The Certain Hour
Author: James Branch Cabell
"Criticism, whatever may be its
pretensions, never does more than to
define the impression which is made upon
it at a certain moment by a work wherein
the writer himself noted the impression
of the world which he received at a
certain hour."
In Dedication of The Certain Hour
Sad hours and glad hours, and all hours, pass over;
One thing unshaken stays:
Life, that hath Death for spouse, hath Chance for lover;
Whereby decays
Each thing save one thing:--mid this strife diurnal
Of hourly change begot,
Love that is God-born, bides as God eternal,
And changes not;--
Nor means a tinseled dream pursuing lovers
Find altered by-and-bye,
When, with possession, time anon discovers
Trapped dreams must die,--
For he that visions God, of mankind gathers
One manlike trait alone,
And reverently imputes to Him a father's
Love for his son.
CONTENTS
"_Ballad of the Double-Soul_"
AUCTORIAL INDUCTION
BELHS CAVALIERS
BALTHAZAR'S DAUGHTER
JUDITH'S CREED
CONCERNING CORINNA
OLIVIA'S POTTAGE
A BROWN WOMAN
PRO HONORIA
THE IRRESISTIBLE OGLE
A PRINCESS OF GRUB STREET
THE LADY OF ALL OUR DREAMS
"_Ballad of Plagiary_"
_BALLAD OF THE DOUBLE-SOUL_
"_Les Dieux, qui trop aiment ses faceties cruelles_"--PAUL VERVILLE.
In the beginning the Gods made man, and fashioned the sky and the sea,
And the earth's fair face for man's dwelling-place, and
this was the Gods' decree:--
"Lo, We have given to man five wits: he discerneth folly and sin;
He is swift to deride all the world outside, and blind
to the world within:
"So that man may make sport and amuse Us, in battling
for phrases or pelf,
Now that each may know what forebodeth woe to his
neighbor, and not to himself."
Yet some have the Gods forgotten,--or is it that subtler mirth
The Gods extort of a certain sort of folk that cumber the earth?
_For this is the song of the double-soul, distortedly two in one,--_
_Of the wearied eyes that still behold the fruit ere the seed be sown,_
_And derive affright for the nearing night from the light_
_of the noontide sun._
For one that with hope in the morning set forth, and knew never a fear,
They have linked with another whom omens bother; and
he whispers in one's ear.
And one is fain to be climbing where only angels have trod,
But is fettered and tied to another's side who fears that
it might look odd.
And one would worship a woman whom all perfections dower,
But the other smiles at transparent wiles; and he quotes
from Schopenhauer.
Thus two by two we wrangle and blunder about the earth,
And that body we share we may not spare; but the Gods
have need of mirth.
_So this is the song of the double-soul, distortedly two in one.--_
_Of the wearied eyes that still behold the fruit ere the seed be sown,_
_And derive affright for the nearing night from the light_
_of the noontide sun._
AUCTORIAL INDUCTION
"_These questions, so long as they remain with the Muses, may very well
be unaccompanied with severity, for where there is no other end of
contemplation and inquiry but that of pastime alone, the understanding
is not oppressed; but after the Muses have given over their riddles to
Sphinx,--that is, to practise, which urges and impels to action, choice
and determination,--then it is that they become torturing, severe and
trying._"
From the dawn of the day to the dusk he toiled,
Shaping fanciful playthings, with tireless hands,--
Useless trumpery toys; and, with vaulting heart,
Gave them unto all peoples, who mocked at him,
Trampled on them, and soiled them, and went their way.
Then he toiled from the morn to the dusk again,
Gave his gimcracks to peoples who mocked at him,
Trampled on them, deriding, and went their way.
Thus he labors, and loudly they jeer at him;--
That is, when they remember he still exists.
_Who_, you ask, _is this fellow_?--What matter names?
He is only a scribbler who is content.
FELIX KENNASTON.--The Toy-Maker.
AUCTORIAL INDUCTION
WHICH (AFTER SOME BRIEF DISCOURSE OF FIRES AND FRYING-PANS) ELUCIDATES
THE INEXPEDIENCY OF PUBLISHING THIS BOOK, AS WELL AS THE NECESSITY OF
WRITING IT: AND THENCE PASSES TO A MODEST DEFENSE OF MORE VITAL THEMES.
