Chapter III: Scholia

Though Mr. Cabell has carried out to his own conclusion the most complete scheme of romance ever undertaken by an American romancer, he has met with strange fortunes on his devoted road. At the outset he seemed to slip into a prevailing category, and indeed seems almost to have put on as a disguise the cloak and sword of the prevailing fashion in romance. He prospered then, only, with the passing of the fashion, to fall into a decline of reputation not at all matched by any falling off in the quality of his product. From such a state he was rescued by the turmoil of eminence which followed the attacks upon _Jurgen_. This must have been as annoying to him as it was unjust to his masterpiece; it nevertheless enabled him to consolidate his position and to bring all his books back into circulation, revised to fit his matured scheme. Having stood since that episode in the rank of the later classics, he now perhaps runs the risk of being estimated by the hearsay which everybody knows without being studied by anybody with the care which he requires and deserves. His individual books may be delightful, but they revolve around the central sun of an idea without which he cannot be seen as entirely himself.

Though only of late has he made his dominating idea explicit, he has made it thoroughly explicit in a series of commentaries which he calls Scholia. Certain of these, such as _The Judging of Jurgen_ and _Taboo_, are minor answers to minor critics, and _Joseph Hergesheimer_, while incidentally revealing, is but his analysis of another writer’s art. _The Lineage of Lichfield_ is more significant. In it Mr. Cabell has painstakingly worked out the genealogy which furnishes the skeleton of his romantic scheme, tracing the ancestry of all his characters back along one line or other to the epic Manuel. At the same time, he has confirmed these relationships by annotations, in the revised edition, to various of his stories which theretofore had seemed to stand alone. The genealogical unity of his imagined world, however, is but a symbol, chosen as a device of art to represent a truth of life. He himself has so well set forth his scheme in the Epistle Dedicatory to the _Lineage_ that quotation is the best comment.

“Now on the face of it, as I have confessed, the thing is a pedigree which indicates the descent of various persons, about whom I have written the stories and books named marginally, from Dom Manuel of Poictesme. In reality, I think, this volume is an outline--or, say, a map--of some nine centuries of Dom Manuel’s life, the life of which my other books are the Biography. For, be it repeated, the life that informed tall Manuel the Redeemer did not become extinct when the old champion rode westward with Grandfather Death: the body and the appearance of Dom Manuel was gone, but his life remained perpetuated in divers children--in, to be accurate, a respectable total of sixteen persons,--who afterward transmitted this life to their progeny, as did they in turn to their own offspring. So this life flowed on through time--and through such happenings in France and England and America as, one by one, my books have recorded, with every generation dividing and subdividing the troubled and attritioned flowing into more numerous streamlets....

“It is about this life that I have written elsewhere, in many places, in various chapters of a Biography which is largish now, but stays incomplete, and will not ever be completed. For this human life, as I write about it, appears to me a stream that, in journeying toward an unpredictable river, itself the tributary of an unplumbed ocean, is fretted equally (still to preserve the fluvial analogue) by the winds of time and by many pebbles of chance. So are there various ripples raised upon the stream as it goes--ultimately--seaward: and, noting these, we say this ripple is Manuel, that Ormskirk, and the other Charteris; noting also that while we name it the small stir is gone. But the stream remains unabated, nor is the sureness of its moving lessened, any more than is the obscurity of its goal.

“Or let us shift the figure. Let us rather liken this continuously reincarnated life of Manuel to an itinerant comedian that with each generation assumes the garb of a new body, and upon a new stage enacts a variant of yesterday’s drama. For I do not find the comedy ever to be much altered in its essentials. The first act is the imagining of the place where contentment exists and may be come to; and the second act reveals the striving toward, and the third act the falling short of, that shining goal, or else (the difference here being negligible) the attaining of it to discover that happiness, after all, abides a thought farther down the bogged, rocky, clogged, befogged heartbreaking road, if anywhere. That is the comedy which, to my finding, the life I write about has enacted over and over again on every stage between Poictesme and Lichfield.

