The Cords of Vanity | Page 2

such as it is. If
there may be said to exist a sort of charter membership in Mr. Cabell's
audience, this document is to be construed as representing its very
enthusiastic welcome to the later and vastly larger elective
membership.
And if, weighed as such a welcome, it proves hopelessly inadequate, at

least it provides a number of possible compensations by the way. For
instance, that New York World critic who damned the book but praised
its frontispiece of 1909, has now a uniquely pat opportunity to balance
his ledger by praising the book and damning this foreword, which,
more or less, replaces the frontispiece. Similarly, the more renowned
critic and anthologist who so well knows the "originals" of the verses in
From the Hidden Way, can now render poetically perfect justice to all
who will care by perceiving that both the earlier edition of this book
and the author of this foreword are but figments of Mr. Cabell's slightly
puckish invention.
But these pages must not be, like those which follow, a comedy of
shirking. They will have flouted a plain duty unless they speak of the
sense and the degree in which this novel, during the process of
reclaiming it, has been actually recreated. Perhaps the matter can be
packed most succinctly into the statement that Mr. Cabell's hero has
been subjected to such a process of growth as has made him
commensurate in stature with the other two modern writers of Mr.
Cabell's invention. As The Cream of the Jest is essentially the book of
Felix Kennaston and Beyond Life that of John Charteris, so THE
CORDS OF VANITY is essentially the book of Robert Etheridge
Townsend. Now, this Townsend has accomplished a deal of growing
since 1909. By this I do not mean that he is taken at a later period of his
own imagined life, or that he fails to act consonantly with the extreme
youth imputed to him: I mean that he is the creation of a more mature
mind, a deeper philosophy, a more probing insight into the implications
of things. A given youth of twenty-five will be very differently
interpreted by an observer of thirty and by the same observer at forty,
very much as a given era of the past will be understood differently by a
single historian before and after certain cycles of his own social and
political experience. The past never remains to us the same past; it
grows up along with us; the physical facts may remain admittedly the
same, but our understanding accents them differently, finds more in
them at some points and less at others. So Robert Etheridge Townsend
remains an example of that special temperament which, being unable to
endure the contact of unhappiness, consistently shirks every
responsibility that entails or threatens discomfort; and the truth about
him, taking him as an example of just that temperament, is still

inexorably told. But his weakness as a man becomes much more
tolerable in this second version, because it is much more intimately and
poignantly correlated with his strength as an artist. One is made to feel
that he, like Charteris, may the better consummate in his art the
auctorial virtues of distinction and clarity, beauty and symmetry,
tenderness and truth and urbanity, precisely because his personal life is
bereft of those virtues. Less than before, the accent is on the wastrel in
Townsend; more than before, it is on the potential creator of beauty in
him. The earlier readers will hardly count it as a fault that Mr. Cabell
has contrived to make his novel, without detriment to any truth
whatsoever, a far less unpleasant book. Sardonic it still is, by a
necessary implication, but not wantonly, and with a mellowness. The
irony, which at its harshest was capable of rasping the nerves, has
become capable of wringing the heart.
Other reasons there are, too, for holding that THE CORDS OF
VANITY is certain to make its second appeal to a many times
multiplied audience. Since divers momentous transactions of the years
just gone, the whole world stands in a moral position extraordinarily
well adapted to the comprehension of just such a comedy of shirking;
and especially the world of thought has received a powerful impulsion
toward the area long occupied by Mr. Cabell's romantic pessimism.
There is perhaps somewhat more demand for satire, or at least a
growing toleration of it. Moreover, by sheer patience and reiteration Mr.
Cabell has procured no little currency for some of his most
characteristic ideas. Chivalry and gallantry, as he analyzes them, are
concepts which play their part in the inevitable present re-editing of
social and literary history. _The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck_, The
Cream of the Jest, and The Certain Hour have somewhat to say to the
discriminating, even on