Part 3
But, either way, the inspiring principle remains unchanged: you think of that which is above or below you in order to avoid thinking of what is about you. So it really does not greatly matter whether you travel with Marco Polo to Cathay or with the Kennicotts to Gopher Prairie. The excursion may be for the purpose of looking at beautiful things wistfully or at ugly things contemptuously: the point is that it is an excursion from the place where you regard over-familiar things with a yawn.
When one considers these truisms,--and fails to see why they need be disputed by anybody not actually engaged in the physical labor of teaching or of contributing to the more successful periodicals,--then the form and scope of even the formally labeled novel seems, plainly, fluctuating and indeterminable. The novelist, it is apparent, will write in the form--with such dramatic, epic or lyric leanings as his taste dictates,--which he personally finds alluring: his rhythms will be such as caress his personal pair of ears: and the scope of his writing will be settled by what he personally does or does not find interesting. For the serious prose craftsman will write primarily to divert himself,--with a part thrifty but in the main a philanthropic underthought of handing on, at a fair price, the playthings and the games which he contrives, for the diversion of those with a like taste in anodynes. And to do this will content him. For he will believe that he may win to fame by brewing oblivion, he will hope to invent, if he prove thrice lucky, some quite new form of "let's pretend." But he will not believe that anybody with a valid claim to be considered a post-graduate child can gravely talk about affixing limits to the form and scope of that especial pastime.
§ 16
And so his "creed," to my experience, stays troublingly nebulous. At most he will admit but general tenets to himself, conceding very secretly:
Imprimis, I play, when all is said, with common-sense and piety, as my fellows appraise these matters, and with death also. I have embarked in a gaming in which to win is not possible: and every sensible person of course thinks this extremely foolish. Yet I know that, for my purpose, the opinions of all other persons are negligible. My own opinions, if indeed I have the patience and the temerity to unearth them, are, as I know also, erroneous; they are unstable: but they remain, none the less, the only reliable guides to my intended goal, diversion.... And my rational standards can be adhered to, I consider, with more safety if they are kept concealed.
Item, I must find out what are, in reality, my real beliefs: and I must set these forth to the best possible advantage; and I must be zealous, above all, not ever to regard my beliefs quite seriously. Human ideas are of positive worth in that they make fine playthings for the less obtuse of mankind. That seems to be the ultimate lean value of all human ideas, even of my ideas. I must carefully conceal my knowledge of this humiliating fact.
Item, I must cherish my ideas as I do my children, with a great love commingled with admitted inability to foresee what they may be like to-morrow. For my ideas and my impressions, in the moment that these visit and pass away from the consciousness which is I, from the fragment of consciousness which insecurely lurks inside this skull, are the only realities known to me in the brief while wherein I am, as yet, permitted to play with common-sense and piety and death. I will to enjoy and play with and, it may be, to perpetuate after my flickering from this skull, these true realities: if I succeed in perpetuating them, that is well; if I fail, I shall not at all worry about this failure once I am dead, and I am fairly certain to be dead by and by. At worst, the ability and the body and the life which transiently were at my disposal will have been really used, both to make something and to divert me.... And at best, it would be foolhardy not to keep such intentions concealed.
Item, with human life as a whole I have no grave concern, and I am beguiled by no notion of "depicting" it. My concern is solely with myself. I have no theory of what we call "life's" cause or object; nor can I detect in material existence any general trend. The stars and the continents, the mountains and these flustering hordes of men, every mole-hill and the diligent dancing of gnat swarms,--all appears to blend in a vagrant and very prettily tinted and generally amusing stream by which I too am swept onward. If but for my dignity's sake, I prefer to conceal my knowledge of this fact.
Item, there is upon me a resistless hunger to escape from use and wont: I seem more utterly resolved than are my fellows, not to be bored: and it is in my endeavor to evade the tediousness of familiar things that I am playing--playing, as I know, quite futilely,--with common-sense and piety and death. Such levity tends, it well may be, to no applaudable outcome: meanwhile this playing diverts me.... And meanwhile, my fellows being what they are, my amusement is a matter very profitably concealed.
Item, I really must, in the teeth of all solicitation, refuse to plagiarize anything from what people call "nature" and "real life." My playing, which I term my "art," has no concern with things which, in any case, are too ill-managed to merit imitation. For, still adhering to that simile of the prettily tinted stream, I am persuaded my art need not pretend to be a treatise upon hydrodynamics: my art is well content to be the autobiography of an unvalued straw adrift in this sparkling and babbling stream that hastens toward an unguessable ocean. Let us avoid guesswork, since it is profitless. Let us avoid, too, no reasonable pains to conceal this fact.
