The Line of Love

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The Line of Love

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Cabell #4 in our series by James Branch Cabell
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Title: The Line of Love Dizain des Mariages
Author: James Branch Cabell

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THE LINE OF LOVE
BY
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
1921

TO
ROBERT GAMBLE CABELL I

"He loved chivalrye, Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisye. And of
his port as meek as is a mayde, He never yet no vileinye ne sayde In al
his lyf, unto no maner wight. He was a verray parfit gentil knyght."

Introduction
The Cabell case belongs to comedy in the grand manner. For fifteen
years or more the man wrote and wrote--good stuff, sound stuff,
extremely original stuff, often superbly fine stuff--and yet no one in the
whole of this vast and incomparable Republic arose to his merit--no
one, that is, save a few encapsulated enthusiasts, chiefly somewhat
dubious. It would be difficult to imagine a first-rate artist cloaked in
greater obscurity, even in the remotest lands of Ghengis Khan. The
newspapers, reviewing him, dismissed him with a sort of inspired
ill-nature; the critics of a more austere kidney--the Paul Elmer Mores,
Brander Matthewses, Hamilton Wright Mabies, and other such
brummagem dons--were utterly unaware of him. Then, of a sudden, the
imbeciles who operate the Comstock Society raided and suppressed his
"Jurgen," and at once he was a made man. Old book-shops began to be
ransacked for his romances and extravaganzas--many of them stored, I
daresay, as "picture-books," and under the name of the artist who
illustrated them, Howard Pyle. And simultaneously, a great gabble
about him set up in the newspapers, and then in the literary weeklies,
and finally even in the learned reviews. An Englishman, Hugh Walpole,
magnified the excitement with some startling _hochs_; a single hoch
from the Motherland brings down the professors like firemen sliding
down a pole. To-day every literate American has heard of Cabell,
including even those presidents of women's clubs who lately confessed
that they had never heard of Lizette Woodworth Reese. More of his
books are sold in a week than used to be sold in a year. Every flapper in
the land has read "Jurgen" behind the door; two-thirds of the
grandmothers east of the Mississippi have tried to borrow it from me.
Solemn Privat Dozenten lecture upon the author; he is invited to take to
the chautauqua himself; if the donkeys who manage the National
Institute of Arts and Letters were not afraid of his reply he would be
offered its gilt-edged ribbon, vice Sylvanus Cobb, deceased. And all
because a few pornographic old fellows thrust their ever-hopeful snouts
into the man's tenth (or was it eleventh or twelfth?) book!
Certainly, the farce must appeal to Cabell himself--a sardonic mocker,
not incapable of making himself a character in his own revues. But I

doubt that he enjoys the actual pawing that he has been getting--any
more than he resented the neglect that he got for so long. Very lately, in
the midst of the carnival, he announced his own literary death and
burial, and even preached a burlesque funeral sermon upon his life and
times. Such an artist, by the very nature of his endeavors, must needs
stand above all public-clapper-clawing, pro or con. He writes, not to
please his customers in general, nor even to please his partisans in
particular, but to please himself. He is his own criterion, his own
audience, his own judge and hangman. When he does bad work, he
suffers for