The desire to write perfectly of beautiful happenings is, as the saying
runs, old as the hills--and as immortal. Questionless, there was many
a serviceable brick wasted in Nineveh because finicky persons must
needs be deleting here and there a phrase in favor of its cuneatic
synonym; and it is not improbable that when the outworn sun expires in
clinkers its final ray will gild such zealots tinkering with their
"style." Some few there must be in every age and every land of whom
life claims nothing very insistently save that they write perfectly of
beautiful happenings.
Yet, that the work of a man of letters is almost always a congenial
product of his day and environment, is a contention as lacking in
novelty as it is in the need of any upholding here. Nor is the
rationality of that axiom far to seek; for a man of genuine literary
genius, since he possesses a temperament whose susceptibilities are of
wider area than those of any other, is inevitably of all people the one
most variously affected by his surroundings. And it is he, in
consequence, who of all people most faithfully and compactly exhibits
the impress of his times and his times' tendencies, not merely in his
writings--where it conceivably might be just predetermined
affectation--but in his personality.
Such being the assumption upon which this volume is builded, it appears
only equitable for the architect frankly to indicate his cornerstone.
Hereinafter you have an attempt to depict a special temperament--one in
essence "literary"--as very variously molded by diverse eras and as
responding in proportion with its ability to the demands of a certain
hour.
In proportion with its ability, be it repeated, since its ability is
singularly hampered. For, apart from any ticklish temporal
considerations, be it remembered, life is always claiming of this
temperament's possessor that he write perfectly of beautiful happenings.
To disregard this vital longing, and flatly to stifle the innate
striving toward artistic creation, is to become (as with Wycherley and
Sheridan) a man who waives, however laughingly, his sole apology for
existence. The proceeding is paltry enough, in all conscience; and
yet, upon the other side, there is much positive danger in giving to
the instinct a loose rein. For in that event the familiar
circumstances of sedate and wholesome living cannot but seem, like
paintings viewed too near, to lose in gusto and winsomeness. Desire,
perhaps a craving hunger, awakens for the impossible. No emotion,
whatever be its sincerity, is endured without a side-glance toward its
capabilities for being written about. The world, in short, inclines to
appear an ill-lit mine, wherein one quarries gingerly amidst an abiding
loneliness (as with Pope and Ufford and Sire Raimbaut)--and wherein one
very often is allured into unsavory alleys (as with Herrick and
Alessandro de Medici)--in search of that raw material which loving
labor will transshape into comeliness.
Such, if it be allowed to shift the metaphor, are the treacherous
by-paths of that admirably policed highway whereon the well-groomed and
well-bitted Pegasi of Vanderhoffen and Charteris (in his later manner)
trot stolidly and safely toward oblivion. And the result of wandering
afield is of necessity a tragedy, in that the deviator's life, if not
as an artist's quite certainly as a human being's, must in the outcome
be adjudged a failure.
Hereinafter, then, you have an attempt to depict a special
temperament--one in essence "literary"--as very variously molded by
diverse eras and as responding in proportion with its ability to the
demands of a certain hour.
II
And this much said, it is permissible to hope, at least, that here and
there some reader may be found not wholly blind to this book's goal,
whatever be his opinion as to this book's success in reaching it. Yet
many honest souls there be among us average-novel-readers in whose eyes
this volume must rest content to figure as a collection of short
stories having naught in common beyond the feature that each deals with
the _affaires du coeur_ of a poet.
Such must always be the book's interpretation by mental indolence. The
fact is incontestable; and this fact in itself may be taken as
sufficient to establish the inexpediency of publishing _The Certain
Hour_. For that "people will not buy a volume of short stories" is
notorious to all publishers. To offset the axiom there are no doubt
incongruous phenomena--ranging from the continued popularity of the
Bible to the present general esteem of Mr. Kipling, and embracing the
rather unaccountable vogue of "O. Henry";--but, none the less, the
superstition has its force.
Here intervenes the multifariousness of man, pointed out somewhere by
Mr. Gilbert Chesterton, which enables the individual to be at once a
vegetarian, a golfer, a vestryman, a blond, a mammal, a Democrat, and
an immortal spirit. As a rational person, one may debonairly consider
_The Certain Hour_ possesses as large license to look like a volume of
short stories as, say, a backgammon-board has to its customary guise of
a two-volume history; but as an average-novel-reader, one must vote
otherwise. As an average-novel-reader, one must condemn the very book
which, as a seasoned scribbler, one was moved to write through long
consideration of the drama already suggested--that immemorial drama of
the desire to write perfectly of beautiful happenings, and the obscure
martyrdom to which this desire solicits its possessor.