“I call it a comedy. Really there is thin sustenance for the tragic muse in the fact that with each performance the costume of the protagonist is spoiled, and the human body temporarily informed with Manuel’s life is thrown perforce to the dust-heap. There is not even apparent, to reflection, any economic loss: for the wardrobe of this mundivagant posturer is self-replenishing, in that as each costume is used it thriftily begets new apparel for the comedian to ruin in to-morrow’s rendering of the old play. The parent’s flesh is flung by like an outworn coat: but the comedian, reclad with the child’s body, tricked out with strong fresh sinews and re-rouged with youth, is lustily refurbishing, with a garnish of local allusions and of the latest social and religious and political slang, all yesterday’s archaic dialogue and inveterate ‘situations.’”

Mr. Cabell understands that formerly, “they whisper, the scenery was arboreal, and our comedian wore fur and a tail; as before that his costume was reptilian, and yet earlier was piscine. So do the scientists trace backward his career to life’s first appearance upon the stage, when the _vis comica_ which later was to animate the thews of Manuel had for its modest apparel only a small single bubble embedded in primeval slime.” And, since “our comedian has dressed his rôle with increasing elaborateness, progressing from a mere pinhead of sentiency to all the intricate fripperies of the human body,” Mr. Cabell likewise understands that “to-morrow the age-old comedian will be doing and wearing none knows what, although in reason the restless artist that we call life cannot long stay content with human bodies for his apparel and medium. Already, in considerate eyes, life tends to some more handsome expression, by means of the harnessed chemistries and explosions, and collaborating flywheels and vapors, and wire-dancing thunderbolts, that in all our cities dwarf the human beings who serve as the release levers.” Still, history is vague and prophecy is futile, so Mr. Cabell limits his Biography to the materials which he can examine. “I merely know that, even though the life of our planet may by and by discard mankind just as it has discarded the dodo and the dinosaur, at present men and women are life’s clothing: and I take it to be the part of urbanity to accept the mode of our day.”

The march of the Biography has at last, thanks to the _Lineage_, become traceable. Starting out with _Figures of Earth: A Comedy of Appearances_, it introduces Manuel and Poictesme with something of the geography and mythology of the province. Then follow the books particularly devoted to the chivalric code, _Domnei: A Comedy of Woman-Worship_ and _Chivalry: Dizain des Reines_. Returning along its chronological path, the Biography studies the career of Manuel’s great contemporary in _Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice_, and from it proceeds, by what may be called the line of gallantry, through _The Line of Love: Dizain des Manages_, _The High Place: A Comedy of Disenchantment_, and _Gallantry: Dizain des Fêtes Galantes_, to the middle of the eighteenth century. Turning back once more, the Biography brings up the line of poetry in _The Certain Hour: Dizain des Poëtes_, _The Cords of Vanity: A Comedy of Shirking_, to Mr. Cabell’s own book of verse, _From the Hidden Way: Dizain des Échos_. Finally come the other novels with an American setting, _The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck: A Comedy of Limitations_, _The Eagle’s Shadow: A Comedy of Purse-Strings_, and _The Cream of the Jest: A Comedy of Evasions_, the last of which, by exhibiting the double life of its hero in Poictesme and in Lichfield, brings the two ends of the Biography together. There remain to be listed only the prologue, _Beyond Life: Dizain des Demiurges_, and the epilogue, _Straws and Prayer Books: Dizain des Diversions_.

Mr. Cabell includes his prologue and epilogue in the Biography, but they may also be considered among the Scholia. Roughly speaking, the first explains what he makes of the universe, and the second why he has made his books. In the universe, at least so far as it concerns itself with men and women, he finds that the one non-negligible element is romance, “the first and loveliest daughter of human vanity,” by which mankind is deceived, itself eagerly taking part in the deception, and is thereby exalted. “No one on the preferable side of Bedlam wishes to be reminded of what we are in actuality, even were it possible, by any disastrous miracle, ever to dispel the mist which romance has evoked about all human beings.” For the estate of man upon his planet is trifling. “All about us flows and gyrates unceasingly the material universe,” Mr. Cabell makes John Charteris say, in _Beyond Life_, “an endless inconceivable jumble of rotatory blazing gas and frozen spheres and detonating comets, wherethrough spins Earth like a frail midge. And to this blown molecule adhere what millions and millions and millions of parasites just such as I am, begetting and dreaming and slaying and abnegating and toiling and making mirth, just as did aforetime those countless generations of our forebears, every one of whom was likewise a creature just such as I am!... And still--behold the miracle!--still I believe life to be a personal transaction between myself and Omnipotence; I believe that what I do is somehow of importance; and I believe that I am on a journey toward some very public triumph not unlike that of the third prince in the fairy-tale.” Only with the help of this persistent self-delusion has the race been able to endure its plight. So the first man tricked himself into the devout belief that the naked apes must triumph over all their rivals in the struggle for hegemony; so the last man will continue to play ape to his dreams. Romance, then, which begets these dynamic illusions, is a demiurge, a force poured into the stream of life so near its source that it may no longer be separated from the stream, and certainly may not be disregarded by any of the stream’s historians.