Item, let us avoid, also, the narcotizing perils of reverence,--even for our juniors, who are in all æsthetic matters invariably in the right,--or of being quite as serious about ourselves and our doings in collusion with printers and publishers as if mankind and the books of men were of grave and demonstrable importance. And let us, above all, avoid disastrous candors, and say boldly none of these things. Let us who "write" protest that we have no concealments, that we expose ourselves entire, and that our unselfish aim is to benefit and entertain other persons, the while that we play ceaselessly with common-sense and piety and death.
II
THE WAY OF WIZARDRY
"Such star-gazings show you indeed a bluer heaven and bigger stars and a sun rising out of the night: yet neither Athos will reveal to those who climb up to it, nor Olympos, so much extolled by the poets, in what way God cares for the human race, nor make plain the nature of virtue and of justice and temperance, unless the soul scans these matters narrowly; and the soul, if it engages on the task, pure and undefiled, will soar much higher than this summit of Caucasus."
_2._
_The Way of Wizardry_
§ 17
The literary artist plays, I had said, with common-sense.... But here I harked back, compunctious. For only a moment since I had admitted that "travel with Marco Polo to Cathay" was, after all, not the sole end of our art: such romanticizing was merely one of the two avenues which, equally, afforded escape from the tediousness of familiar material surroundings. Yet it was the only avenue I was in train to recommend. And so I paused here to reflect that in the Biography I had always ignored the very real and solid claims of "realism."
Well, of that other method of escape, just indicated by my concession of the possibilities of "travel with the Kennicotts to Gopher Prairie"--of the type of diversion which is furnished by the "realist,"--I could but admit the existence and the potency, restricted, to be sure, to an unenvied class of minds; and must so pass on, with no too obvious shuddering. "Realism" simply did not divert me, that was all: and thus in my mind ranked with dancing and The Literary Digest[1] and golf, as aberrancies of dullness that I could profitably avoid without reprehending.... Indeed, it had been my droll luck to have some pre-compository insight into the shaping of, if not the most notable, certainly the wideliest talked about, of this century's "realistic" novels; so that I still cherish a peculiar leniency for these Kennicotts whom I first met in manuscript; and I read their family history with a double sense of guilt. Here is the marriage I suggested between the school-teacher and Ramie Wutherspoon: and I recall, with qualms describable as second cousins to remorse, that in a "realistic" novel no marriage can ever turn out really happily. Here, murdered by me, I am afraid, in the middle of another man's book, is the unoffending Scandinavian girl, Bea Sorgenson, who, but for my lethal intervention, might perhaps have thrived and have utilized the resources, and have educed the covert virtues and nobilities of Gopher Prairie, overlooked by the less practical heroine in chief; for this was to have been coincidently the story of Bea's success and of Carol's failure as an exponent of general social uplift: and would so have converted the whole affair into a feminized and unreadable down-to-date version of the Idle and Industrious Apprentices. I might, I reflect with a troubled spirit, I might perhaps have here struck "realism" a shrewd blow by heartening Lewis in his first suicidal plan.... To the other side, here is Carol's technical virtue preserved unmarred, in the teeth of my lewd urgings: for I was resolute to have her fall from grace, duly escorted by Eric Valborg, and then to find that nothing whatever came of it. And here is not one of the suggested remedies for the Middle West's regrettable provincialism, of which, but for my protestations and scoffings upon bended knees, the reader might have had full benefit. I recall rather vaguely the nature, but vividly the great number, of these possible remedies which Lewis, once, planned to suggest: and I guiltily speculate if it would not have been the part of true kindliness, as well as of æsthetic morality, to have encouraged the launching of that avalanche of constructive criticism upon the unsuspecting reader of _Main Street_. He, paralyzed, engulfed, demolished, would probably not ever again, my conscience whispers, have opened another "realistic" novel.... At all events, I too had been in this matter of "realism" at least once, tinily, a _particeps criminis_. I confessed it, and resumed my epilogue.
For all this seemed remarkably remote from my introductory remark about Marco Polo. I had in mind, then, not _The Travels of Marco Polo the Venetian_, but the small novel called _Messer Marco Polo_ which Donn Byrne published now some years ago. And it is of this fiction that I wish here to speak more specifically, because of my personal involvement in its fortunes.
§ 18
Not often does one sustain the sense of having long awaited the book which time and chance and a kindred desire in another's being have combined to produce at last, and to make at last a vended commodity, as easy now to come by as blotting-paper or bad whiskey. I had this sense about _Messer Marco Polo_. It was, to me, the most delightful of surprises, a bit of unanticipatable flotsam washed up from the wide sunless sea of "realism." For we were, at just that time, being edified rather remorselessly. Sinclair Lewis had, via the book to which I have but now referred, detected several flaws in the cultural life of the Middle West; John Dos Passos had discovered that the Wilson War had been conducted not altogether as a pleasure trip for the private soldier; and Upton Sinclair was in his customary low spirits. Nobody, I think, could have looked for the coming of a _Messer Marco Polo_ through the auctorial welter,--whose susurrus was after all but a more literate, vast "Ain't it awful, Mabel?"--among those fretful waves of indignation over the dreariness of small-town life and the loneliness of the artist in this unappreciative country, and over how terribly our army swore in Flanders, and over the venality of our press and pulpit and every other institution, and (lone lisper of good yet to come) over the imminence of several more stupendous wars that would wipe out us and all our sordid existence. And yet, through these gray floods of portentous information (here neatly to round off my simile) floated this carved spar of loveliness, with absolutely startling irrelevance.