Now, clearly, the struggle of a special temperament with a fixed force
does not forthwith begin another story when the locale of combat
shifts. The case is, rather, as when--with certainly an intervening
change of apparel--Pompey fights Caesar at both Dyrrachium and
Pharsalus, or as when General Grant successively encounters General Lee
at the Wilderness, Spottsylvania, Cold Harbor and Appomattox. The
combatants remain unchanged, the question at issue is the same, the
tragedy has continuity. And even so, from the time of Sire Raimbaut to
that of John Charteris has a special temperament heart-hungrily
confronted an ageless problem: at what cost now, in this fleet hour of
my vigor, may one write perfectly of beautiful happenings?
Thus logic urges, with pathetic futility, inasmuch as we
average-novel-readers are profoundly indifferent to both logic and good
writing. And always the fact remains that to the mentally indolent
this book may well seem a volume of disconnected short stories. All of
us being more or less mentally indolent, this possibility constitutes a
dire fault.
Three other damning objections will readily obtrude themselves: _The
Certain Hour_ deals with past epochs--beginning before the introduction
of dinner-forks, and ending at that remote quaint period when people
used to waltz and two-step--dead eras in which we average-novel-readers
are not interested; _The Certain Hour_ assumes an appreciable amount of
culture and information on its purchaser's part, which we
average-novel-readers either lack or, else, are unaccustomed to employ
in connection with reading for pastime; and--in our eyes the crowning
misdemeanor--_The Certain Hour_ is not "vital."
Having thus candidly confessed these faults committed as the writer of
this book, it is still possible in human multifariousness to consider
their enormity, not merely in this book, but in fictional
reading-matter at large, as viewed by an average-novel-reader--by a
representative of that potent class whose preferences dictate the
nature and main trend of modern American literature. And to do this,
it may be, throws no unsalutary sidelight upon the still-existent
problem: at what cost, now, may one attempt to write perfectly of
beautiful happenings?
III
Indisputably the most striking defect of this modern American
literature is the fact that the production of anything at all
resembling literature is scarcely anywhere apparent. Innumerable
printing-presses, instead, are turning out a vast quantity of
reading-matter, the candidly recognized purpose of which is to kill
time, and which--it has been asserted, though perhaps too
sweepingly--ought not to be vended over book-counters, but rather in
drugstores along with the other narcotics.
It is begging the question to protest that the class of people who a
generation ago read nothing now at least read novels, and to regard
this as a change for the better. By similar logic it would be more
wholesome to breakfast off laudanum than to omit the meal entirely.
The nineteenth century, in fact, by making education popular, has
produced in America the curious spectacle of a reading-public with
essentially nonliterary tastes. Formerly, better books were published,
because they were intended for persons who turned to reading through a
natural bent of mind; whereas the modern American novel of commerce is
addressed to us average people who read, when we read at all, in
violation of every innate instinct.
Such grounds as yet exist for hopefulness on the part of those who
cordially care for _belles lettres_ are to be found elsewhere than in
the crowded market-places of fiction, where genuine intelligence
panders on all sides to ignorance and indolence. The phrase may seem
to have no very civil ring; but reflection will assure the fair-minded
that two indispensable requisites nowadays of a pecuniarily successful
novel are, really, that it make no demand upon the reader's
imagination, and that it rigorously refrain from assuming its reader to
possess any particular information on any subject whatever. The author
who writes over the head of the public is the most dangerous enemy of
his publisher--and the most insidious as well, because so many
publishers are in private life interested in literary matters, and
would readily permit this personal foible to influence the exercise of
their vocation were it possible to do so upon the preferable side of
bankruptcy.
But publishers, among innumerable other conditions, must weigh the fact
that no novel which does not deal with modern times is ever really
popular among the serious-minded. It is difficult to imagine a tale
whose action developed under the rule of the Caesars or the
Merovingians being treated as more than a literary _hors d'oeuvre_. We
purchasers of "vital" novels know nothing about the period, beyond a
hazy association of it with the restrictions of the schoolroom; our
sluggish imaginations instinctively rebel against the exertion of
forming any notion of such a period; and all the human nature that
exists even in serious-minded persons is stirred up to resentment
against the book's author for presuming to know more than a potential
patron. The book, in fine, simply irritates the serious-minded person;
and she--for it is only women who willingly brave the terrors of
department-stores, where most of our new books are bought
nowadays--quite naturally puts it aside in favor of some keen and
daring study of American life that is warranted to grip the reader.
