Chivalry | Page 2

of the
ceaseless quest for beauty. For we must accept the truth that Mr. Cabell

is not a novelist at all in the common acceptance of the term, but a
historian of the human soul. His books are neither documentary nor
representational; his characters are symbols of human desires and
motives. By the not at all simple process of recording faithfully the
projections of his rich and varied imagination, he has written thirteen
books, which he accurately terms biography, wherein is the bitter-sweet
truth about human life.
II
Among the scant certainties vouchsafed us is that every age lives by its
special catchwords. Whether from rebellion against the irking
monotony of its inherited creeds or from compulsions generated by its
own complexities, each age develops its code of convenient illusions
which minimize cerebration in dilemmas of conduct by postulating an
unequivocal cleavage between the current right and the current wrong.
It works until men tire of it or challenge the cleavage, or until
conditions render the code obsolete. It has in it, happily, a certain
poetic merit always; it presents an ideal to be lived up to; it gives
direction to the uncertain, stray impulses of life.
The Chivalric code is no worse than most and certainly it is prettier
than some. It is a code peculiar to an age, or at least it flourishes best in
an age wherein sentiment and the stuff of dreams are easily translatable
into action. Its requirements are less of the intellect than of the heart. It
puts God, honor, and mistress above all else, and stipulates that a
knight shall serve these three without any reservation. It requires of its
secular practitioners the holy virtues of an active piety, a modified
chastity, and an unqualified obedience, at all events, to the categorical
imperative. The obligation of poverty it omits, for the code arose at a
time when the spiritual snobbery of the meek and lowly was not
pressing the simile about the camel and the eye of the needle. It leads to
charming manners and to delicate amenities. It is the opposite of the
code of Gallantry, for while the code of Chivalry takes everything with
a becoming seriousness, the code of Gallantry takes everything with a
wink. If one should stoop to pick flaws with the Chivalric ideal, it
would be to point out a certain priggishness and intolerance. For, while

it is all very well for one to cherish the delusion that he is God's vicar
on earth and to go about his Father's business armed with a shining
rectitude, yet the unhallowed may be moved to deprecate the enterprise
when they recall, with discomfort, the zealous vicarship of, say, the late
Anthony J. Comstock.
But here I blunder into Mr. Cabell's province. For he has joined many
graceful words in delectable and poignant proof of just that lamentable
tendency of man to make a mess of even his most immaculate
conceivings. When he wrote Chivalry, Mr. Cabell was yet young
enough to view the code less with the appraising eye of a pawnbroker
than with the ardent eye of an amateur. He knew its value, but he did
not know its price. So he made of it the thesis for a dizain of beautiful
happenings that are almost flawless in their verbal beauty.
III
It is perhaps of historical interest here to record the esteem in which
Mark Twain held the genius of Mr. Cabell as it was manifested as early
as a dozen years ago. Mr. Cabell wrote The Soul of Melicent, or, as it
was rechristened on revision, Domnei, at the great humorist's request,
and during the long days and nights of his last illness it was Mr.
Cabell's books which gave Mark Twain his greatest joy. This
knowledge mitigates the pleasure, no doubt, of those who still, after his
fifteen years of writing, encounter him intermittently with a feeling of
having made a great literary discovery. The truth is that Mr. Cabell has
been discovered over and over with each succeeding book from that
first fine enthusiasm with which Percival Pollard reviewed _The
Eagle's Shadow_ to that generous acknowledgment by Hugh Walpole
that no one in England, save perhaps Conrad and Hardy, was so sure of
literary permanence as James Branch Cabell.
With _The Cream of the Jest, Beyond Life_, and Figures of Earth
before him, it is not easy for the perceptive critic to doubt this
permanence. One might as sensibly deny a future to Ecclesiastes, _The
Golden Ass, Gulliver's Travels_, and the works of Rabelais as to
predict oblivion for such a thesaurus of ironic wit and fine fantasy,
mellow wisdom and strange beauty as Jurgen. But to appreciate the

tales of Chivalry is, it seems, a gift more frequently reserved for the
general reader than for the