Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
inflicted chronic dyspepsia upon him. To conventional persons the
dyspepsia and Jane Welsh Carlyle’s sharp replies to her husband’s ill
humor, seem the important reality, and the overpowering visions of
time and space that were at the root of the family discord, seem no
other than romance. In this curious world of convention all things are
topsy-turvy, and it needs a tremendous effort of will to set them only
a little right.
To this effort Mr. Cabell’s life work has been dedicated with unruffled
urbanity. Like Carlyle he chooses to roam far in his philosophic
quests, and like Thoreau he comes home at nightfall with little
more than a handful of stardust in his wallet. He loves to sally
forth on the greatest of adventures--the pursuit of reality where it
lies broadcast, hidden from practical eyes that refuse to see. He is
impelled by the old wonder that has haunted men from the beginning
of their long upward climb; the wonder and the fear of life. Now to
anyone but a fool or a poet, only too plainly life is petty and gross
and inconsequential, from the moment when with superfluous blood and
pain we are brought into the world, to the time when we return by an
unlovely process to chemical elements. It is compounded of vanity,
as the old poet long ago observed. The practical, about which we
make so much pother and over which we chatter so foolishly, is only
an illusion which men hug because it keeps them in self-conceit. Mr.
Cabell refuses to accept any such illusions at their face value. He
will not be humbugged by foolish persons who pretend to talk wisely.
What is man? he insists on asking: A parasite on the thin rind of a
planet that swings silently through interstellar space--“an ape who
chatters to himself of kinship with the archangels while filthily he
digs for groundnuts.” If this is the reality to which the philosopher
must come finally--and like Hamlet Mr. Cabell does not shirk the
contemplation of graveyard facts--then must the thoughtful man accept
logically a frank pessimism, and on this foundation build such a hut
as may best shelter him for the few days of his unintelligible life.
Over this sorry conclusion Mr. Cabell broods much, and because he is
a human being with a will to enjoy life and think well of himself, he
uses every faculty to scramble out of the pit and find a pleasanter
refuge for the brief time of his existence. The idealist in him engages
the pessimist, and like so many other moderns he goes out in quest of
that which may keep him sane. It is true that man is an ape reft of his
tail and grown rusty at climbing, but is that the whole story? It is
evident that men in all times have refused to believe that they are not
something other than apes--their very dreams seem to belie a conclusion
so mean and ignoble. Is there not some deeper _élan vital_, some hidden
impulse that drives man forward and upward even while his mind is on
groundnuts? “Yet more clearly do I perceive,” argues the idealist,
“that this same man is a maimed god.... He is under penalty condemned
to compute eternity with false weights and to estimate infinity with a
yardstick; and he very often does it.... There lies the choice which
every man must make--or rationally to accept his own limitations? or
stupendously to play the fool and swear that he is at will omnipotent.”
This would seem to be a hard choice, but Mr. Cabell does not hesitate.
He patches up his agnosticism with the will to believe, on the
pragmatic grounds that it seems to work. For man “rationally to accept
his own limitations,” is to defeat everything worth while in life; it
is to yield the battle to a black pessimism. Whereas “stupendously to
play the fool and swear that he is at will omnipotent,” may end in
creating the will to omnipotence, and the fool in some preposterous
fashion may prove that he is indeed divine. Let man but accept his
logical limitations and he returns to the ape reft of more than his
tail, fallen to gibbering in the mud, refusing to take hold of that
rope of sand by which miraculously he has drawn himself forward
hitherto. For accepting his limitations means contenting himself
with material fact, and “the trouble with facts seems to be, that
if one treats them out of relation to the rest of life, they become
lies.” In the “stupefying mist of common sense” men walk blindly. The
practical, the conventional, are alien to the deeper reality which is
shadowed forth by emotions and dreams; which refuses to disclose itself
nakedly, but hides behind symbols, haunting the mind even while one
is pottering among inconsequentials. This deeper reality itself may
be but a dream, but nevertheless it possesses the power of creating
a will to believe, upon which hangs man’s destiny. Hence the tales
which we tell ourselves are significant because through some occult
process they foreshadow the thing that may be; they prod the foolish
will to omnipotence to believe that we shall outgrow the ape. For grown
rusty at climbing, the ape-man “however dimly, feels himself to be a
symbol, and the frail representative of Omnipotence in a place that is
not home; and so strives blunderingly, from mystery to mystery, with
pathetic makeshifts, not understanding anything, greedy in all desires,
and honeycombed with poltroonery, and yet ready to give all, and to die
fighting, for the sake of that undemonstrable idea.”
It is because he is terrified at the meanness of what practical men
call reality, that Mr. Cabell turns away from it to find the true life
in dreams. Not only are they pleasanter, they are more useful; they are
all that man has to aid him in the appalling task of getting himself
out of the slime, that he may walk in green fields. We need to turn
Prospero’s words around--our dreams are such stuff as we are made
on. They alone are real and salutary, for amid all their ramblings
they seem dimly to suggest some end; amidst their rank egoisms they
seem to foreshadow a purpose: and may not that end and purpose be
the eventual creation of a life for man that shall be worthy of his
dreams? It is illogical to assume that man can pull himself up by his
own bootstraps, but how else shall he pull himself up? Is not man the
inveterate romancer somehow blindly creating a noble romance of man?