That _Messer Marco Polo_ should have "happened" at this precise moment seemed a small miracle so pleasure-giving that I hastily waived all consideration as to the book's ultimate value. I only knew I had joyed in the reading of it, somewhat as the partially starved might rejoice in an unexpected windfall of savory food, without any need to deliberate the viands' durability.
None the less does the tale, some years after that first keen greedy gulping of its delights, and after a more leisured third reading, remain a very fine and beautiful strange book. I sincerely hope you are familiar with it: even if you are not, here is no need for me to summarize this tale of how young Marco Polo, loitering through youth's amiable adulteries in thirteenth century Venice, became enamored, through report, of the Khan of Tartary's daughter, and of his adventuring as he crossed Asia to win to her. It suffices to report that here, in brief, we have a variant of the old high tale of Geoffrey Rudel and his Far Princess, adorned with very vivid, curious ornament, and brought to a dénouement no less sad but more soul-contenting.
Yet the essential thing about this book, I thought at my first reading, was its prodigality in the transforming magic which--heaven knows, in how few books!--quite incommunicably lends romantic beauty to this or that not necessarily unusual or fertile theme, somewhat as sunset tinges the wooded and the barren mountain with equal glamour. To me this book at once exposed Donn Byrne as a practitioner of that rare and unteachable wizardry without which one writes only words, and without which the most carefully made sentences tend but to bury one another like neat undertakers.
Technically, though, the construction of _Messer Marco Polo_ must remain always to any novelist peculiarly interesting. To Mr. Byrne, in Westchester, N.Y., "at the second check of the hunt, came the message that a countryman and a clansman needed me," in the person of Malachi Campbell of the Long Glen: and it is the old Celt who tells of what, in a far-off golden yesterday, Marco Polo the Venetian saw and encountered in Cataia. So then does Mr. Byrne set about his magicking, to lure you from the prosaic to the wonderful, at last to leave you contentedly cuddled in the lap of the incredible. He raises for you, to begin, the milieu of his Westchester,--"the late winter grass, sparse, scrofulous, the jerry-built bungalows, the lines of uncomely linen, the blatant advertising boards." It is in, seen through, and continuously colored by, this almost Gopher Prairean atmosphere that Malachi evokes the old time and the great plenty of Ireland in the days of her championship, and the gleaming world of tall Dermot and Granye of the Bright Breasts and amorous fierce Maeve and Cuchulain in whose heroic looks were love and fire; and evokes too, seen as if beyond and colored by the glow of this Celtic wonderland, not merely the opulent sleek life of the heyday and prime of Venice, "that for riches and treasures was the wonder of the world"; since past even that, illuminate and tinged by all, is evoked also the Venetian's notion of the inscrutable, good-tempered, shining, evil East.
The tale, thus, seems a fantastic and gracious pageant, saddened somehow by the known evanescence of its beauty, regarded through three opalescent veils: or, rather, all that happens--just as we upon reflection prefer to have had it happen,--in the Chinese jasmine garden by the Lake of Cranes, is viewed through a rose-tinted gauze of mediæval fancies seen through thin aureate Celtic mists observed through the unhued but glazing window-panes of a Westchester, N.Y., drawing-room. I am by no means sure this curious tour de force was worth performing; but I am unshakably convinced that Mr. Byrne "brings it off" to a nicety.
Well, such was the romance which appeared some years ago without much heralding, and which, when I first read it, had existed as a book for a month or two without attracting any particular attention. And, reading, I wondered. For this tale, in itself delightful--for a reason to which I shall recur,--seemed to me to be told in words so "warm and colored," and so adroitly marshalled as to drive any honest-minded reader to the confessional. I confessed, then, to being uncritically seduced by the fact that Mr. Byrne, without apparent effort or shame, wrote perfectly of beautiful happenings and seemed no whit afraid of elaborated diction. I confessed to thinking that many of the episodes, perhaps most notably the efforts of Marco Polo to convert to Christianity the pagan girl who while he talks is merely conscious of the fact that she loves the talker, have a queer and heart-wringing loveliness that is well-nigh intolerable. And I confessed to finding the brief chapter which bridges seventeen years, and winds up the story to "the true rhythm of life," a small masterpiece of art and wisdom.
