Chapter X: James Branch Cabell on the High Place

In James Branch Cabell, the genealogist is barely hidden by the philosopher. The author of “Jurgen” is the only philosophical novelist in the United States to-day. At first glance, he even seems somewhat un-American. His fanciful characters dwell in a land as unreal as themselves, Poictesme, bordering upon the Land of Cocaigne and the Abbey of Thélème. (Who, previous to Cabell, had ever dared to raise an Abbey of Thélème in the land of the Puritans?) It is not easy to find the bonds of connection between the writer and his surroundings. His work is very close to European and to French models, and evidences at the same time a great knowledge of booklore as well as of humanity.

It is necessary to have had a long contact with Cabell to realize his true significance; at first, he seems to be rather fantastic, but, after some frequentation, one discovers the deeper meaning of his writings. His ambition was to sketch a sort of epic of human desire. His characters, under their various masks, are attempts to draw and depict men as conceived in utter liberty. Dom Manuel, Jurgen, and their succeeding reincarnations, are not Puritan inventions. This was not the first time that an inspired American had attempted to paint a “personality picture” of man as such. A great many novelists had essayed it and had wasted their efforts in the task. The Transcendentalists of New England ascribed to the typical man every attribute of moral perfection. Emerson, in his famous “Representative Men,” tried to delineate the ideal man. He conceived him as a contemplative sort of person. Emerson had sallies of “gay science.” He did not accept the world as it is and tried many times to defeat reality. He knew man well and was wary of accepting him as he was. Long before Nietszche, he imagined the superman, whom he called the _homo novus_, or the _plus-man_. A prudent man, rather shy and inhibited, but capable of thinking daringly, Emerson had some of Dom Manuel’s and Jurgen’s characteristics. According to him, the ideal man was much less the active hero than the thinker climbing up the rarefied summits of thought and taking his risks with the self-reliance of a conquistador. Emerson, like Cabell, was a transcendental realist. He would have sympathized with Koshchei, the God of Things-as-They-Are. But Emerson’s sensibility was atrophied and suppressed. To a large extent he conceived the superman in his own image, with a large brain and a very small heart. On the other hand, he allowed a large place to dreams, to the subconscious elements, and to what he called demonology. Dreams played a large part in his philosophy; if there ever was a daydreamer besides Hawthorne or Alcott in the romantic twilight of Concord, he was the one. He was not unaware of the phenomena of dual personality, trances and ecstasies. His philosophy of history and of the heroes was decidedly “Bovaryistic.” Upon this point again the confidences of his journals are most curious. He confessed to having experienced trances of a mystic and orgiastic nature; at times he felt as though he were being turned into another person. That sort of experience was not infrequent in the Emerson family. His brother, Charles Emerson, was also under the influence of such spells and his aunt, Mary Moody, was a visionary and an authentic _clairvoyante_. The effects caused by inhibition seem to have been quite prevalent among the Puritan writers of New England. Take the life of Margaret Fuller, for instance. Was there ever an example of greater suppression--and more heroic attempt to evade it? Her desire for expatriation was paid for at the sacrifice of her life.

The number of Dom Manuels, of Jurgens, in American letters is countless. Thoreau disguised himself as an Indian. Whitman went through every possible form of cosmic avatar. Edgar Allan Poe was haunted by the dead. A Southerner like Cabell, like him fanciful and fantastic, but sad, obsessed by the memory of a dear, departed one, his whole life was akin to a nightmare. A daydreamer and a somnambulist, he too lived in Dreamland, on Fairy Island, and in the domain of Arnheim. Had Jurgen been more crafty, had Dom Manuel been wiser, had Florian de Puysange been less of the _roué_, they would all have felt at home in Edgar Allan Poe’s imaginary fatherland. But Poe did not care for allegory. He cultivated dreams for their own sake. The fusion between object and subject, the real and the ideal, life and dreams, was complete in his writings. He never woke up.

