Figures of Earth | Page 3

waste-basket.... But I do know that the
entire book developed, howsoever helterskelter, and after fumbling in
no matter how many blind alleys, from that first memorandum about
the troubling window of Ageus. All leads toward--and through--that
window.
The book, then, was published in the February of 1921. I need not here
deal with its semi-serial appearance in the guise of short stories: these
details are recorded elsewhere. But I confess with appropriate humility
that the reception of "Figures of Earth" by the public was, as I have
written in another place, a depressing business. This romance, at that
time, through one extraneous reason and another, disappointed
well-nigh everybody, for all that it has since become, so near as I can
judge, the best liked of my books, especially among women. It seems,
indeed, a fact sufficiently edifying that, in appraising the two legendary
heroes of Poictesme, the sex of whom Jurgen esteemed himself a
connoisseur, should, almost unanimously, prefer Manuel.
For the rest,--since, as you may remember, this is the third preface
which I have written for this book,--I can but repeat more or less what I
have conceded elsewhere. This "Figures of Earth" appeared
immediately following, and during the temporary sequestration of,
"Jurgen." The fact was forthwith, quite unreticently, discovered that in
"Figures of Earth" I had not succeeded in my attempt to rewrite its
predecessor: and this crass failure, so open, so flagrant, and so
undeniable, caused what I can only describe as the instant and
overwhelming and universal triumph of "Figures of Earth" to be
precisely what did not occur. In 1921 Comstockery still surged, of
course, in full cry against the imprisoned pawnbroker and the crimes of
his author, both literary and personal; and the, after all, tolerably large

portion of the reading public who were not disgusted by Jurgen's
lechery were now, so near as I could gather, enraged by Manuel's lack
of it.
It followed that--among the futile persons who use serious, long words
in talking about mere books,--aggrieved reproof of my auctorial
malversations, upon the one ground or the other, became in 1921
biloquial and pandemic. Not many other volumes, I believe, have been
burlesqued and cried down in the public prints by their own
dedicatees.... But from the cicatrix of that healed wound I turn away. I
preserve a forgiving silence, comparable to that of Hermione in the
fifth act of "A Winter's Tale": I resolve that whenever I mention the
names of Louis Untermeyer and H.L. Mencken it shall be in some
connection more pleasant, and that here I will not mention them at all.
Meanwhile the fifteen or so experiments in contrapuntal prose were, in
particular, uncharted passages from which I stayed unique in deriving
pleasure where others found bewilderment and no tongue-tied irritation:
but, in general, and above every misdemeanor else, the book
exasperated everybody by not being a more successfully managed
re-hashing of the then notorious "Jurgen."
Since 1921, and since the rehabilitation of "Jurgen," the notion has
uprisen, gradually, among the more bold and speculative thinkers, that
perhaps I was not, after all, in this "Figures of Earth" attempting to
rewrite "Jurgen": and Manuel has made his own friend.
James Branch Cabell
Richmond-in-Virginia
30 April 1927

A FOREWORD
"Amoto quoeramus seria ludo"

To
SINCLAIR LEWIS

MY DEAR LEWIS:
To you (whom I take to be as familiar with the Manuelian cycle of
romance as is any person now alive) it has for some while appeared, I
know, a not uncurious circumstance that in the _Key to the Popular
Tales of Poictesme_ there should have been included so little directly
relative to Manuel himself. No reader of the Popular Tales (as I recall
your saying at the Alum when we talked over, among so many other
matters, this monumental book) can fail to note that always Dom
Manuel looms obscurely in the background, somewhat as do King
Arthur and white-bearded Charlemagne in their several cycles,
dispensing justice and bestowing rewards, and generally arranging the
future, for the survivors of the outcome of stories which more
intimately concern themselves with Anavalt and Coth and Holden, and
with Kerin and Ninzian and Gonfal and Donander, and with Miramon
(in his rôle of Manuel's seneschal), or even with Sclaug and Thragnar,
than with the liege-lord of Poictesme. Except in the old
sixteenth-century chapbook (unknown to you, I believe, and never
reprinted since 1822, and not ever modernized into any cognizable
spelling), there seems to have been nowhere an English rendering of
the legends in which Dom Manuel is really the main figure.
Well, this book attempts to supply that desideratum, and is, so far as the
writer is aware, the one fairly complete epitome in modern English of
the Manuelian historiography not included by Lewistam which has yet
been prepared.
It