James Branch Cabell
Reading edition
James Branch Cabell was born at Richmond, Virginia, April 14, 1879. He taught French and Greek for two years at William and Mary College (1896-7), worked in the pressroom of the Richmond Times (1898), was on the staff of the New York Herald (1899-1901) and began contributing to the magazines in 1902, writing over sixty short stories as well as scattered essays, translations and papers on historical and biographical subjects.
Although Cabell likes to describe himself as a genealogist, he is the author of some of the most exquisite prose in contemporary literature. But it is a prose that rises high above its own 214beauty of style. In books like The Certain Hour (1916), The Cream of the Jest (1917), Jurgen (1919) and the poetry-crammed “comedy of appearances,” Figures of Earth (1921), the composite Cabell hero emerges, triumphant in the midst of his defeats—the eternally disillusioned, eternally hopeful Jurgen-Charteris-Kennaston: a symbol of the human soul seeking some sort of finality, some assurance in a world of illimitable perplexities.
Though Cabell is best known as a novelist, his books are liberally dotted with original verses that do duty as chapter-headings, mottoes, tail-pieces, interpolated songs and epilogues. A complete volume of his verse, From the Hidden Way (1916), bore the subtitle “Being Seventy-Five Adaptations.” It purported to be paraphrases from forgotten troubadours like Allesandro de Medici, Antoine Riczi, Charles Garnier and half a dozen other obscure Parnassians. Cabell even quoted the first lines of each of their poems in the original Latin, French or Provençal. Even after the hoax was exposed, it was difficult for most readers to believe that the entire collection—names, references, first lines in the “original” and all—were the creation of Cabell, the masquerader.
In From the Hidden Way, the romancer has added another story to that gem-studded ivory tower in which Cabell lives and escapes the modern world. Whether he echoes the mediæval ballata or the more modern rondeau, roundel and sonnet, his is an artifice solidly erected upon art.
SEA-SCAPES
I lie and dream in the soft warm sand; and the thunder and surge and the baffled roar
Of the sea’s relentless and vain endeavors are a pleasant lullaby, here on shore.
215Since a little hillock screens yonder ageless, tenacious battlings (which shatter, and pass
In foam and spume), I appraise, half-nodding, much sand and sky and gaunt nodding grass.
And I am content to lie and dream; and I am too drowsy to rise, and see
If it be worth breasting—that ocean yonder, which a little hillock hides from me.
ONE END OF LOVE
“It is long since we met,” she said.
I answered, “Yes.”
She is not fair,
But very old now, and no gold
Gleams in that scant gray withered hair
Where once much gold was: and, I think,
Not easily might one bring tears
Into her eyes, which have become
Like dusty glass.
“’Tis thirty years,”
I said. “And then the war came on
Apace, and our young King had need
Of men to serve him oversea
Against the heathen. For their greed,
Puffed up at Tunis, troubles him——”
216She said: “This week my son is gone
To him at Paris with his men.”
And then: “You never married, John?”
I answered, “No.” And so we sate
Musing a while.
Then with his guests
Came Robert; and his thin voice broke
Upon my dream, with the old jests,
No food for laughter now: and swore
We must be friends now that our feud
Was overpast.
“We are grown old—
Eh, John?” he said. “And, by the Rood!
’Tis time we were at peace with God
Who are not long for this world.”
“Yea,”
I answered; “we are old.” And then,
Remembering that April day
At Calais, and that hawthorn field
Wherein we fought long since, I said:
“We are friends now.”
And she sate by,
Scarce heeding. Thus the evening sped.
And we ride homeward now, and I
Ride moodily; my palfrey jogs
Along a rock-strewn way the moon
Lights up for us; yonder the bogs
217Are curdled with thin ice; the trees
Are naked; from the barren wold
The wind comes like a blade aslant
Across a world grown very old.