The nearer we get to Cabell’s “Jurgen,” the more we see the transformation and alteration of the “personality picture” or the ideal man in America. The Civil War came. The great men of the day were politicians and soldiers,--Grant, Lincoln. Then came the “dreadful decade” followed by the advent of the realist, Theodore Roosevelt, Edison, Carnegie, Wilson and now Henry Ford. Some of these idols were to be blasted by Mark Twain’s vengeful irony. But Mark Twain himself was destined to prove, through his books, that the man of dreams was dead. He buried him himself without much respect, but not without incidentally damning the whole race of man in his posthumous book, “The Mysterious Stranger,” which is a veritable challenge to life and to the impossibility of its ever bearing supermen.

Praise be to the Lord, “Jurgen” was born in 1919, and the rights of imagination were restored. Chivalry, the troubadours’ _gay saber_ came back to life in America.

The French eighteenth-century _conteurs_, Voltaire and Anatole France to-day had somebody to talk to in the United States.

“The High Place” shows unmistakable traces of Anatole France’s influence. There are curious affinities between M. d’Astarac and Florian de Puysange. Saint Hoprig seems to have been taken out bodily from the “Revolt of the Angels,” after having drunk a dram or so in the company of Jerôme Coignard. At last we have an American novelist frankly going back to the source of art and free thought.

The ideal man represented by Jurgen and Dom Manuel was reincarnated in the person of Florian de Puysange. The book which deals with him is less loaded with allegory than the previous one, and its philosophy is more superficial. In atmosphere and tone it is very French, with an eighteenth-century tang. It is a masterpiece of Cabellian irony. Anglo-Saxon countries are richer in humorists than in ironists. Irony comes with a certain mobility of the mind, a certain dilettantism, a display of the ego with which Anglo-Saxons are not very familiar. They are a practical and realistic race. Socially, and morally speaking, irony is a dangerous weapon. Humor is amusing, but, even when it is somber, it remains optimistic. It rests on an ethical background. Irony comes with skepticism, and skepticism is not popular among Anglo-Saxons. Add to this the pressure of public opinion and of social constraint. From a certain point of view, irony is an equivocation and a game ill tolerated by practical and respectable people; yet it is irony which is James Branch Cabell’s forte. The story of Florian de Puysange is a masterpiece on this score.

“The High Place” may be connected with the saga of Dom Manuel and Jurgen. Like “Jurgen,” it is again the triumph of a dream.

The time is the sunset of the Roi Soleil. The scene is still the mystical kingdom of Poictesme, located in the forest of Acaire between the Mediterranean and the Cévennes. One afternoon the hero of the book, a ten-year-old child, fell asleep in a beautiful garden while reading the tales of M. Perrault. A vernal breeze was blowing in the park. Florian de Puysange had a dream. All of Cabell’s novels begin thus with a plunge into dreamland. The transition from consciousness to dream in his books is operated through various means, usually magical. In this case, Florian de Puysange was bewitched by a book, and fell asleep in a beautiful garden. Florian was a scion of Jurgen’s line. He inherited dreaming. In his dream he finds himself taken to a “high place.” The dream is that of a beautiful woman asleep in an enchanted garden. Florian at this time was only ten years old, but he was to live his whole life in anticipation. Jurgen’s dreams had been retrospective. Those of Florian de Puysange took place in the future.

He climbed the slopes of a high mountain, atop of which the beautiful Melior, guarded by the Saint Hoprig, awaited him. Saint Hoprig, who would have done honor even to Anatole France, was a rather broad-minded saint. Of course he accomplished miracles and aided Florian in conquering Melior. Florian married the fairy. Let us interpret this as signifying that Florian, freed by sleep from the necessities of ordinary life, succeeded in marrying the ideal. The story of Florian’s allegorical nuptials is in the author’s best manner. He goes back in this to the erotic symbolism of “Jurgen.” Here is the marriage scene:

Acaire was old and it had been a forest since there was a forest
anywhere: and all its denizens came now to do honor to the champion
who had released them from their long sleeping. The elves came in
their blue low-crowned hats; the gnomes, in red woolen clothes;
and the kobolds, in brown coats that were covered with chips and
sawdust. The dryads and other tree spirits of course went verdantly
appareled: and after these came fauns with pointed furry ears,
and the nixies with green teeth and very beautiful waxen hair,
and the duergar, whose loosely swinging arms touched the ground
when they walked, and the queer little rakhna, who were white and
semi-transparent like jelly, and the Bush Gods that were in Acaire
the oldest living creatures and had quite outlived their divinity.
From all times and all mythologies they came, and they made a
tremendous to-do over Florian and the might which had rescued them
from their centuries of sleeping under Melusine’s enchantment.

