Chapter II: Cabell Major

The Poictesme which Mr. Cabell has created and gradually populated with a whole dynasty and its subjects, friends, and enemies, lies somewhere on the map of Europe--just where, there are few precise geographers to say. The country was a fief of the wicked King Ferdinand of Castile and Léon, who beheaded his old friend, the rightful count, to make a place for Manuel. At that time, which was 1234, Poictesme was in the hands of the Northmen under Duke Asmund, later expelled. Not too far from Provence, neither was it too far from Scotland, both of which Manuel visited on his way to claim his new possession. It had a sea-coast, the cities of Bellegarde and Storisende in which Manuel ordinarily lived, and many dark woods and twilight heaths and haunted mountains. It engaged in diplomatic relations with France and England, to say nothing of less formal contacts between its rulers and all the countries, real or imagined, of the medieval universe. Scandinavia poetically impinged upon the province, with Constantinople and Barbary, Massilia, Aquitaine, Navarre, Portugal, Rome, Alexandria, Arcadia, Olympus, Asgard, and the Jerusalems Old and New. Though it seems to have seen its great days in the thirteenth century, it was still prosperous as late as the eighteenth. Nothing, indeed, in the matter of geography or history is impossible to Poictesme, for it is, of course, a pure creation. Mr. Cabell may please himself with skirting actuality in a hundred or a thousand details, as he does; but his innumerable elusions are only incidental to a deliberate scheme. Having found no world in which he could be satisfied to build the structure of his art, he has invented and completed one.

Because he has been in one of his professions a genealogist, Mr. Cabell sees Poictesme with something of the genealogist’s eye. Manuel, Count and Redeemer of the province, is also its prime ancestor. From his heroic loins spring all the later Cabellian generations, whether in Poictesme or out of it. By Niafer he is the father of the Melicent of _Domnei_, the Dorothy la Désirée of _Jurgen_, the Ettarre of _The Cream of the Jest_, as well as of the Emmerick who succeeds him; this line reaches, by way of the short stories, down through the English Allonbys and Bulmers to the American Rudolph Musgrave and Felix Kennaston and Robert Etheridge Townsend of _The Cords of Vanity_ and _The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck_. By Alianora of Provence, technically wife of Henry III of England, Manuel is the father of Edward I, whose descendants are numerous and impressive. In a different fashion Manuel has the help of Freydis in the process of informing with almost human fire the ten figures which he has modeled and which move among mankind as the poets of _The Certain Hour_, wherein Shakspere and Herrick and Wycherley and Pope and Sheridan are brothers in clay of the John Charteris who is Mr. Cabell’s mouthpiece in _Beyond Life_. Moreover, the skein of all these lines of descent is tangled. The blood of Manuel touches that of the lords of Puysange, so famous in Poictesme and in so many Cabell stories; Edward Longshanks is reprehensibly related to the Bulmers; Cynthia Allonby appears as the Dark Lady of Shakspere. Even though Mr. Cabell has in his later books, and in the later editions of his earlier books, laid an increasing emphasis upon the genealogical unity of his charters, he from the first worked in a manner which made it possible for him thus to draw them together when he was ready.

This unity in Poictesme has thrown into a higher and higher relief the two great figures who dominate it, not only because they are eminent in that country but because they between them manage to exhibit virtually all the human qualities which interest Mr. Cabell. They are Manuel the Redeemer and Jurgen the pawnbroker. Characteristically, their creator refers to what he calls his original sources, _Les Gestes de Manuel_ and _La Haulte Histoire de Jurgen_, and he unearths a literary historian to say for him that: “the Gestes are mundane stories, the History is a cosmic affair, in that, where Manuel faces the world, Jurgen considers the universe.... Dom Manuel is the Achilles of Poictesme, as Jurgen is its Ulysses.” In his own person Mr. Cabell goes on to say: “Now, roughly, the distinction serves. Yet minute consideration discovers, I think, in these two sets of legends a more profound, if subtler, difference, in the handling of the protagonist: with Jurgen all of the physical and mental man is rendered as a matter of course; whereas in dealing with Manuel there is, always, I believe, a certain perceptible and strange, if not inexplicable, aloofness. Manuel did thus and thus, Manuel said so and so, these legends recount: yes, but never anywhere have I detected any firm assertion as to Manuel’s thoughts and emotions, nor any peep into the workings of this hero’s mind.... These old poets of Poictesme would seem, whether of intention or no, to have dealt with their national hero as an admirable person whom they have never been able altogether to love, or entirely to sympathize with, or to view quite without distrust.” Mr. Cabell hints that this may be due to “the natural inability of a poet to understand a man who succeeds in everything,” but he himself avers that he is content to follow the old romancers, pointing out that “in real life ... such is the fashion in which we are compelled to deal with all happenings and with all our fellows, whether they wear or lack the gaudy name of heroism.”

