Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
faith, discreetly left unvoiced, that these hard-won, fond, wearisome,
and implacable wives were, after all, just temporary makeshifts. By
and by would Freydis and Helen return, at their own season.”--For the
dream persists in the very face of present fact, and in this lies
man’s hope. “In youth all men that live have been converts if but in
transitory allegiance, to that religion of the world’s youth--to the
creed of _domnei_, or woman-worship.” Now it is “the very essence
of _domnei_, that the woman one loves is providentially set between
the lover’s apprehension and God, as the mobile and vital image and
corporeal reminder of Heaven, as a quick symbol of beauty and holiness,
of purity and perfection. In her the lover views all qualities which
can be comprehended by merely human faculties.” “If but in honor, his
heart stays bound to his first and only real love, that woman of whom
he never tires. Her coming is not yet. He can but wait, sustained by
his sure faith ... that some day her glory will be apparent, and he
will enter gladly into her secret kingdom, and will find her kisses all
that in youth he foreknew to be not impossible.... And meanwhile this
prescience, somehow, informs all art ... and makes it to him a vital
thing.... And there seems to be no beauty in the world save those stray
hints of her, whose ultimate revealment is not yet.... And it is very
often through desire to express his faith in this withheld perfection,
of which he has been conscious in broken glimpses from afar, that he
turns artist.... For every art is a confession of faith in that which
is not yet.”
But however adroitly man has turned the jest against nature, and
erected a noble palace from base materials, the jest remains,
mixed with the mortar, and the structure cannot endure for long.
It is insubstantial, and at any moment the cloud-capped towers may
disintegrate and the dream palace disappear, leaving not a rack behind.
There remains only the jest. This unhappy ending Mr. Cabell foresees,
and hence emerges the profound irony that underlies all his writing.
To such disillusionment must all things come. Life is no more than a
comedy, played by puppets; bitter, with more tears than laughter in
it; yet because tears are futile and unnerving, what remains for the
gallant gentleman but to confront life with a jest? Mr. Cabell does not
wholly forego his chivalric ideal even while he is contemplating the
vanity of all endings in the light of their beginnings. As Horvendile
the clerk, he clings to it, even though he is doomed to walk the
streets of Lichfield, Virginia, in the form of Felix Kennaston, who
passes--to his own incredulous amusement--as a personage of some
importance, with two automobiles and money in four banks. He possesses
the magic sigil of Scoteia, by the potency of which he can send forth
his soul to meet Ettarre, and recover the raptures that Felix Kennaston
no longer knows. But the sigil of Scoteia turns out to be the half-top
of a pomade glass from his wife’s dressing-table; the potency is gone;
and he remains at last no more than a respectable citizen with his
automobiles and money in four banks. _The Cream of the Jest_ reduces
the chivalric ideal to pure irony.
By a transition more natural, perhaps, to a Virginian than to another
American, Mr. Cabell turns from the contemplation of chivalry to the
study of gallantry; and shifts the theme of his romances from the
ecstatic adoration of the Woman, whom to possess is to lose, to the
gay pursuit and enjoyment of women. In “The Rivet in Grandfather’s
Neck” he chooses to set a decidedly shabby and roue gallantry over
against a somewhat futile and antiquated southern chivalry. He loves
both the gallant and the gentleman, and he spares neither; they are
equally the descendants of that Cavalier ideal which flourished so
rankly in the soil of the old planter society; nevertheless the
quaint and lovable Rudolph Musgrave with his gentle heroics comes
off distinctly better than his brilliant half-brother, the novelist
John Charteris. One might, indeed, wonder at Mr. Cabell’s treatment
of the artist Charteris, were it not so distinctly Shavian. It is
odd how similar is his conception of the artist to the definition
of Shaw--one who wriggles into the confidence of women to learn
their secrets only to betray them. Nevertheless Jack Charteris, the
brilliant thinker and talker of _Beyond Life_, mouthpiece of the
Cabellian philosophy, deserves better treatment than he gets in the
story of this sorry escapade; he comes quite too near the likeness
of the mountebank Sheridan. In _The Cords of Vanity_ gallantry
reveals itself more attractively; it is gilded with youth and wit
and poetry. It is Congreve at his best, scintillating, brilliant,
with a delightful affectation of pose and gesture; and it is Marlowe
also, with its galloping wit steeped in pure poetry. There is the
true Elizabethan rapture of fine words and lovely images and quaint
conceits. “Meantime,” says young Robert Townsend, “being in love, I
refined upon the notions of love with the ingenuity of an Elizabethan.”
There you have the spirit of the book. It is more than a pretty piece
of paganism; it is the brightest tale of gallantry in our literature,
masterly in the restrained irony of its inimitable conclusion.
It is obvious, however, that the mood which finally will receive
dramatization from Mr. Cabell cannot be summed up in the ideal of
gallantry. What that mood is one finds revealed at length by John
Charteris in _Beyond Life_. It is the quintessence of irony distilled
from long observation of human life, but it is not Congreve, much
less is it Sheridan. Those shameless and selfish roues began as
artists but they ended as mountebanks; life taught them cynicism and
not tenderness; it sharpened their wit and dulled their sympathy.