From the top of the “high place” Florian can see all the country around him:

He saw the forests lying like dark flung-by scarves upon the paler
green of cleared fields; he saw the rivers as narrow shinings.
In one place, very far beneath them, a thunderstorm was passing
like--of all things of this blissful day,--a drifting bride’s
veil. Florian saw it twinkle with a yellow glow, then it was again
a floating small white veil. And everywhere the lands beneath in
graduations of vaporous indistinction. Poictesme seemed woven
of blue smokes and of green mists. It afforded no sharp outline
anywhere as his gazing passed outward toward the horizon. And there
all melted bafflingly into a pearl-colored sky: the eye might not
judge where, earth ending, heaven began in that bright and placid
radiancy.

We shall leave it to Doctor Freud to translate these Cabellian symbols literally. They are both erotic and poetic:

First Melior and Florian were given an egg and a quince pear: he
handed her the fruit, which she ate, and the seeds of which she
spat out; he took from her the egg and broke it. Holy Hoprig, who
had tendered his resignation as the high-priest of Llaw Gyffes,
but whose successor had not yet been appointed, then asked the
bridegroom a whispered question.

Florian was astonished, and showed it. But he answered, without
comment, “Well, let us say nine times.”

Hoprig divided a cake into nine slices, and placed these upon
the altar. Afterward Hoprig cut the throat of a white hen, and
put a little of its blood upon the feet of Melior and Florian.
The trumpets sounded then, as King Helmas came forward, and gave
Florian a small key.

I shall not tell all the romantic events which followed the nuptials of Florian de Puysange with the fairy Melior. Florian was a _roué_. Born during the reign of Louis XIV, his imaginary life took place by anticipation during the Regency. No sooner was he married than he forgot Melior. The only vestige of loyalty remaining in him was that due to his caste. In order to obtain Melior, he had, like Faust, to give something to the Devil and he had promised his first-born child. To the Devil, who in this instance was Mr. Jennicot, he had also dedicated as a sort of bonus into the bargain, the not very valuable soul of Cardinal Dubois, but the Cardinal cheated the Devil.

As a compensation the Marquis de Puysange poisoned the Duke of Orleans in the course of an orgy most dramatically narrated in the book. Florian now started on his career. A sort of Don Juan with a Bluebeard complex, he got rid of a long string of women, and would have disposed of Melior herself had not Saint Hoprig protected her. This protection, as Florian soon found out, was of so intimate a nature that it allowed him to forfeit his promise to the Devil without committing perjury.

But all these incidents are merely a pretext. I should do injustice to the author by dwelling upon the anecdotic side of his book. “The High Place” is essentially notable for the philosophic fancy playing through the background of incident. The sub-title, “a comedy of disenchantement,” tells the moral to be drawn from it. Disenchanted by reality, disenchanted by dreams, Florian is a typical Cabellian hero. He is double within himself. No sooner has he satisfied his wishes than he wishes something else. On this point he is no exception to the rule of Dom Manuel and Jurgen. And yet he had married a fairy, though one who had come down to earth to become his wife and was soon to be with child. How could he help being tired of her?

At the end of his trail, Florian tried to build a moral system based on the conciliation of contrary elements. Just as there were two gods in “Jurgen” (Satan and Koshchei), there are two in “The High Place.” Melior went back to Fairyland whence she had been drawn by Florian’s courting. Mr. Jennicot, the Devil, and St. Michael give us the key to the whole story, and it is rather disconcerting. Florian’s two patrons, the Devil and St. Michael, agree unanimously, in way of conclusion, that life is worth only what our dreams make of it, and that all dreams are rather inane. What then? _In vino veritas_, proclaims the Devil, quoting his Rabelais, and the Archangel Michael does not disapprove. Finally, Michael and Satan come so close to each other that their faces are confused and that they end up by becoming one. Let us listen to the Devil as Professor of Philosophy:

Such men as he (Florian) continue to dream, and I confess such men
are dangerous: for they obstinately aspire toward a perfectibility
that does not exist, they will be content with nothing else; and
when your master and I do not satisfy the desire which is in their
dreams, they draw their appalling logical conclusions. To that
humiliation, such as it is, I answer Drink! For the Oracle of
Babcuc also--that oracle which the little curé of Meudon was not
alone in misunderstanding--that oracle speaks the true wonder word.