As aspects of romance, as creations of the demiurge, Mr. Cabell studies the principal motives which direct the human enterprise. There is chivalry, a notion founded upon no ascertainable testimony, to the effect that men are not only the favored children of the gods but are their representatives in a foreign country, and so are obliged to bear themselves as much like gods as may be. Sustained by this conception, what pinnacles of self-reliant virtue have not men aspired to, and sometimes reached! There is love, which, springing from a fierce animal desire, has been now narrowed and now enlarged until it embraces consideration and reverence and a sensibility so acute as occasionally to disavow the original impulse. “When you come to judge,” says Charteris, what man has made of the raw materials of love, “appraising the deed in view as against the wondrous overture of courtship and that infinity of high achievements which time has seen performed as grace-notes, words fail before his egregious thaumaturgy.” There is common-sense, “another dynamic illusion, through which romance retains the person of average intelligence in physical employment and, as a by-product, in an augmenting continuance of creature comforts,” as if prudence were more than an affair of the swift moment and as if the things called practical had any ultimate value in the whirling current of existence. There is religion, based upon the primitive suspicion which men had that the seen activities of nature must be manipulated by unseen beings, extended to the hope that these unseen beings were vitally interested in mankind, and raised finally to the confidence that there was another universe in which men would be rewarded or punished for their doings and thoughts in this one. “And religion, like all the other products of romance, is true in a far higher sense than are the unstable conditions of our physical life. Indeed, the most prosaic of materialists proclaim that we are all descended from an insane fish, who somehow evolved the idea that it was his duty to live on land, and eventually succeeded in doing it. So that now his earth-treading progeny manifest the same illogical aspiration toward heaven, their bankruptcy in common-sense may, even by material standards, have much the same incredible result.”

Nor in the secular spheres are the motives of mankind less clearly the illusions of romance. Art but seduces the artist, at almost every personal cost to himself, into the assurance that he can catch beauty or truth in the net of his own vision and so transmit something eternal to posterity, when as a matter of fact posterity will perhaps not even notice him and certainly will not long bear him in mind as anything more noticeable than a classic. Patriotism, too, is an anodyne which the demiurge administers to save men from the bewilderment and panic they would possibly feel if they once admitted that they live in nations governed by other men not essentially wiser than themselves, an anodyne which drugs them into national complacency or lifts them to a burning loyalty to what they hold to be the national good. And as to optimism, what could be more unwarrantable an illusion, among the fortuitous items of experience, than the creed which promises that any given chain of events must have the happy ending found nowhere in the universe except in second-rate romances? In short, the demiurge of romance is the element in life which rounds out with curves and colors the clumsily articulated skeleton of fact, thereby serving, with the truest utility which may be asked of it, to add to the dull condition of the brutes the human desiderata of distinction and clarity, and beauty and symmetry, and tenderness and truth and urbanity.