“To what does the whole business tend?” he asks at the conclusion of
_Beyond Life_, “--why, how in heaven’s name should I know? We can but
be content to note that all goes forward, toward something.... It may
be that we are nocturnal creatures perturbed by rumors of a dawn which
comes inevitably, as prologue to a day wherein we and our children
have no part whatever. It may be that when our arboreal propositus
descended from his palm tree and began to walk upright about the earth,
his progeny were forthwith committed to a journey in which today is
only a way-station. Yet I prefer to take it that we are components
of an unfinished world, and that we are but as seething atoms which
ferment toward its making, if merely because man as he now exists can
hardly be the finished product of any Creator whom one could very
heartily revere. We are being made into something quite unpredictable,
I imagine: and through the purging and the smelting, we are sustained
by an instinctive knowledge that we are being made into something
better. For this we know, quite incommunicably, and yet as surely as we
know that we will have it thus. And it is this will that stirs in us to
have the creatures of earth and the affairs of earth, not as they are,
but ‘as they ought to be,’ which we call romance. But when we note how
visibly it sways all life we perceive that we are talking about God.”
From this persistent will to romance--the incorrigible propensity to
follow the dynamic illusion of dreams that is so deep an instinct of
human nature--Mr. Cabell deduces a conception of art that to careless
readers seems whimsically perverse; and from it likewise emerges the
lambent irony that plays like diffused lightning about the horizons
of his thought. The function of art in society, he insists, is to
comfort and inspire man with its divine beauty. Without the artist this
is but a grim and forbidding place where men live; and unless every
man is somewhat the artist, and seeks his compensations in the lure
of romance, it must remain grim and forbidding. It is therefore the
privilege and the duty of the artist “to prevaricate tenderly about
the universe”; to create for life a meaning that is not apparent, by
clothing it in beauty and adducing for it a noble significance. It is
his mission to lure men away from the contemplation of facts which
terrify or debase, from all ignoble and depressing realism, to pursue
the ideal and entice the imagination to enter and dwell in a world as
it ought to be. The artist, therefore, is a Moses in the wilderness,
pointing men to the Promised Land, and even enabling them to go forward
and taste its fruits while they still dwell in the wilderness.
Now of all the dreams which lure men, the one universal and potent
dream, Mr. Cabell asserts with Freudian understanding, is the woman
dream. Its roots are deep in the ape-animal; it drives men inexorably,
for upon it depends the very existence of the race. And therefore, a
shrewd mother-nature has somehow transmuted its base materials into
the very stuff of romance, commingling with it all high and generous
impulses, making of it the loveliest dream that visits man’s weak
head. In consequence of which ironic transmutation this lovely dream
“hoodwinks humanity through the dynamic illusion known as love,
in order that humanity may endure, and the groans of a lover be
perpetuated in the wails of an infant.” Considered in one light this
is the very “cream of the jest” that nature perpetrates upon man; but
considered in another light, does it not turn out to be the supreme
jest which man has perpetrated upon nature? For once he has been
taught the alphabet of romance, through the crude necessity of race
preservation, he has gone far in his studies, and turned romancer on a
great scale. From this raw material of biological sex-love he has woven
the fabrics of his religion, of his art, of his idealism; he has dipped
it in gleaming dyes, twisted it to quaint patterns, fashioned from it
lovely robes to cover what is ugly. It is the wellspring and source of
all romance.
Through this open door of woman-worship Mr. Cabell chooses to enter his
world of deeper realities. “There is in every human being that which
demands communion with something more fine and potent than itself,”
and this something more fine and potent he seeks in the woman of his
dreams. It was so when the world was young, and it will be so as long
as there is youth left in the world. In early times this object of
adoration was the witch-woman, the Circes and Calypsos of ancient
tales; later it became the lady-mistress of chivalric ideals; today
it is the dream maiden whom the young man woos but never finds in
marriage, and not finding her is impelled to turn to the ever-young
and ever-lovely Helens and Ettarres of old romance. A good half
of Mr. Cabell’s work is given over to this curious celebration of
woman-worship. It is elaborated in _Domnei_ (1920), in _Jurgen_, in
_Figures of Earth_. In the strange tales of the land of Poictesme the
drama flows from the balking and thwarting of this woman quest by the
Dame Niafers and Dame Lisas of the commonplace world, to man’s undoing.
Nevertheless “the long, high, fruitless questing does not ever end,
but, rather, is temporarily remitted for the society of Dame Niafer and
of Dame Lisa. For ... one perceives that, even in remote Poictesme,
those aging nympholepts, Dom Manuel and Jurgen--they also--were
heartened to endure the privileges of happily married persons by a sure