The Archangel Michael wants to know what our dreams matter to the angels and the demons:

“They matter much to them,” answers Jennicot. “Men go enslaved by
this dream of beauty: but never yet have they sought to embody
it, whether in their wives or in their equally droll works of art,
without imperfect results, without results that were maddening
to the dreamer. Men are resolved to know that which they may
wholeheartedly worship. No, they are not bent upon emulating what
they worship: it is rather that holiness also is a dream which
allures mankind resistlessly.”

Whereupon Saint Michael and Mr. Jennicot, in their perplexity, go back to their cups. They have a great need of shaking off their thoughts. Man’s dreaming is for both of them a topic of foremost importance. Are not they produced by it? But to judge by dreamers’ pace in Cabell’s novels, and by the wreckage of dreams strewing their path, what does the future have in store for archangels and demons? Jennicot and St. Michael console themselves by trying to reconcile their antinomies _inter pocula_, among symbolic cups in which, according to the author, life and death, reality and dreams, evil and wrong, god and devil, all become mixed and lose their identity:

“Meanwhile he does not drink, he merely dreams, this little
Florian,” observes M. Jennicot, who seems to be the favorite
interpreter of the novelist. “He dreams of beauty and of holiness
fetched back by him to an earth which everywhere fell short of
his wishes, fetched down by him intrepidly from that imagined
high place where men attain to their insane desires. He dreams of
aspiring and joy and color and suffering and unreason, and of those
quaint taboos which you and he call sin, as being separate things,
not seeing how all blends in one vast cup. Nor does he see, as yet,
that this blending is very beautiful, when properly regarded and
very holy when approached without human conceit.”

Then the two faces which bent over Florian were somehow blended
into one face, and Florian knew that these two beings had melted
into one person, and that this person was prodding him very gently.

Whereupon the dreamer awakes. He is still only ten years old and he has lived until thirty in his dream. Now the dream is gone. His father, the Comte de Puysange, wakes him up. But Florian is not yet through with dreaming awake, in spite of the author’s final statement that henceforward Florian de Puysange settled down, and like Jurgen, descended from heaven to earth.

Thus “The High Place” takes on at the end an authentic air of a novel Doctor Faustus. But let us reach the last part of the cycle, “The Cream of the Jest,” “a comedy of evasions.”

* * * * *

The principal character of the book, Felix Kennaston, is already known to readers of Cabell; he was the ironist in one of his early works, “The Eagle’s Shadow.” Kennaston had from remote descent authentic blood of Dom Manuel and Jurgen in his veins. The book which portrays him is a veritable treatise in romantic disguises. It harks back to the thesis unfolded by the author in “Beyond Life.” Not satisfied with upholding the rights of fiction, Cabell now shows us a writer of fiction at work. Are we to see Cabell himself in Felix Kennaston? They look very much alike. Kennaston too is writing an allegorical saga. One day, while walking in his garden, he had stepped upon a little shining metal disc which plays an important part in the book. (Each one of Cabell’s novels has revolved around some talisman or charm.)

Felix Kennaston’s imagination gave a life of its own to this piece of metal. It became a magic seal, the Sigil of Scoteia, a Key to Dreamland. Whenever light touched it, Kennaston fell into a trance and dreamt curious dreams. Thanks to this sigil, he spent his whole life dreaming and he was not alone in his dreams. Of course he too flirted therein with a fairy, La Belle Ettare, beautiful, enchanting, wonderfully accomplished, and of whom Kennaston’s wife became reasonably jealous. The book is a novel of intrigue only incidentally. The real subject is the study of Kennaston’s mind at work. Behind him we see the author pointing an explanatory finger.