Thus cryptically Mr. Cabell suggests that in _Figures of Earth_, his novel devoted to Manuel, he has set himself to portray a man of action busy with his diverse affairs. Manuel, it is true, is essentially an artist. What seems to him his greatest aim is to mold out of clay, in the manner of the gods, certain figures in his own image. But the burden of necessity constantly interrupts him. He is obliged to turn aside from these concerns to redeem and rule Poictesme, to love various women, and to bear himself among men as becomes a hero of his station. Or rather, he permits himself so to be obliged. When he appears upon the scene he is a swineherd in the mythical regions of Rathgor and Lower Targamon. With Suskind, a fairy mistress uncorrupted by sin or salvation, he has studied “the secret of preserving that dissatisfaction which is divine where all else falls away with age into the acquiescence of beasts.” Suskind, however, Manuel deserts because he is tempted by the prospects of human glory. At first he is confident enough to take for his motto: “I follow after my own thinking and my own desires.” But among mankind he finds that success is to be purchased at another price, and that the world is eager to be deceived, so he changes his motto to _Mundus vult decipi_. Though at his voice all spells are broken and at his touch all walls tumble down, he is steadily subdued to the color of the universe he lives in. It costs him thirty years to win back Niafer, whom once in his arrogance he had allowed Grandfather Death to take rather than Manuel, but who turns out to be much like any other wife. Having been made count of Poictesme for no particular reason of his own, he wastes enormous energies in redeeming it, and then is bored by the duties thereby brought upon him. Of the figures which he has, with the unearthly assistance of Queen Freydis, informed with fire, the one which Manuel most values is Sesphra, whose name, after all, is but Phrases transposed. Eventually, this hero with the proud heart spends most of his days in the Room of Ageus, which is an anagram for Usage. Tempted by Suskind to return to her high-hearted garden, he pleads an excuse in his daughter Melicent, though the child actually wearies him whenever he has played with her a quarter of an hour; and when he perceives the insidious mark of Suskind upon Melicent, he goes out and slays the lovely spirit, “whose heart and life was April, and who plotted courageously against the orderings of unimaginative gods.” Thereafter it required Grandfather Death to fetch Manuel back to the dim pool of Haranton, where still awaited him the figure of himself which he had long ago begun and never finished.

“Oh, certainly,” says Manuel to Grandfather Death, “Count Manuel’s achievements were notable and such as were not known anywhere before, and men will talk of them for a long while. Yet, looking back,--now that this famed Count of Poictesme means less to me,--why, I seem to see only the strivings of an ape reft of his tail, and grown rusty at climbing, who has reeled blunderingly from mystery to mystery, with pathetic makeshifts, not understanding anything, greedy in all desires, and always honeycombed with poltroonery. So in a secret place his youth was put away in exchange for a prize that was hardly worth the having; and the fine geas [bond or obligation] which his mother laid upon him was exchanged for the common geas of what seems expected.” This, in half a paragraph, is Mr. Cabell’s allegory of worldly success. Through the career of such a demi-demon as Manuel runs the enlarging thread of defeat; the other side of all his triumphs wears the face of loss. Hope falters and courage compromises. The mightiest champion is no better off than Gulliver when he wakes in Lilliput and finds himself bound by countless threads in one helpless position. And the mightiest champion is likely to be worse off, for the chances are that he will accept his threads and by and by make virtues of them.

