vicious rhetoric which consists of vague and sonorous sentiment added merely for geperal impressiveness. And this style, whose cadences are built upon the elaborate periods of an earlier prose, rather than on the rise and fall of the conversational voice, comes a little artificially to modern ears, which, for no particularly good reason, prefer an illusion of speech.

It is the inflexibility of his style which is responsible for most of Mr. Cabell's failures: this and the thinness of his visual imagination, which too often refuses to find incidents and details to body forth the thought. In this connection it is interesting to remember that it is Christopher Marlowe to whom Mr. Cabell constantly turns as the perfect type of the poet. And while no one could possibly deny that Marlowe is, by sheer genius, in the first order of the English poets, surpassing even Shakespeare in the violence and splendor of his imagination, it must be admitted that the blank verse of his best period is singularly inflexible, that he is magnificently given to rhetoric and that he failed to find any adequate occupation for his titanic personages. Which is not to suggest that Mr. Cabell is another Marlowe, but rather that he has found a consolation for his own shortcomings in that most glorious failure among English poets. Yet when he comes to reread Jurgen, where for once his imagination teems with incident, and no sounding phrase goes wandering without its thought, I do not think that Mr. Cabell will have need for comfort.