That Mr. Cabell does not condemn all these illusions is evidenced by the labor he has put into his Biography. “From the beginning,” says John Charteris with his author’s approbation, “I have been contending that nothing in the universe is of importance, or is authentic to any serious sense, except the various illusions of romance, the demiurge.” No Biographer with any gift of irony could have persisted through fifteen sizeable volumes, and several smaller ones, in the chronicling of mere painted mirages. _Straws and Prayer-Books_, the epilogue which rounds out the series at the end of its second decade, inventories and anatomizes the motives which, so far as Mr. Cabell is aware of them, have impelled him to the long task. His motives really come down to one. “The artist,” he commences, “or, at least, the artist who happens to be a novelist,--is life’s half-frightened playboy.” As other men devise for themselves the fictions by which they live, he devises fictions for himself and them, constructing in the process certain pleasant imaginative alcoves in which all who will may linger as they advance toward death “through gray and monotonous corridors.” The artist, however, must not be tricked, as Mr. Cabell says he has not been, into “the deadly error of succumbing to praiseworthy motives” and thus “misled into evanescence through philanthropy.” “For the one really ponderable sort of writer--the writer who communicates to us something of his own delight and interest in his playing, and who thus in the end contributes to our general human happiness,--has been influenced while about this playing by none save selfish considerations. He has written wholly to divert himself: he has for that moment been inclavated to pleasure-seeking with somewhat the ruthlessness of a Nero and all the tenacity of a débutante: and if I seem unduly to emphasize this obvious fact, it is merely because the man afterward so often lies about it.”

Most thoroughly to divert himself, says Mr. Cabell, avoiding the dangerous first person by speaking in the third, the artist makes sport with the three martinets which he, like other men at bottom, genuinely abhors: common-sense and piety and death. “The literary artist ... temporarily endows his followers with the illusion of possessing what all alchemists have sought,--unfading youth, wealth and eternal life. He engineers the escape for which men have always longed, and which they have always known to be attainable, as here, by magic.” So Mr. Cabell has left behind the flat terrain of common-sense and has laid the scene of his actions within or somewhere near the magical boundaries of Poictesme. Moreover: “Everywhere through the shadowland of legend canter and gallop--with the gleaming eyes of nocturnal creatures, with a multitudinous tossed shining of steel,--these ‘squires of the night’s body, Diana’s foresters, these minions of the moon,’ whom the prosaic call thieves and highwaymen: and everywhere men have admired and cherished some cunning, strong, unconquerable rogue.” And the artist also, set by his profession a little outside of the sleek and ordered universe, has given his allegiance less to the established gods than to Pan, the scapegoat of nature, the outcast god “who had looked upon the divine handiwork, and seen that it was not good; or, at any rate, not good enough.” So Mr. Cabell has left to others the austere task of penning the lives of the saints and has himself created Jurgen and his experimental crew. Above all, men have abhorred death, a thing so dreadful to them that except in special instances they prefer to it the twin tediums of common-sense and piety. “None the less, it is with this omnipresent and omnicorporeal monarch that the artist makes sport, depriving death of terrors with the opiates of religion: and maiming death of potency likewise, so long as the artist eludes destruction and survives in his art.” So Mr. Cabell, aware of the impending ugliness as only the lover of loveliness can be, has for twenty years toilsomely kept on piling his bright pebbles upon his shining cairn.

Yet what, he says he asked himself just before ending his explanation, has he got out of his work on the Biography? His first answer was that he had got nothing, since “the outcome of his manifold playing ... was always unpredictable, always chance-guided, and, in any case, was of no benefit or hurt to him by and by, and was never of any grave importance to anybody else.” But on further thought he found a second answer to his question. “I really had got out of life what I most wanted. I had wanted to make the Biography: and I had made it, in just the way which it seemed good to me. To do that had been, no doubt, my play and my diversion, in the corridors where men must find diversion ... or else go mad.... But ... it seemed to me, too, that I had somehow fulfilled, without unduly shirking, an obligation which had been laid upon me to make the Biography. I was not, heaven knew, claiming for myself any heavenly inspiration or even any heavenly countenance. Rather, it seemed to me that the ability and the body and the life which transiently were at my disposal had been really used: with these lent implements which were not ever properly speaking mine, and which presently would be taken away from me, I had made something which was actually mine.... Here then, upon this shelf, in these brown volumes which make up the Biography, I can lay hand and eye upon just what precisely my life has amounted to: the upshot of my existence is here before me, a tangible and visible and entirely complete summing up, within humiliatingly few inches. And yet, as I consider these inadequate brown volumes, I suspect that the word I am looking for is ‘gratitude.’”