Thus in _Figures of Earth_, which is called A Comedy of Appearances, the ordinary formula of comedy is reversed. To most ironic commentators it seems amusing that duped boys should cling to visions instead of adjusting themselves with a minimum of conflict to the solid, prudent realities. No story, to such commentators, seems so salutary, and none is employed by them so frequently, as the story of a youth who unlearns unwisdom in the school of secular experience, arriving, at the end, at the conclusion that as the common is the sensible, it is no doubt also the excellent. Though Mr. Cabell is ironic enough, he does not find undeniable doctrine taught in the secular schools. The dreams of youth come back to haunt the wisest men, who may have to admit that the dreams are of a more persistent substance than the daily phantasms which they have pursued. The average millions, who have had no such dreams or who have been so disloyal to them that they remember them only as fumblings in the dark, exult at the spectacle of a hero deprived gradually of the use of his bright wings and harnessed to the customary furrow. This exultation Mr. Cabell challenges. What to him appears comic in the situation is not that the youth should have resisted the world so long but that he should have been taken in by it so completely. The surrender would be tragic were it not shared by so many men and by them so stoutly rationalized into victory. For such rationalizing Mr. Cabell in _Figures of Earth_ reserves his chief laughter. As another might laugh at the promises of Suskind, he laughs at the homely counsels of Niafer. For the center of genuine existence does not in his apprehension coincide with the center of busy mediocrity. He is of another country. In that other country the rapture of love endures without subsiding into comfortable friendship, and glory is measured by a sense of aims perfectly achieved rather than by the buzz of imbecile applause from trivial onlookers. How preposterous that Manuel should have emigrated from such a region to be a commonplace husband and count and father!

_James Branch Cabell fecit_

Copied from the frontispiece of: +Popular Tales of
Poictesme+/Supernatural, Romantic and/Legendary/Collected and
Illustrated/by John Frederick Lewistam/(_drawing_)/London:/Sampson
Howe, Son, and Marsden,/ 24, Ludgate Hill./1855./The Right of
Translation is reserved./

This map, be it noted, omits the Bas-Taunenois region (Val-Ardray),
which in the thirteenth century formed the northern and eastern
frontier of Poictesme. In Val-Ardray were the old Forest of Bovion
(now, like a great part of Acaire, cleared ground) and the plains of
the Ardre River, then defended (as is shown) by Aradol and, further
east, by the fortresses of Nointel, Basardra, Yair and Upper Ardra.

This district would appear to have been, somewhat naively, left
out by Lewistam so as to make room for his map’s title. A similar
awkwardness in cartographic art has, one deduces, led to the
omission of Lorcha, so often mentioned in the text of the _Popular
Tales_,--that evil tower which stood, of course, in Acaire, about
midway between Asch and the Château des Roches. It is noteworthy,
for the rest, that this map retains the old name Beauvillage for the
little town more ambitiously entitled, since the seventeenth century,
Beauséant. Bülg, doubtless, is followed here.

John Bulmer’s marriage in the former Forest of Acaire, it is
estimated, took place near this map’s +M+ in the word “+FORMER+.”
]