So, modernity of scene is everywhere necessitated as an essential
qualification for a book's discussion at the literary evenings of the
local woman's club; and modernity of scene, of course, is almost always
fatal to the permanent worth of fictitious narrative.
It may seem banal here to recall the truism that first-class art never
reproduces its surroundings; but such banality is often justified by
our human proneness to shuffle over the fact that many truisms are
true. And this one is pre-eminently indisputable: that what mankind
has generally agreed to accept as first-class art in any of the varied
forms of fictitious narrative has never been a truthful reproduction of
the artist's era. Indeed, in the higher walks of fiction art has never
reproduced anything, but has always dealt with the facts and laws of
life as so much crude material which must be transmuted into
comeliness. When Shakespeare pronounced his celebrated dictum about
art's holding the mirror up to nature, he was no doubt alluding to the
circumstance that a mirror reverses everything which it reflects.
Nourishment for much wildish speculation, in fact, can be got by
considering what the world's literature would be, had its authors
restricted themselves, as do we Americans so sedulously--and
unavoidably--to writing of contemporaneous happenings. In
fiction-making no author of the first class since Homer's infancy has
ever in his happier efforts concerned himself at all with the great
"problems" of his particular day; and among geniuses of the second rank
you will find such ephemeralities adroitly utilized only when they are
distorted into enduring parodies of their actual selves by the broad
humor of a Dickens or the colossal fantasy of a Balzac. In such cases
as the latter two writers, however, we have an otherwise competent
artist handicapped by a personality so marked that, whatever he may
nominally write about, the result is, above all else, an exposure of
the writer's idiosyncrasies. Then, too, the laws of any locale wherein
Mr. Pickwick achieves a competence in business, or of a society wherein
Vautrin becomes chief of police, are upon the face of it extra-mundane.
It suffices that, as a general rule, in fiction-making the true artist
finds an ample, if restricted, field wherein the proper functions of
the preacher, or the ventriloquist, or the photographer, or of the
public prosecutor, are exercised with equal lack of grace.
Besides, in dealing with contemporary life a novelist is goaded into
too many pusillanimous concessions to plausibility. He no longer moves
with the gait of omnipotence. It was very different in the palmy days
when Dumas was free to play at ducks and drakes with history, and
Victor Hugo to reconstruct the whole system of English government, and
Scott to compel the sun to set in the east, whenever such minor changes
caused to flow more smoothly the progress of the tale these giants had
in hand. These freedoms are not tolerated in American noveldom, and
only a few futile "high-brows" sigh in vain for Thackeray's "happy
harmless Fableland, where these things are." The majority of us are
deep in "vital" novels. Nor is the reason far to seek.
IV
One hears a great deal nowadays concerning "vital" books. Their
authors have been widely praised on very various grounds. Oddly
enough, however, the writers of these books have rarely been commended
for the really praiseworthy charity evinced therein toward that large
long-suffering class loosely describable as the average-novel-reader.
Yet, in connection with this fact, it is worthy of more than passing
note that no great while ago the _New York Times'_ carefully selected
committee, in picking out the hundred best books published during a
particular year, declared as to novels--"a 'best' book, in our opinion,
is one that raises an important question, or recurs to a vital theme
and pronounces upon it what in some sense is a last word." Now this
definition is not likely ever to receive more praise than it deserves.
Cavilers may, of course, complain that actually to write the last word
on any subject is a feat reserved for the Recording Angel's unique
performance on judgment Day. Even setting that objection aside, it is
undeniable that no work of fiction published of late in America
corresponds quite so accurately to the terms of this definition as do
the multiplication tables. Yet the multiplication tables are not
without their claims to applause as examples of straightforward
narrative. It is, also, at least permissible to consider that therein
the numeral five, say, where it figures as protagonist, unfolds under
the stress of its varying adventures as opulent a development of real
human nature as does, through similar ups-and-downs, the Reverend John
Hodder in _The Inside of the Cup_. It is equally allowable to find the
less simple evolution of the digit seven more sympathetic, upon the
whole, than those of Undine Spragg in _The Custom of the Country_.