In this conclusion, which only by the shorter-sighted codes of philanthropy can be adjudged arrogant, Mr. Cabell has modestly kept faith with his whole creed. Looking back over the course of the Biography he suspects that he has played in it the rôle of Horvendile, “the erratic demiurge who composes and controls the entire business extempore, without any prompter except his own æsthetic whims.” He reasons that it must have been vain, but he testifies that it has been pleasant. It remains for others, susceptible or not to Mr. Cabell’s reasoning in the matter, to bear witness to the general pleasure which has been the by-product of his private diversion.

Those others, however susceptible, will not linger too long over his reasoning about the vast futility of human life. This is an ancient doctrine, shared by all who keep their eyes wide open as they charge the impregnable walls of fate. Nor will those other men for whom Mr. Cabell has incidentally constructed his charming alcoves linger too long over the central conception about which the Biography has been arranged. Ingenious and arresting as it is, it insists upon recalling certain words of its originator to the effect that “it is the nature of every explanatory theory to be evolved after the phenomena it accounts for.” The author of the Biography must be estimated, like any other artist, by his actual performances; theories are for critics. If he gives delight by his bold playing with ideas, he gives still more by the energy, never imitable in mere discourse, with which he puts such ideas into action in the behavior of the characters he has created. More beguilingly than did ever Solon or Lycurgus, Mr. Cabell has outlined the polity of Poictesme; like another Manuel, he has robustly peopled it, endowing it, possibly, with as long a life as some identifiable medieval counties had. His people have, if not the dimensions of verisimilitude, the unmistakableness of visions; bull-necked Manuel, eating his proud heart amid the tumult of affairs; lank Jurgen, considering the universe with a mind as free and nimble as the recalcitrant Pan’s; Melicent and Perion, blown over seas and mountains in their disunited flesh, but in their spirits forever clasped in one undying rapture; the lords of Puysange, supple and insolent in the face of whatever adventures; gallant, hardy, disillusioned Ormskirk, master of brave gestures and difficult occasions; John Charteris, airy commentator in a world through which he flounders; besides these, scores of slighter heroes, cut no doubt by the pattern of Manuel, but perennially re-enacting the unavoidable comedy with delicate variations; and besides all these, the exquisite glimmering girls, the radiant women, who are the ends of the heroes’ pursuits and the enrichments and torments of their successes. A philosopher might have incubated the theory upon which the Biography is based; a critic might have elaborated the scheme of carrying Manuel through many metempsychoses; only a poet, authentically gifted, could have created the figures which now inhabit Poictesme.

Mr. Cabell is not, however, at his most poetical in his verse. _From the Hidden Way_ belongs, in a sense, with the Scholia, being made up in considerable part of what pretend to be English adaptations of originals by Alessandro de Medici, Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, Nicholas de Caen, Antoine Riczi, Charles Garnier, Théodore Passerat, Alphonse Moreau, and Paul Verville--some of them imaginary and some of them characters of the Biography, where poems by them also appear. The pretended adaptations are occasionally fresh and sweet; the sonnets, especially, wherein Mr. Cabell speaks in his own person, have a convincing timbre; but as a whole his poems give the impression of being first drafts or subsequent paraphrases of passages better rendered in the prose. He has very rarely, when working with rhyme and meter, quite fitted his matter to his own natural rhythm, which is a prose rhythm, delicate, balanced, and idiosyncratic beyond the reach of most regular verse. A single comparison is enough. He has never been happier as a poet than in the lines, ascribed to Alessandro de Medici, which bear the title, _But Wisdom Is Justified of Her Children_:

“Phyllida, spring wakes about us--
Wakes to mock at us and flout us
That so coldly do delay:
When the very birds are mating,
Pray you, why should we be waiting--
We that might be wed to-day?

“_Life is brief_, the wise men tell us;--
Even those dusty, musty fellows
That have done with life,--and pass
Where the wraith of Aristotle
Hankers, vainly, for a bottle,
Youth and some frank Grecian lass.

“Ah, I warrant you;--and Zeno
Would not reason, now, could he know
One more chance to live and love:
For, at best, the merry May-time
Is a very fleeting playtime;--
Why, then, waste an hour thereof?

“Plato, Solon, Periander,
Seneca, Anaximander,
Pyrrho, and Parmenides!
Were one hour alone remaining
Would ye spend it in attaining
Learning, or to lips like these?