Yet there is, Mr. Cabell knows, an argument which goes still further. If the career of Manuel is centripetal, drawing him into the terrestrial vortex, the career of Jurgen is centrifugal, flinging him off through white space and parti-colored time; and the end of both careers is equally age and decrepitude and the sense of universal vanity. For all men live, whatever their rebellions, under the rule of Koshchei the Deathless, who made things as they are. From that rule even the incredible adventures of the pawnbroker of Poictesme cannot free him. Jurgen, having spoken kindly of things as they are, is for a reward permitted to have a year of youth and to move about in the world with his old head upon his young shoulders, an impish, inquisitive, amorous Faust. _Jurgen_ is called A Comedy of Justice, but the thing its hero seeks is really what is known as poetic justice because it nowhere exists in the mechanical realm of Koshchei. Nonchalantly during this replevined year Jurgen assumes the titles one after the other of duke and prince and king and emperor and pope. As emperor he ventures into hell; as pope he ascends to heaven, where he seats himself impudently upon the very throne of God. The year takes him to the court where Guenevere is a princess, in that flush of loveliness which had not yet become the flower eventually to seem divine to the knights of Arthur; and Jurgen has the love of Guenevere. The year takes him to Cocaigne, where the only law is that every man shall do that which seems good to him, and where Queen Anaïtis, more often known as the Lady of the Lake, instructs him in many perverse and curious arts; and Jurgen has the love of Anaïtis. The year takes him to Pseudopolis, where Grecian Helen lives married to Achilles and warred upon by the hosts of Philistia; and Jurgen, though too prudent to touch her incomparable beauty and thus bring it into comparison with all the beauty he has tasted, is lifted to a fresh vision of the marvels he had long ago perceived in Dorothy la Désirée, Count Manuel’s daughter, whom he loved when he was twenty and a poet. But when, at the end of his great journey, he is offered by Koshchei his choice of these bright women, he sorrowfully rejects all of them. Through knowledge he has lost the code of Chivalry which could have made him suspect divinity in Guenevere; through becoming forty he has lost the zest of the senses which could have made him fix all his desire upon Anaïtis; through infidelity to his old vision of perfection he has lost the courage which might have made him willing to mate with Helen. Though Koshchei with one hand has made him generous offers, Koshchei with the other hand has beaten him. Jurgen finally from too much sugar turns back to honest salt and rejoins his commonplace but comfortable wife.

This much, however, Jurgen owes to the author of _Figures of Earth_: he believes that in thus admitting his tether he has sustained defeat, not gained a victory. “I have become again a creature of use and wont; I am the lackey of prudence and half-measures; and I have put my dreams upon an allowance.... I have failed my vision!... I have failed, and I know very well that every man must fail: and yet my shame is no less bitter. For I am transmuted by time’s handling! I shudder at the thought of living day-in and day-out with my vision.... It does not seem fair, but there is no help for it.” The justice which Jurgen has hunted through the universe is as much an illusion as the success which Manuel captured. The day comes when the incorrigible dreamer, long cured of his phantasms of reality, suddenly discovers that he has not sufficient faith in anything, not even in his own deductions, and that he must go back to earth as naked as he was when he came out of his mother’s womb.

Though the conclusion of _Jurgen_ is devastating, the book itself is a continual delight. The rage of a few zealots has directed attention to certain phallic passages in the narrative, but these so admirably fit the general scheme that only the nimble-snouted root them out and mumble them. For Mr. Cabell, alone among American novelists, the hot writhings and grotesque abandonments of love are as much a part of love’s comedy as the more spiritual perturbations, and he has allowed his irony to play over the body hardly less than over the soul of Jurgen. But the real concern of the uproarious legend is with the voyaging, trafficking soul. Such insolence as Jurgen’s thrusts itself into every forbidden corner and such intelligence as his brings away at least a little wisdom. These are the territories of romance which he is visiting, wherein the world’s imagination has localized the great deeds and emotions which the race remembers; but Jurgen, with his cheeky shrewdness, finds nonsense behind many of the emotions and postures behind many of the deeds. Even in hell there are delusions, for the witty and profound devils who inhabit it are kept busy inventing and executing the torments which men, in the pride of their sins, demand. Indeed, all hell is nothing but an illusion which Koshchei has created for the gratification of vain mankind. Heaven itself, cut by Koshchei on the garish pattern furnished him by Revelations, is another illusion, in which Jurgen’s grandmother lives tenderly nourished upon the blisses which she had expected to find there. And how rollickingly on page after page are ridiculed the prudes of Philistia and the excessive claims of democracy, which is the form of government chosen by the devils, and the pretensions of many orthodoxies and the blindness of sentimentalists and the brevity and unreality of appearances. Jurgen looks in turn at all the bubbles of existence, past or present, and pricks them one by one. At the same time, his story is not a continuous snarling. It is full-bodied, a progression full of beauty and pity and mirth, as if a huge organ should burst into laughter.