Kennaston did not concern himself with fiction for its own sake, but because it opened to him the gates of the Unknown. It was his road to spiritual adventure. He is an authentic daydreamer. He is not unhappy. He has every reason for being satisfied with life as it is. He is rich, talented, successful as an author, married to an attractive woman; yet he is bored. Bovaryism in his case is all the more striking because it is gratuitous. Life weighs on his shoulders; like all of Cabell’s heroes, he needs adventure, a written if not a real one. We find the novelist and the adventurer united in his person. Kennaston represents two things: first, the common run of man dissatisfied with reality and instinctively seeking an escape through dreams, and then, the taking to fiction, writing for more complete evasion. But let us listen to Kennaston’s complaint against reality and his plea in favor of dreams. It is he speaking through the mouth of the scribe Horvendile, his double; we are reminded of the familiar grievances of Carol Kennicott, Babbitt and the characters in Dreiser, Anderson and Sinclair Lewis:

I find my country an inadequate place in which to live.... Oh,
many persons live there happily enough! or, at worst, they seem
to find the prizes and the applause of my country worth striving
for wholeheartedly. But there is that in some of us which gets no
exercise there; and we struggle blindly, with impotent yearning,
to gain outlet for great powers which we know that we possess,
even though we do not know their names. And so, we dreamers wander
at adventure to Storisende--oh, and into more perilous realms
sometimes!--in search of a life that will find employment for
every faculty we have. For life in my country does not engross us
utterly. We dreamers waste there at loose ends, waste futilely....
Oh, yes! it may be that we are not sane; could we be sure of that,
it would be a comfort. But, as it is, we dreamers only know that
life in my country does not content us, and never can content
us. So we struggle, for a tiny dear-bought while, into other and
fairer-seeming lands in search of--we know not what! And after a
little, we must go back into my country and live there as best we
may.

This is, in a nutshell, the plight of all the inhibited and repressed people with whom we have met in the American _gesta_ told by the American novelists of to-day.

Such is the summary of Felix Kennaston’s adventures. We understand now the failure of Cabell’s heroes to make their escape. So their return to the land described by the scribe Horvendile occurs only after a long circumnavigation. Disgusted with reality, a Kennaston will not capitulate without having experienced every possible form of dream. He has no illusions about life, as he tells La Belle Ettare, but he is anxious to wreak a beautiful vengeance on it. If he cannot live as he wants, he will live as he may. Sick of men, he will hobnob in the company of great heroes. In a sequence of curious chapters, Kennaston, besides holding familiar converse with his fictitious Egeria, thanks to his magic seal, takes huge delight in imaginary reincarnations. We find him at Whitehall chatting with Cromwell, at Vaux-le-Vicomte during a fête given by Fouquet, at the Conciergerie where he is waiting to be called to the guillotine:

Nightly he went adventuring with Ettare: and they saw the cities
and manners of many men, to an extent undreamed-of by Ithaca’s
mundivagant king; and among them even those three persons who had
most potently influenced human life....

For once, in an elongated room with buff-colored walls--having
scarlet hangings over its windows, and seeming larger than it
was in reality, because of its many mirrors--they foregathered
with Napoleon; on the evening of his coronation: the emperor
of half-Europe was fretting over an awkward hitch in the day’s
ceremony, caused by his sisters’ attempt to avoid carrying the
Empress Josephine’s train; and he was grumbling because the old
French families continued to ignore him as a parvenu.

In a neglected orchard sun-steeped and made drowsy by the murmur
of bees, they talked with Shakespeare; the playwright, his nerves
the worse for the preceding night’s potations, was peevishly
complaining of the meager success of his later comedies, worrying
over Lord Pembroke’s neglect of him, and trying to concoct a masque
in the style of fat Ben Jonson, since that was evidently what the
theater-patronizing public wanted. And they were with Pontius
Pilate in Jerusalem, on the evening of a day when the sky was black
and the earth had trembled; and Pilate, benevolent and replete with
supper, was explaining the latest theories concerning eclipses and
earthquakes to his little boy, and chuckling with fond pride in the
youngster’s intelligent questions.