But, even so, this definition of what may now, authoritatively, be
ranked as a "best novel" is an honest and noteworthy severance from
misleading literary associations such as have too long befogged our
notions about reading-matter. It points with emphasis toward the
altruistic obligations of tale-tellers to be "vital."
For we average-novel-readers--we average people, in a word--are now, as
always, rather pathetically hungry for "vital" themes, such themes as
appeal directly to our everyday observation and prejudices. Did the
decision rest with us all novelists would be put under bond to confine
themselves forevermore to themes like these.
As touches the appeal to everyday observation, it is an old story, at
least coeval with Mr. Crummles' not uncelebrated pumps and tubs, if not
with the grapes of Zeuxis, how unfailingly in art we delight to
recognize the familiar. A novel whose scene of action is explicit will
always interest the people of that locality, whatever the book's other
pretensions to consideration. Given simultaneously a photograph of
Murillo's rendering of _The Virgin Crowned Queen of Heaven_ and a
photograph of a governor's installation in our State capital, there is
no one of us but will quite naturally look at the latter first, in
order to see if in it some familiar countenance be recognizable. And
thus, upon a larger scale, the twentieth century is, pre-eminently,
interested in the twentieth century.
It is all very well to describe our average-novel-readers' dislike of
Romanticism as "the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a
glass." It is even within the scope of human dunderheadedness again to
point out here that the supreme artists in literature have precisely
this in common, and this alone, that in their masterworks they have
avoided the "vital" themes of their day with such circumspection as
lesser folk reserve for the smallpox. The answer, of course, in either
case, is that the "vital" novel, the novel which peculiarly appeals to
us average-novel-readers, has nothing to do with literature. There is
between these two no more intelligent connection than links the paint
Mr. Sargent puts on canvas and the paint Mr. Dockstader puts on his
face.
Literature is made up of the re-readable books, the books which it is
possible--for the people so constituted as to care for that sort of
thing--to read again and yet again with pleasure. Therefore, in
literature a book's subject is of astonishingly minor importance, and
its style nearly everything: whereas in books intended to be read for
pastime, and forthwith to be consigned at random to the wastebasket or
to the inmates of some charitable institute, the theme is of paramount
importance, and ought to be a serious one. The modern novelist owes it
to his public to select a "vital" theme which in itself will fix the
reader's attention by reason of its familiarity in the reader's
everyday life.
Thus, a lady with whose more candid opinions the writer of this is more
frequently favored nowadays than of old, formerly confessed to having
only one set rule when it came to investment in new
reading-matter--always to buy the Williamsons' last book. Her reason
was the perfectly sensible one that the Williamsons' plots used
invariably to pivot upon motor-trips, and she is an ardent
automobilist. Since, as of late, the Williamsons have seen fit to
exercise their typewriter upon other topics, they have as a matter of
course lost her patronage.
This principle of selection, when you come to appraise it sanely, is
the sole intelligent method of dealing with reading-matter. It seems
here expedient again to state the peculiar problem that we
average-novel-readers have of necessity set the modern
novelist--namely, that his books must in the main appeal to people who
read for pastime, to people who read books only under protest and only
when they have no other employment for that particular half-hour.
Now, reading for pastime is immensely simplified when the book's theme
is some familiar matter of the reader's workaday life, because at
outset the reader is spared considerable mental effort. The motorist
above referred to, and indeed any average-novel-reader, can without
exertion conceive of the Williamsons' people in their automobiles.
Contrariwise, were these fictitious characters embarked in palankeens
or droshkies or jinrikishas, more or less intellectual exercise would
be necessitated on the reader's part to form a notion of the
conveyance. And we average-novel-readers do not open a book with the
intention of making a mental effort. The author has no right to expect
of us an act so unhabitual, we very poignantly feel. Our prejudices he
is freely chartered to stir up--if, lucky rogue, he can!--but he ought
with deliberation to recognize that it is precisely in order to avoid
mental effort that we purchase, or borrow, his book, and afterward
discuss it.
Hence arises our heartfelt gratitude toward such novels as deal with
"vital" themes, with the questions we average-novel-readers confront or
make talk about in those happier hours of our existence wherein we are
not reduced to reading. Thus, a tale, for example, dealing either with
"feminism" or "white slavery" as the handiest makeshift of
spinsterdom--or with the divorce habit and plutocratic iniquity in
general, or with the probable benefits of converting clergymen to
Christianity, or with how much more than she knows a desirable mother
will tell her children--finds the book's tentative explorer, just now,
amply equipped with prejudices, whether acquired by second thought or
second hand, concerning the book's topic. As endurability goes,
reading the book rises forthwith almost to the level of an
afternoon-call where there is gossip about the neighbors and Germany's
future. We average-novel-readers may not, in either case, agree with
the opinions advanced; but at least our prejudices are aroused, and we
are interested.