It is the symbolism of _Jurgen_ and _Figures of Earth_ which makes them at some points difficult. Mr. Cabell is the most humorous of mythologists. Out of what might seem pedantry if there were less gusto in it, or ignorance if there were less method, he has inextricably jumbled all the mythologies as well as all the histories and geographies. Nor has he hesitated to invent with a large hand. The result is that he crowds his pages with symbols which may be brilliantly suggestive and which may be merely mystification. And mystification, of course, is often irritation. But Mr. Cabell no more minds irritating than he minds mystifying. He works under cover, always by the method of indirection. Not even in a certain priceless copy of _Jurgen_ which he once fully annotated for a friend does he give away all his secret meanings. Allegory lurks where no one has any reason to suspect it; allegory is also sometimes absent from passages wherein by all precedent it ought to be. What reader, in such circumstances, can be quite sure that Mr. Cabell is not having sport with him? No one can be sure, and from the uncertainty springs discomfort in downright bosoms. For downright bosoms this comic poet did not write these books. He writes for scholars who are erudite enough to catch a reasonable share of his allusions but not so literal as to be vexed when an allusion goes over their heads; for worldlings who are sophisticated enough to laugh with him at all follies and yet to take no offense if he hints that perhaps even sophistication may be another folly; for poets who are whole enough to follow him to the moon for visions and still to take pleasure with him when he returns to move gleefully about the earth. All told, these scholars and worldlings and poets make up perhaps a smallish audience. That, however, Mr. Cabell knows perfectly. He understands that it is but an illusion of comic justice to hold that good plays are always performed before good houses.

The Manuel and Jurgen sagas are too rich to be exhausted within the limits of a single book apiece. Melicent, for instance, Manuel’s daughter upon whom Suskind laid her mark, reappears as the radiant heroine of _Domnei_, loved by Perion de la Forêt. Partly because _Domnei_, originally called _The Soul of Melicent_, belongs to the period which produced _Chivalry_, and partly because it pretends to be a prose redaction of _Le Roman de Lusignan_ by Nicolas de Caen, that invented poet, it has but few touches of bitter irony. It is Mr. Cabell’s highest flight in the representation of the extravagant woman-worship developed out of the chivalric code--the worship which began by ascribing to the beloved the qualities of purity and perfection, of beauty and holiness, and ended by virtually identifying her with the divine. This high-flying folly can go no further than it goes in the careers of Perion and Melicent, who are so uplifted by ineffable desire that their souls reach ceaselessly out to each other though obstacles large as continents intervene. For Perion the most deadly battles are but thornpricks in the quest of Melicent; and such is Melicent’s loyalty that the possession of her body by Demetrios of Anatolia leaves her soul immaculate and almost unperturbed. In this tale love is canonized: throned on alabaster above all the vulgar gods it diffuses among its worshipers a crystal radiance in which mortal imperfections perish, or are at least forgotten during rapturous hours.

A cynical rogue like Jurgen might point out that Perion and Melicent have as an asset to their fidelity the advantage that they never meet during their long quest and might insinuate that they are simple creatures who run no risk of any withering contact with the intelligence. Nothing, in any case, pulls them down. Even that second of disappointment which Perion feels when Melicent comes to him in the bloody Court of Stars proves to be but one pulse-beat lost between his old loyalty and its more glorious successor. A consequence of such single-mindedness is that _Domnei_ is unified and dramatic beyond any other of the Cabell novels. It lacks all the hocus-pocus of mythology; it is innocent of symbolism. Melicent and Perion have divided one idea between them, and they cherish the matched halves, as village lovers divide and cherish a sixpence. When Perion, taken prisoner by Demetrios, is threatened with his tortures, Melicent ransoms him with herself given in marriage to the proconsul; and when Melicent, in turn, is threatened with similar agonies, Perion buys the life of Demetrios at a great price and sends him back to her white arms. Their love is so powerful that it infects their world. Demetrios, who cannot understand it, is yet shamed by it. He withholds his greedy hands from Melicent and becomes the honorable rival of Perion. Even Ahasuerus the Jew, after his long scheming has made him master of the Melicent whom he has from the first desired, renounces her, contenting himself with the poor consolation that he, like Demetrios, surpasses Perion in his recognition of the true soul of Melicent. Are these actions merely gestures? Perhaps, but they are never empty. One by one they build up the illusion of a universe wherein love fulfills its blazing promises, out of the reach of fickleness or jealousy or the mere hunger of the senses. And with what steadiness Mr. Cabell unrolls his plot, proceeding from gesture to gesture till all his characters have been purged of their low motives and the lovers stand exultant in the noon of their victory over all unworthiness. With this intentness and steadiness of his conception goes the style of _Domnei_, which is lucid and unvarying lovely.