“The Cream of the Jest” is another treatise on day-dreaming and absent-mindedness. One day, alas! Kennaston’s wife threw in the wastebasket the magic disc which was his key to wonderland. That was the death blow to his flights into romance and the end of his romantic career. His wife, too, died in a mysterious manner, probably punished by the fairies for being too prosaic. We learn at the end of the book as a sort of consolation over the loss of the talisman and an assurance as to its origin--a signal revenge of reality upon dreams--that the sigil of Scoteia was but the cover of a pot of cold cream!

Cabell buries Kennaston without much ceremony after calling him down for his evasions. Yet the parting word is still in favor of dreams. From the scientific point of view Kennaston is not hard to explain. His was a case of auto-suggestion, but this explanation does not suffice for the novelist. The case of Felix Kennaston was not an isolated one. Felix was a representative man. He impersonated the conflict between fiction and romance: To Kennaston

the dream alone could matter--his proud assurance that life was
not a blind and aimless business, not all a hopeless waste and
confusion; and that he, this gross, weak animal, could be strong
and excellent and wise, and his existence a pageant of beauty and
nobility. To prove this dream was based on a delusion would be no
doubt an enjoyable retaliation for Kennaston’s being so unengaging
to the eye and so stupid to talk to; but it would make the dream no
whit less lovely or less dear to him--or to the rest of us either.

For it occurred to me that his history was, in essentials, the
history of our race, thus far. All I advanced for or against
him, equally, was true of all men that ever lived.... For it is
in this inadequate flesh that each of us must serve his dream;
and so, must fail in the dream’s service, and must parody that
which he holds dearest. To this we seem condemned, being what we
are. Thus, one and all, we play false to the dream, and it evades
us, and we dwindle into responsible citizens. And yet always
thereafter--because of many abiding memories--we know, assuredly,
that the way of flesh is not a futile scurrying through dining
rooms and offices and shops and parlors, and thronged streets and
restaurants, “and so to bed” ...

It was in appropriate silence, therefore, that I regarded Felix
Kennaston as a parable. The man was not merely very human; he was
humanity. And I reflected that it is only by preserving faith in
human dreams that we may, after all, perhaps some day make them
come true.

Such is the moral of “The Cream of the Jest,” a summarizing of Cabell’s ironistic philosophy. It is decidedly Nietszchean. In a Puritan land he conceives life as a work of art and sees in Art the highest form of life to transcend itself. This he did with fine daring and great poetic feeling in a chapter of the same book, “The Evolution of a Vestryman.” In pages filled with a humor reminiscent of Samuel Butler, Cabell eulogizes Chance. In a world of chance encounters, Art alone reveals intentions and a goal to the human puppets. The author, boldly unfolding his thesis, roundly scores the religions. He reproaches them with postponing till the morrow what Art promises to us _hic et nunc. Carpe diem!_ Cabell’s philosophy assumes an artistic epicureanism midway between Anatole France and Walter Pater. Then comes a paradoxical apology of Christianity, which Cabell forgives for having falsified human perspectives because it has increased the romantic interest of life. According to him, God did not die to redeem us. Imagine a novelist dying for the marionettes he has paraded before our eyes! God reincarnated himself and died to _express himself_ and to teach us to do as much. What would the Puritans think of this new theology?

* * * * *

I shall stop here with this rapid view of Cabell’s mind. I have neglected his early works, although some of them were quite significant. Some are even very attractive: “The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck” is the touching, beautiful and ironic story of an _amour d’automne_ in the romantic background of a Virginia estate. Cabell is a very subtle and delicate psychologist of the woman’s heart. “The Eagle’s Shadow” is a suggestive sentimental “imbroglio.”

“The Cords of Vanity, A Comedy of Cowardice,” portrays a modern descendant of Jurgen experiencing in real life all the adventures which had occurred to Jurgen only in dreams. He flirts with, seduces, and abandons half a dozen ladies, victims of his disillusioned philosophy of love. This book gave Cabell a chance to display a delicious bit of _marivaudage_.