Domnei | Page 2

a figment.... Here, since
the conception of domnei has so utterly vanished, the break between the
ages impassable, the sympathy born of understanding is interrupted.
Hardly a woman, to-day, would value a sigh the passion which turned a
man steadfastly away that he might be with her forever beyond the
parched forest of death. Now such emotion is held strictly to the gains,
the accountability, of life's immediate span; women have left their
cloudy magnificence for a footing on earth; but--at least in warm
graceful youth--their dreams are still of a Perion de la Forêt. These,
clear-eyed, they disavow; yet their secret desire, the most Elysian of all
hopes, to burn at once with the body and the soul, mocks what they
find.
That vision, dominating Mr. Cabell's pages, the record of his revealed
idealism, brings specially to Domnei a beauty finely escaping the dusty
confusion of any present. It is a book laid in a purity, a serenity, of
space above the vapors, the bigotry and engendered spite, of dogma and
creed. True to yesterday, it will be faithful of to-morrow; for, in the
evolution of humanity, not necessarily the turn of a wheel upward,
certain qualities have remained at the center, undisturbed. And, of these,
none is more fixed than an abstract love.
Different in men than in women, it is, for the former, an instinct, a need,
to serve rather than be served: their desire is for a shining image
superior, at best, to both lust and maternity. This consciousness, grown
so dim that it is scarcely perceptible, yet still alive, is not extinguished
with youth, but lingers hopeless of satisfaction through the incongruous
years of middle age. There is never a man, gifted to any degree with
imagination, but eternally searches for an ultimate loveliness not
disappearing in the circle of his embrace--the instinctively Platonic

gesture toward the only immortality conceivable in terms of ecstasy.
A truth, now, in very low esteem! With the solidification of society, of
property, the bond of family has been tremendously exalted, the mere
fact of parenthood declared the last sanctity. Together with this,
naturally, the persistent errantry of men, so vulgarly misunderstood, has
become only a reprehensible paradox. The entire shelf of James Branch
Cabell's books, dedicated to an unquenchable masculine idealism, has,
as well, a paradoxical place in an age of material sentimentality.
Compared with the novels of the moment, Domnei is an isolated, a
heroic fragment of a vastly deeper and higher structure. And, of its
many aspects, it is not impossible that the highest, rising over even its
heavenly vision, is the rare, the simple, fortitude of its statement.
Whatever dissent the philosophy of Perion and Melicent may breed, no
one can fail to admire the steady courage with which it is upheld. Aside
from its special preoccupation, such independence in the face of
ponderable threat, such accepted isolation, has a rare stability in a
world treacherous with mental quicksands and evasions. This is a valor
not drawn from insensibility, but from the sharpest possible recognition
of all the evil and Cyclopean forces in existence, and a deliberate
engagement of them on their own ground. Nothing more, in that
direction, can be asked of Mr. Cabell, of anyone. While about the story
itself, the soul of Melicent, the form and incidental writing, it is no
longer necessary to speak.
The pages have the rich sparkle of a past like stained glass called to life:
the Confraternity of St. Médard presenting their masque of Hercules;
the claret colored walls adorned with gold cinquefoils of Demetrios'
court; his pavilion with porticoes of Andalusian copper; Theodoret's
capital, Megaris, ruddy with bonfires; the free port of Narenta with its
sails spread for the land of pagans; the lichen-incrusted glade in the
Forest of Columbiers; gardens with the walks sprinkled with crocus and
vermilion and powdered mica ... all are at once real and bright with
unreality, rayed with the splendor of an antiquity built from webs and
films of imagined wonder. The past is, at its moment, the present, and
that lost is valueless. Distilled by time, only an imperishable romantic

conception remains; a vision, where it is significant, animated by the
feelings, the men and women, which only, at heart, are changeless.
They, the surcharged figures of Domnei, move vividly through their
stone galleries and closes, in procession, and--a far more difficult
accomplishment--alone. The lute of the Bishop of Montors, playing as
he rides in scarlet, sounds its Provençal refrain; the old man Theodoret,
a king, sits shabbily between a prie-dieu and the tarnished hangings of
his bed; Mélusine, with the pale frosty hair of a child, spins the
melancholy of departed passion; Ahasuerus the Jew buys Melicent for a
hundred and two minae and enters her room past midnight for his