Connected remotely with the Jurgen saga is _The High Place_, which in lucidity if not in loveliness may be compared with _Domnei_. There is the minor connection that Florian de Puysange has the unlawful blood of Jurgen in him, and the major connection that that blood leads Florian along paths, as far away as the eighteenth century, which dimly recall the paths of Jurgen. For Florian is no single-hearted Perion de la Forêt, struggling forever up one mount of ecstasy. Almost at the beginning of the story he attains the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, Melior, and is thereafter terribly bored by her; the four wives he has had already have not taught him to rise superior to disillusion. Nor is boredom his only fate; he is hoodwinked by her too, and deprived of all his grounds of faith. He who had won her cynically enough, making a pact with Janicot that she was to remain Florian’s wife but a year and that Janicot was to have her child for his fee, finds that the child is not his own but Holy Hoprig’s. Melior is a minx, and Hoprig, whom Poictesme has thought a saint, is a fraud. Beauty and holiness, that is to say, have connived to cheat Florian. This later Jurgen comes then to something like the conclusions of his legendary ancestor, and listens without too angry a dissent to the doctrine of worldly prudence as enunciated by his father: “To submit is the great lesson. I too was once a dreamer: and in dreams there are lessons. But to submit, without dreaming any more, is the great lesson; to submit, without either understanding or repining, and without demanding of life too much of beauty or of holiness, and without shirking the fact that this universe is under no least bond ever to grant us, upon either side of the grave, our desires. To do that, my son, does not satisfy and probably will not ever satisfy a Puysange. But to do that is wisdom.”

Listening without too absolute a consent, for Florian is a Puysange, he yet agrees that in practice the one rule to follow is: “Thou shalt not offend against the notions of thy neighbor.” Florian does not so offend, though he commits, in one way or another, almost all the other offenses possible. True, Mr. Cabell in the end explains that the whole story has been a dream of Florian’s, brought on by his reading of Perrault’s version of the Sleeping Beauty. It is, however, such a dream as would come to a Puysange, with the strain of Jurgen in him. _The High Place_ is as diabolistic as _Domnei_ is devout. The center of neither action lies within the confines of ordinary humanity. Florian is jauntily at ease with Janicot. And it is Janicot, the ancient adversary, who, talking with Michael the archangel, pronounces the commentary and the benediction: “I have never been omnipotent, I am not worshipped in any shining temple even to-day; but always I have been served.... God after god has set rules to bridle and to change the nature of my people. Meanwhile I do not meddle with their natures, I urge them to live in concord with their natures, and to make the most of my kingdom.... Your master is strong, as yet, and I too am strong, but neither of us is strong enough to control men’s dreams. Now, the dreaming of men--mark you, I do not say of humankind, for women are rational creatures,--has an aspiring which is ruthless. It goes beyond decency, it aspires to more of perfectibility than any god has yet been able to provide or even to live up to. So this quite insane aspiring first sets up beautiful and holy gods in heaven, then in the dock; and, judging all by human logic, decrees this god not to be good enough.... It follows that all gods must pass until--perhaps--a god be found who satisfies the requirements of this disastrously exigent human dreaming. It follows that I must perforce go quietly about my kingdom because of this insane toplofty dreaming.”

Thus Janicot furnishes a key to Poictesme: it is a country in which men, fettered as they may be by space and time, by good and evil, dream triumphantly beyond them.