And these "vital" themes awake our prejudices at the cost of a
minimum--if not always, as when Miss Corelli guides us, with a
positively negligible--tasking of our mental faculties. For such
exemption we average-novel-readers cannot but be properly grateful.
Nay, more than this: provided the novelist contrive to rouse our
prejudices, it matters with us not at all whether afterward they be
soothed or harrowed. To implicate our prejudices somehow, to raise in
us a partizanship in the tale's progress, is our sole request. Whether
this consummation be brought about through an arraignment of some
social condition which we personally either advocate or reprehend--the
attitude weighs little--or whether this interest be purchased with
placidly driveling preachments of generally "uplifting"
tendencies--vaguely titillating that vague intention which exists in us
all of becoming immaculate as soon as it is perfectly convenient--the
personal prejudices of us average-novel-readers are not lightly lulled
again to sleep.
In fact, the jealousy of any human prejudice against hinted
encroachment may safely be depended upon to spur us through an
astonishing number of pages--for all that it has of late been
complained among us, with some show of extenuation, that our original
intent in beginning certain of the recent "vital" novels was to kill
time, rather than eternity. And so, we average-novel-readers plod on
jealously to the end, whether we advance (to cite examples already
somewhat of yesterday) under the leadership of Mr. Upton Sinclair
aspersing the integrity of modern sausages and millionaires, or of Mr.
Hall Caine saying about Roman Catholics what ordinary people would
hesitate to impute to their relatives by marriage--or whether we be
more suavely allured onward by Mrs. Florence Barclay, or Mr. Sydnor
Harrison, with ingenuous indorsements of the New Testament and the
inherent womanliness of women.
The "vital" theme, then, let it be repeated, has two inestimable
advantages which should commend it to all novelists: first, it spares
us average-novel-readers any preliminary orientation, and thereby
mitigates the mental exertion of reading; and secondly, it appeals to
our prejudices, which we naturally prefer to exercise, and are
accustomed to exercise, rather than our mental or idealistic faculties.
The novelist who conscientiously bears these two facts in mind is
reasonably sure of his reward, not merely in pecuniary form, but in
those higher fields wherein he harvests his chosen public's honest
gratitude and affection.
For we average-novel-readers are quite frequently reduced by
circumstances to self-entrustment to the resources of the novelist, as
to those of the dentist. Our latter-day conditions, as we cannot but
recognize, necessitate the employment of both artists upon occasion.
And with both, we average-novel-readers, we average people, are most
grateful when they make the process of resorting to them as easy and
unirritating as may be possible.
V
So much for the plea of us average-novel-readers; and our plea, we
think, is rational. We are "in the market" for a specified article;
and human ingenuity, co-operating with human nature, will inevitably
insure the manufacture of that article as long as any general demand
for it endures.
Meanwhile, it is small cause for grief that the purchaser of American
novels prefers Central Park to any "wood near Athens," and is more at
home in the Tenderloin than in Camelot. People whose tastes happen to
be literary are entirely too prone to too much long-faced prattle about
literature, which, when all is said, is never a controlling factor in
anybody's life. The automobile and the telephone, the accomplishments
of Mr. Edison and Mr. Burbank, and it would be permissible to add of
Mr. Rockefeller, influence nowadays, in one fashion or another, every
moment of every living American's existence; whereas had America
produced, instead, a second Milton or a Dante, it would at most have
caused a few of us to spend a few spare evenings rather differently.
Besides, we know--even we average-novel-readers--that America is in
fact producing her enduring literature day by day, although, as rarely
fails to be the case, those who are contemporaneous with the makers of
this literature cannot with any certainty point them out. To voice a
hoary truism, time alone is the test of "vitality." In our present
flood of books, as in any other flood, it is the froth and scum which
shows most prominently. And the possession of "vitality," here as
elsewhere, postulates that its possessor must ultimately perish.