The higher irony lay quite beyond their natures. But with Mr. Cabell
tenderness, sympathy, an ardent concern for the inevitable failure
that lies in wait upon aspiration, are so strong and urgent that under
the governance of a mind less intellectual, they must inevitably run
into sentimentality. But there is in Mr. Cabell something of the
intellectual austerity of Matthew Arnold, and it conducts him to
the same ends. Consider such a passage as this: “Through a merciful
dispensation, we are one and all of us created very vain and very
dull.... Vanity it is that pricks us indefatigably to play the ape to
every dream romance induces; yet vanity is but the stirrup-cup: and
urgent need arises that human dullness retain us (as it does) securely
blinded, lest we observe the wayside horrors of our journey and go mad.
One moment of clear vision as to man’s plight in the universe would
be quite sufficient to set the most philosophic gibbering. Meanwhile
with bandaged eyes we advance: and human sanity is guided by the brave
and pitiable and tireless dullness of mankind.... Yet how varied are
the amiable activities of human dullness, which tend alike to protect
and to enliven human progress! Dullness it is, of course, that brews
and quaffs Dutch courage; ... that fosters salutary optimism as to the
destiny of mankind, in flat defiance of everything mankind can do,
and does unblushingly.... And finally dullness it is that lifts up
heart and voice alike, to view a parasite infesting the epidermis of a
midge among the planets, and cries. _Behold, this is the child of God,
All-mighty and All-worshipful, made in the likeness of his Father!_...
These and how many other wholesome miracles are daily brought about by
our dullness, by our brave and pitiable and tireless dullness, by our
really majestic dullness, in firm alliance with the demiurgic spirit
of romance.... For that to which romance conducts, in all the affairs
of life ... is plain enough--distinction and clarity, and beauty and
symmetry, and tenderness and truth and urbanity.”
Here then is the note that still awaits adequate dramatization in a
comedy greater than he has yet written--a cosmic irony suffused with
tenderness and truth and urbanity. Above all, urbanity. Mr. Cabell
has played too long with the ideal of gallantry; he has devoted too
much precious time to creating Millamants to fall in love with; he has
listened too credulously to the voice of Congreve. “I have read,” says
Charteris, out of Congreve, “that the secret of gallantry is to accept
the pleasures of life leisurely, and its inconveniences with a shrug;
as well as that, among other requisites, the gallant person will always
consider the world with a smile of toleration, and his own doings with
a smile of honest amusement, and Heaven with a smile which is not
distrustful--being thoroughly persuaded that God is kindlier than the
genteel would regard as rational.” Surely the cosmic irony that loves
men’s dullness because it alone can preserve them from madness, and
retorts upon the cosmic terrors with a jest, is higher than gallantry
and more enduring. It arrives at tolerance for all human shortcomings;
it embraces high and low in its sympathies; it achieves urbanity as a
final goal. It is the stuff of which great literature is made. And Mr.
Cabell is creating great literature. A self-reliant intellectual, rich
in the spoils of all literatures, one of the great masters of English
prose, the supreme comic spirit thus far granted us, he stands apart
from the throng of lesser American novelists, as Mark Twain stood
apart, individual and incomparable.
Footnotes
[799] Notes for a lecture delivered at the University of California in
1922.--_Publisher._
[800] Ludwig Lewisohn, _Modern Drama_, New York, 1915, p. 3.
[801] From lecture notes and the syllabus.--_Publisher._
[802] Stephen Crane, _Works_, New York, 1926, Vol. 10, p. 216.
[803] _Ibid._, Vol. 11, p. 21.
[804] Lecture notes.--_Publisher._
[805] _The Responsibilities of the Novelist_, “The Novel with a
‘Purpose,’” Garden City, N. Y., 1928, Vol. 7, p. 22.
[806] _Ibid._, p. 22.
[807] Frank Norris, _Complete Works_, New York, n. d., Vol. III, p. 58.
[808] _Ibid._, p. 22.
[809] Frank Norris, _The Octopus_, New York, 1906, p. 652.
[810] Lecture notes.--_Publisher._
[811] Reprinted by permission from _The Pacific Review_, December,
1921.--_Publisher._
The Problem Novel and the Diversion from Naturalism[812]
No sooner was naturalism fairly under way than it was well-nigh
submerged under a wave of social speculation and inquiry. The years
1903-1917 were a distinctive period--a time of extraordinary ferment,
when America was seeking to readjust her ideals and institutions
to a revolutionary economic order that had come upon her. The
popular phase was revealed in the muckracking movement, a movement
which instructed the American middle class in certain elements of
economics--particularly the close connection between economics and
politics. But underneath, an intellectual revolution was in progress,
setting steadily towards a new social philosophy. The old America had
been intensely conservative, naïvely provincial and self-satisfied,
compassed by a complacence founded on optimism--the gospel of the
business man. The new America was eager and hopeful, impatient to
square institutions to the new conditions. The total movement was
profoundly democratic--a new Jacksonianism rising in protest against a
menacing plutocracy.
1. _The Movement of Criticism._ The work of a vigorous social idealism.
Passed through three broad phases:
a. Political. The movement of Progressivism, 1903-1912. An attempt to
democratize the machinery of government to the end that the will of
the majority shall prevail. Its impulse and much of its program came
from Populism; and it resulted in a clarification of the issue between
republicanism and democracy. An attack on the representative system