The Line of Love | Page 2

it as no holy clerk ever suffered from a gnawing conscience
or Freudian suppressions; when he does good work he gets his pay in a
form of joy that only artists know. One could no more think of him
exposing himself to the stealthy, uneasy admiration of a women's
club--he is a man of agreeable exterior, with handsome manners and an
eye for this and that--than one could imagine him taking to the stump
for some political mountebank or getting converted at a camp-meeting.
What moves such a man to write is the obscure, inner necessity that
Joseph Conrad has told us of, and what rewards him when he has done
is his own searching and accurate judgment, his own pride and delight
in a beautiful piece of work.
At once, I suppose, you visualize a somewhat smug fellow, loftily
complacent and superior--in brief, the bogus artist of Greenwich
Village, posturing in a pot-hat before a cellar full of visiting
schoolmarms, all dreaming of being betrayed. If so, you see a ghost. It
is the curse of the true artist that his work never stands before him in all
its imagined completeness--that he can never look at it without feeling
an impulse to add to it here or take away from it there--that the
beautiful, to him, is not a state of being, but an eternal becoming.
Satisfaction, like the praise of dolts, is the compensation of the
aesthetic cheese-monger--the popular novelist, the Broadway dramatist,
the Massenet and Kipling, the Maeterlinck and Augustus Thomas.
Cabell, in fact, is forever fussing over his books, trying to make them
one degree better. He rewrites almost as pertinaciously as Joseph
Conrad, Henry James, or Brahms. Compare "Domnei" in its present
state to "The Soul of Melicent," its first state, circa 1913. The obvious
change is the change in title, but of far more importance are a multitude

of little changes--a phrase made more musical, a word moved from one
place to another, some small banality tracked down and excised, a
brilliant adjective inserted, the plan altered in small ways, the rhythm
of it made more delicate and agreeable. Here, in "The Line of Love,"
there is another curious example of his high capacity for revision. It is
not only that the book, once standing isolated, has been brought into the
Cabellian canon, and so related to "Jurgen" and "Figures of Earth" at
one end, and to the tales of latter-day Virginia at the other; it is that the
whole texture has been worked over, and the colors made more
harmonious, and the inner life of the thing given a fresh energy. Once a
flavor of the rococo hung about it; now it breathes and moves. For
Cabell knows a good deal more than he knew in 1905. He is an artist
whose work shows constant progress toward the goals he aims
at--principally the goal of a perfect style. Content, with him, is always
secondary. He has ideas, and they are often of much charm and
plausibility, but his main concern is with the manner of stating them. It
is surely not ideas that make "Jurgen" stand out so saliently from the
dreadful prairie of modern American literature; it is the magnificent
writing that is visible on every page of it--writing apparently simple
and spontaneous, and yet extraordinarily cunning and painstaking. The
current notoriety of "Jurgen" will pass. The Comstocks will turn to new
imbecilities, and the followers of literary parades to new marvels. But it
will remain an author's book for many a year.
By author, of course, I mean artist--not mere artisan. It was certainly
not surprising to hear that Maurice Hewlett found "Jurgen"
exasperating. So, too, there is exasperation in Richard Strauss for
plodding music-masters. Hewlett is simply a British Civil Servant
turned author, which is not unsuggestive of an American Congressman
turned philosopher. He has a pretty eye for color, and all the gusto that
goes with beefiness, but like all the men of his class and race and time
he can think only within the range of a few elemental ideas, chiefly of a
sentimental variety, and when he finds those ideas flouted he is
horrified. The bray, in fact, revealed the ass. It is Cabell's skepticism
that saves him from an Americanism as crushing as Hewlett's Briticism,
and so sets him free as an artist. Unhampered by a mission, happily
ignorant of what is commended by all good men, disdainful of the petty

certainties of pedagogues and green-grocers, not caring a damn what
becomes of the Republic, or the Family, or even snivelization itself, he
is at liberty to disport himself pleasantly with his nouns, verbs,
adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions and pronouns, arranging
them with the same free hand, the same innocent joy, the same superb
skill and discretion with