Nay, by the time these printed pages are first read as printed pages,
allusion to those modern authors whom these pages cite--the pre-eminent
literary personages of that hour wherein these pages were written--will
inevitably have come to savor somewhat of antiquity: so that sundry
references herein to the "vital" books now most in vogue will rouse
much that vague shrugging recollection as wakens, say, at a mention of
_Dorothy Vernon_ or _Three Weeks_ or _Beverly of Graustark_. And while
at first glance it might seem expedient--in revising the last
proof-sheets of these pages--somewhat to "freshen them up" by
substituting, for the books herein referred to, the "vital" and more
widely talked-of novels of the summer of 1916, the task would be but
wasted labor; since even these fascinating chronicles, one comprehends
forlornly, must needs be equally obsolete by the time these
proof-sheets have been made into a volume. With malice aforethought,
therefore, the books and authors named herein stay those which all of
three years back our reviewers and advertising pages, with perfect
gravity, acclaimed as of enduring importance. For the quaintness of
that opinion, nowadays, may profitably round the moral that there is
really nothing whereto one may fittingly compare a successful
contribution to "vital" reading-matter, as touches evanescence.
And this is as it should be. _Tout passe.--L'art robust seul a
l'eternite_, precisely as Gautier points out, with bracing
common-sense; and it is excellent thus to comprehend that to-day, as
always, only through exercise of the auctorial virtues of distinction
and clarity, of beauty and symmetry, of tenderness and truth and
urbanity, may a man in reason attempt to insure his books against
oblivion's voracity.
Yet the desire to write perfectly of beautiful happenings is, as the
saying runs, old as the hills--and as immortal. Questionless, there
was many a serviceable brick wasted in Nineveh because finicky persons
must needs be deleting here and there a phrase in favor of its cuneatic
synonym; and it is not improbable that when the outworn sun expires in
clinkers its final ray will gild such zealots tinkering with their
"style." This, then, is the conclusion of the whole matter. Some few
there must be in every age and every land of whom life claims nothing
very insistently save that they write perfectly of beautiful
happenings. And even we average-novel-readers know it is such folk who
are to-day making in America that portion of our literature which may
hope for permanency.
Dumbarton Grange
1914-1916
BELHS CAVALIERS
"_For this RAIMBAUT DE VAQUIERAS lived at a time when prolonged habits
of extra-mundane contemplation, combined with the decay of real
knowledge, were apt to volatilize the thoughts and aspirations of the
best and wisest into dreamy unrealities, and to lend a false air of
mysticism to love. . . . It is as if the intellect and the will had
become used to moving paralytically among visions, dreams, and mystic
terrors, weighed down with torpor._"
Fair friend, since that hour I took leave of thee
I have not slept nor stirred from off my knee,
But prayed alway to God, S. Mary's Son,
To give me back my true companion;
And soon it will be Dawn.
Fair friend, at parting, thy behest to me
Was that all sloth I should eschew and flee,
And keep good Watch until the Night was done:
Now must my Song and Service pass for none?
For soon it will be Dawn.
RAIMBAUT DE VAQUIERAS.--_Aubade, from F. York Powell's version_.
BELHS CAVALIERS
You may read elsewhere of the long feud that was between Guillaume de
Baux, afterward Prince of Orange, and his kinsman Raimbaut de
Vaquieras. They were not reconciled until their youth was dead. Then,
when Messire Raimbaut returned from battling against the Turks and the
Bulgarians, in the 1,210th year from man's salvation, the Archbishop of
Rheims made peace between the two cousins; and, attended by Makrisi, a
converted Saracen who had followed the knight's fortunes for well nigh
a quarter of a century, the Sire de Vaquieras rode homeward.
Many slain men were scattered along the highway when he came again into
Venaissin, in April, after an absence of thirty years. The crows whom
his passing disturbed were too sluggish for long flights and many of
them did not heed him at all. Guillaume de Baux was now undisputed
master of these parts, although, as this host of mute, hacked and
partially devoured witnesses attested, the contest had been dubious for
a while: but now Lovain of the Great-Tooth, Prince Guillaume's last
competitor, was captured; the forces of Lovain were scattered; and of
Lovain's lieutenants only Mahi de Vernoil was unsubdued.
Prince Guillaume laughed a little when he told his kinsman of the
posture of affairs, as more loudly did Guillaume's gross son, Sire
Philibert. But Madona Biatritz did not laugh. She was the widow of
Guillaume's dead brother--Prince Conrat, whom Guillaume succeeded--and
it was in her honor that Raimbaut had made those songs which won him
eminence as a practitioner of the Gay Science.