“Thus, I demonstrate by reason
Now is our predestined season
For the garnering of all bliss;
Prudence is but long-faced folly;
Cry a fig for melancholy!
Seal the bargain with a kiss.”

Deft and spirited as these lines are, they strike the ear with the accents of another century, a little thin, a little derivative. With how much more substance, with how much richer and deeper rhythms Horvendile in _The Cream of the Jest_ is allowed to apostrophize Ettarre, speaking perfectly of beautiful old happenings in the language of a new rapture!

“Assuredly it was you of whom blind Homer dreamed, comforting endless night with visions of your beauty, as you sat in a bright fragrant vaulted chamber weaving at a mighty loom, and embroidering on tapestry the battles men were waging about Troy because of your beauty; and very certainly it was to you that Hermes came over fields of violets and parsley, where you sang magic rhymes, sheltered by an island cavern, in which cedar and citron-wood were burning--and, calling you Calypso, bade you release Odysseus from the spell of your beauty. Sophocles, too, saw you bearing an ewer of bronze, and treading gingerly among gashed lamentable corpses, lest your loved dead be dishonored; and Sophocles called you Antigonê, praising your valor and your beauty. And when men named you Bombyca, Theocritus also sang of your grave drowsy voice and your feet carven of ivory, and of your tender heart and all your honey-pale sweet beauty....

“And as Mark’s Queen, ... you strayed with Tristran in the sunlit glades of Morois, that high forest, where many birds sang full-throated in the new light of spring; as Medeia you fled from Colchis; and as Esclairmonde you delivered Huon from the sardonic close wiles of heathenry, which to you seemed childish. All poets have had these fitful glimpses of you, Ettarre, and of that perfect beauty which is full of troubling reticences, and so, is somehow touched with something sinister. Now all these things I likewise see in you, Ettarre; and therefore, for my sanity’s sake, I dare not concede that you are a human being.”

At such moments the poet in Mr. Cabell takes him well beyond the reach of the Scholiast in him. Other scholiasts, however, may still be drawn to the task of dealing with the critical problems he presents. One problem, in particular, invites: the problem as to what place he occupies in the literature of his native country.

There seems to be no longer any reason for not associating him with the only comparable American romancers, Hawthorne and Melville. Unlike the others as each of these three may seem, they have all at least this much in common, that they are engineers of escape from the universe of compromises and half-measures to the universe in which both the reason and the imagination would prefer to live. Hawthorne was indeed more strictly bound to the actual world than either of the others, yet he too breathed uncomfortably in it, and kept sending his imagination back to times in which it could function without the daily handicaps which fretted him. Only in the dim world of old Salem could he imagine the proud spirit of Hester Prynne rising up and cracking the stiff frame of the Puritan code. Melville, less touched by Puritanism than Hawthorne, fled from his world not along the track of time but along the track of space, sending his imagination to a cannibal paradise in the Pacific, to the wild frontiers of the remote ocean where his countrymen wrestled with angels and demons. Mr. Cabell, more systematic than Melville or Hawthorne in his thinking, is more thorough in his art. He has left behind both his own place and his own age, and has taken refuge in an imagined realm where the very shadows are brighter than the sunshine of Virginia. He pays for this greater detachment with a certain rarefaction; Hawthorne is more solid, Melville more robust. It is in wit and loveliness that Mr. Cabell matches them.