Above all, I now confess this is the only contemporary book that ever I actually sought the privilege of reviewing. And when this task was entrusted to me, by The Nation, I indited every word of _Messer Marco Polo's_ encomium with a teasing faint suspicion that I was almost certainly writing high-pitched nonsense which I would some day re-read with embarrassment.
At all events, while the first rapture lasts, said I, let me profess that I most cordially admire this story, and seem to find no praise too exquisite. You, I advised potential readers, may derive from it a more temperate pleasure, you may not even enjoy what my more sophisticated juniors, I confess, are deprecating as "this pseudo-Celtic stuff": and, in fact, the tale can hardly appeal to any considerable audience, just now, since it "exposes" and "arraigns" nothing whatever. With that I had no concern. It was merely my affair to tell everybody who would listen that, to my finding, _Messer Marco Polo_ was a very magically beautiful book.
§ 19
So I said all this in a review which I have here more or less exactly iterated. I count myself to-day fortunate that this review achieved a brief bewildering sort of fame. Virtuosi thought well of it, it was quoted with approval by the literary editors of the leading papers of Des Moines and Walla Walla and Mobile. It seemed, indeed, to be reprinted illimitably in papers everywhere throughout the country, so that The Nation's honorarium but visited me in transit to the bank account of my clipping bureau. And the publishers reproduced this review at full length in their advertisements, and reproduced it, again virtually at full length, upon the novel's dust jacket.... I could open no periodical wherein reading-matter was advertised without encountering the proclamation, "James Branch Cabell says _Messer Marco Polo_ is a very magically beautiful book." At first the phrase read like a ukase, it had the full and final ring of an imperial decree: later, with so constant repetition, it began to take on somehow the flavor of a taunt, and I would read on a bit further, in the next advertisement, hurriedly.... And people wrote to me about my pæans, some to thank me for, as they put it, "discovering" the novel for them, and some of course to rebuke me as the member of a petty clique of assassins, atheists and tomb-defilers who combined thus shamelessly to puff one another's books. And in fine there was rarely seen so much bombilation over any one brief and not especially remarkable criticism, whose only striking characteristics were the dubious ones of enthusiasm and sincerity.
But this to-do had the merit of drawing people's attention to _Messer Marco Polo_ and of provoking people to read this small novel. And many thousands joyed in the reading of it, very much as I had done. For here again was the true formula and the hero with whom mankind peculiarly delights in imagination to identify itself,--the hero who wanders footloose and at adventure through lands which are to him and to the reader in nothing familiar. It is the formula of the _Odyssey_, the formula of picaresque romance, and of all fairy stories properly equipped with quests and an indomitable third prince. It is of course precisely the one formula which cannot ever lose its charm so long as men retain that frame of mind which seems coeval with recorded history, of being bored by the routine of their daily living.... And people also found in _Messer Marco Polo_ just the quality I had ascribed to this book, the quality which I have vaguely indicated as wizardry.
§ 20
Wizardry is, we know, one of the very oldest of human avocations.... Yet I recall how my friend Richard Harrowby, of Montevideo, once told me that, to his mind, the most strange feature of wizardry was the adroit consistency with which truth here has always been distorted or concealed. For it stays an indisputable fact, as Harrowby pointed out, that many persons still believe wizardry, in common with its sister branch of witchcraft, to have been a delusion; and that the majority of those who are wiser remain at considerable pains not actively to dispute this quite common belief. The art of censorship had, in fact, here achieved its oldest and capital triumph.
"Well, you," I admitted, "know more about such matters than I even pretend to. So far as I can judge, your friends the wizards have just emulated the family doctor and all business men, in their usual endeavors, to prolong life and to change less rare materials into gold. Their sagas, from the history of Geber to that of Cagliostro, present--in so far, anyhow, as the tale is formally told,--mighty dull and sordid reading: and each of these ancient fakirs would seem to have got little enough out of the powers and privileges of the mage who, in that jolly old sonorous phrase, holds in his left hand the branch of the blossoming almond, and in his right hand the clavicles of Solomon."
To which Harrowby replied quite gravely: "Cabell, you tempt me. You really should distinguish between wizards and sorcerers-- But, no! I shall not voice any indiscretions. The day is not yet come, I too concede, for wise persons to speak candidly about magic, though already, I believe, the day dawns."
His faith in that day is perennial, and at times rather pathetic....
"For one thing, though," I urged him on, "I am ready to argue that, just on material grounds, much of the fabulous wonder-working which our long-headed fathers used to dismiss with a shrug, to-day is taking on a different aspect; and that it becomes increasingly difficult to reject as a popular delusion performances which our own senses note to the right and left of us every day."
"And what," asked Harrowby, "imply these rolling periods?"