Biatritz said, "It is a long while since we two met."
He that had been her lover all his life said, "Yes."
She was no longer the most beautiful of women, no longer his be-hymned
Belhs Cavaliers--you may read elsewhere how he came to call her that in
all his canzons--but only a fine and gracious stranger. It was
uniformly gray, that soft and plentiful hair, where once such gold had
flamed as dizzied him to think of even now; there was no crimson in
these thinner lips; and candor would have found her eyes less wonderful
than those Raimbaut had dreamed of very often among an alien and
hostile people. But he lamented nothing, and to him she was as ever
Heaven's most splendid miracle.
"Yes," said this old Raimbaut,--"and even to-day we have not reclaimed
the Sepulcher as yet. Oh, I doubt if we shall ever win it, now that
your brother and my most dear lord is dead." Both thought a while of
Boniface de Montferrat, their playmate once, who yesterday was King of
Thessalonica and now was so much Macedonian dust.
She said: "This week the Prince sent envoys to my nephew. . . . And
so you have come home again----" Color had surged into her time-worn
face, and as she thought of things done long ago this woman's eyes were
like the eyes of his young Biatritz. She said: "You never married?"
He answered: "No, I have left love alone. For Love prefers to take
rather than to give; against a single happy hour he balances a hundred
miseries, and he appraises one pleasure to be worth a thousand pangs.
Pardieu, let this immortal usurer contrive as may seem well to him, for
I desire no more of his bounty or of his penalties."
"No, we wish earnestly for nothing, either good or bad," said Dona
Biatritz--"we who have done with loving."
They sat in silence, musing over ancient happenings, and not looking at
each other, until the Prince came with his guests, who seemed to laugh
too heartily.
Guillaume's frail arm was about his kinsman, and Guillaume chuckled
over jests and by-words that had been between the cousins as children.
Raimbaut found them no food for laughter now. Guillaume told all of
Raimbaut's oath of fealty, and of how these two were friends and their
unnatural feud was forgotten. "For we grow old,--eh, maker of songs?"
he said; "and it is time we made our peace with Heaven, since we are
not long for this world."
"Yes," said the knight; "oh yes, we both grow old." He thought of
another April evening, so long ago, when this Guillaume de Baux had
stabbed him in a hedged field near Calais, and had left him under a
hawthorn bush for dead; and Raimbaut wondered that there was no anger
in his heart. "We are friends now," he said. Biatritz, whom these two
had loved, and whose vanished beauty had been the spur of their long
enmity, sat close to them, and hardly seemed to listen.
Thus the evening passed and every one was merry, because the Prince had
overcome Lovain of the Great-Tooth, and was to punish the upstart on
the morrow. But Raimbaut de Vaquieras, a spent fellow, a derelict,
barren of aim now that the Holy Wars were over, sat in this unfamiliar
place--where when he was young he had laughed as a cock crows!--and
thought how at the last he had crept home to die as a dependent on his
cousin's bounty.
Thus the evening passed, and at its end Makrisi followed the troubadour
to his regranted fief of Vaquieras. This was a chill and brilliant
night, swayed by a frozen moon so powerful that no stars showed in the
unclouded heavens, and everywhere the bogs were curdled with thin ice.
An obdurate wind swept like a knife-blade across a world which even in
its spring seemed very old.
"This night is bleak and evil," Makrisi said. He rode a coffin's
length behind his master. "It is like Prince Guillaume, I think. What
man will sorrow when dawn comes?"
Raimbaut de Vaquieras replied: "Always dawn comes at last, Makrisi."
"It comes the more quickly, messire, when it is prompted."
The troubadour only smiled at words which seemed so meaningless. He
did not smile when later in the night Makrisi brought Mahi de Vernoil,
disguised as a mendicant friar. This outlaw pleaded with Sire Raimbaut
to head the tatters of Lovain's army, and showed Raimbaut how easy it
would be to wrest Venaissin from Prince Guillaume. "We cannot save
Lovain," de Vemoil said, "for Guillaume has him fast. But Venaissin is
very proud of you, my tres beau sire. Ho, maker of world-famous songs!
stout champion of the faith! my men and I will now make you Prince of
Orange in place of the fiend who rules us. You may then at your
convenience wed Madona Biatritz, that most amiable lady whom you have
loved so long. And by the Cross! you may do this before the week is out." |
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