Melville, to be sure, is one of the wittiest of romancers. But he never won for his wit a full emancipation from the fears which had been planted in him by his moral training. He fought with the beasts of conscience; he tortured himself with speculations about immortality; he could carry even Captain Ahab only as far as to the sulphurous brink of blasphemy. With conscience and immortality and blasphemy Mr. Cabell’s wit plays as intrepidly as with less formidable prejudices. It has no fears. It stares open-eyed at the blazing sun and good-humoredly strokes the beard of Jehovah. There is, consequently, none of that violence which goes with Melville’s robuster and racier comedy. So are there in Mr. Cabell none of the touches of provincialism which go with Hawthorne’s solider grasp of human character. Is Donatello a faun? Jurgen is, too. But whereas in the substantial tissue of Donatello the sense of sin takes root, Jurgen slips through earth and heaven and hell as unassailably as if Luther had never lived to make men forever conscious of the moral bearing of all things. Mr. Cabell is thus as free to admire loveliness wherever he finds it as to discover the possibilities of mirth in whatever theme. He finds beauty glittering in the midst of ugly sins, and snares it in his tolerant net. He builds fresh beauty about ominous symbols, inventing or elaborating them if need be. He does not, like Hawthorne, feel the obligation constantly to check the wings of his vision by comparing it with reality. Mr. Cabell, by questioning the reality of reality, has been naturalized in the world of dreams till he moves about there without the scruples lasting over from another allegiance. Thus the beauty of his Poictesme is double-distilled. Those lovers of beauty who must now and then come down to earth for renewal will occasionally gasp in Poictesme, wishing the atmosphere would thicken and the brilliant colors change. But always Poictesme hangs above the mortal clouds, suspended from the eternal sky, in the region where wit and beauty are joined in an everlasting kiss.

THE BOOKS OF JAMES BRANCH CABELL

(+Note+: The following list is chronologically arranged in accordance
with the time in which the action of each volume occurs, with the
exception of the first and last volumes which appear as the prologue
and the epilogue respectively of the Biography. For a more detailed
explanation of the chronology of these works the reader is referred
to “The Lineage of Lichfield.” The editions indicated below are the
final revised versions, as the author wishes them to be preserved.)

_BIOGRAPHY_

1. +Beyond Life+: Dizain des Démiurges. New York. 1919.

2. +Figures of Earth+: A Comedy of Appearances. New York. 1921.

3. +The Silver Stallion.+ (_In Preparation._)

4. +Domnei+: A Comedy of Woman Worship. With an introduction by
Joseph Hergesheimer. New York. 1920. (Revised edition of a work
originally published as “The Soul of Melicent”--New York. 1913.)

5. +Chivalry+: Dizain des Reines. With an introduction by Burton
Rascoe. New York. 1921. (Revised edition of a work originally
published in 1909.)

6. +Jurgen+: A Comedy of Justice. New York. 1919.

7. +The Line of Love+: Dizain des Mariages. With an introduction by
H. L. Mencken. New York. 1921. (Revised edition of a work originally
published in 1905.)

8. +The High Place+: A Comedy of Disenchantment. New York. 1923.

9. +Gallantry+: Dizain des Fêtes Galantes. With an introduction
by Louis Untermeyer. New York. 1922. (Revised edition of a work
originally published in 1907.)

10. +Something About Eve.+ (_In Preparation._)

11. +The Certain Hour+: Dizain des Poëtes. New York. 1916.

12. +The Cords of Vanity+: A Comedy of Shirking. With an introduction
by Wilson Follett. New York. 1920. (Revised edition of a work
originally published in 1909.)

13. +From the Hidden Way+: Dizain des Échos. New York. 1924. (Revised
edition of a work originally published in 1916.)

14. +The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck+: A Comedy of Limitations. New
York. 1915.

15. +The Eagle’s Shadow+: A Comedy of Purse-Strings. With an
introduction by Edwin Björkman. New York. 1923. (Revised edition of a
work originally published in 1904.)

16. +The Cream of the Jest+: A Comedy of Evasions. With an
introduction by Harold Ward. New York. 1922. (Revised edition of a
work originally published in 1917.)

17. +Townsend of Lichfield.+ (_In Preparation._)

18. +Straws and Prayer-Books+: Dizain des Diversions. New York. 1924.

_SCHOLIA_

1. +The Judging of Jurgen.+ Chicago. 1920.

2. +Taboo+: A Legend Retold from the Dirghic of Sævius Nicanor, with
prolegomena, notes and a preliminary memoir. New York. 1921.

3. +Joseph Hergesheimer+: An Essay in Interpretation. Chicago. 1921.

4. +The Jewel Merchants+: A Comedy in One Act. New York. 1921.

5. +The Lineage of Lichfield+: An Essay in Eugenics. New York. 1922.

_GENEALOGY_

1. +Branch of Abingdon.+ Richmond. 1911.

2. +Branchiana.+ Richmond. 1907.

3. +The Majors and Their Marriages.+ Richmond. 1915.

Transcriber’s Notes

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