The Cream of the Jest

The Cream of the Jest James Branch Cabell The Cream of the Jest Table of Contents The Cream of the Jest...............................................................................................................................................1 James Branch Cabell......................................................................................................................................1 i The Cream of the Jest James Branch Cabell Introduction by Harold Ward To Louisa Nelson "At me ab amore tuo diducet nulla senectus" Introduction In one of the charming essays wherein Anatole France narrates the adventures of his soul I find these words: "It is good to be reasonable and to love only the true; yet there are hours when common reality no longer satisfies and one yearns to escape from nature. We know well that this is impossible, but we so not desire it the less for that. Are not our most i rrealizable desires the most ardent? Doubtless−−and this is our great misery−−doubtless we cannot escape from ourselves. We are condemned, irrevocably, to see all things reflected in us with a mournful and desolating monotony. For this very reason we t hirst after the unknown and aspire to what is beyond us. We must have the unusual. We are asked, 'What do you wish?' And we reply, 'I wish something else.' What we touch, what we see, is nothing: we are drawn toward the intangible and the invisible." It is a philosophy of disillusion, the graceful sigh of an Epicurean who has concurred in the wisdom of Heraclitus: an Epicurean, however, in whose wisdom is the fragrance of compassion and understanding, and who has achieved to the dignity that is incap able alike of enthusiasm and despair. James Branch Cabell agress with M. Anatole France. He has observed life very closely−−too closely, perhaps, ever to surprise its deepest secrets−−and, in a dozen volumes he has intimated, with exquisite urbanity, that it leaves much to be desired. He ha s even ventured to supply a few of the ommissions, troubled always by the suspicion that he must inevitably fail, yet consoled by the sublime faith that "to write perfectly of beautiful happenings" will ensure his labors against utter oblivion. From the beginnings of these labors Mr. Cabell has ranked himself with the skeptics. In itself this is no distinction, for skepticism nowadays is almost as easy to aquire as faith,−− indeed, for most of its devotees, it is the expression of a faith−−a re bours. But Mr. Cabell, being essentially an aristocrat of sensibilities, and averse from indulgence in the obvious, has always insisted upon distinction. He has found it by introducing into his skepticism two qualities: good taste and irony. That is to say, every doubt which issues from his fertile intelligence must be arrayed in the brilliant garb of a courtier, whose flattery of the monarch−−Life−−is a veiled sarcasm, so delicately worded only upon reflection does one perceive the sting. Yet even the flattery is sincere, and the mockery, however mordant, conceals a poignant wistfulness. Nowhere in his books can a shrewd reader charge him with lese−majeste towards life. It is true that superficially Mr. Cabell is an advocate for ennui, s eeming to relish with soft melodious laughter every imperfection discoverable in the features of "reality." And unquestionably the author of Domnei,of Gallantry, of The Cream of the Jest, Jurgen and Figures of Earth com municates always a profound discontent with things−as−they−are, seeks always a country modeled upon dreams wherein is neither amiguity nor frustration, nor any hint of sorrow or regret. But this is the prerogative of huckster and genius alike. Mr.Cabell has fished in deep waters, and so, not content with "desiderating"−−the word is peculiarly his own−−a "life beyond life," he terminates all his valiant errantry into Cocaigne and Storisende and Poictesme with the invariable conclusion that one should make the best of this world, since all others are conjectural, and all conjectures, however beautiful and necessary, a little childish. The Cream of the Jest 1 The Cream of the Jest This attitude, mingling an adroit, uncanny and disconcerting insight with a suave good humor entitles Mr. Cabell to be called a philosopher. The pedantic will add "a pessimist." Oddly enough, the word fits like a glove; what pessimism deeper than to hav e perceived, with equal clarity, and in one glance, the inadequacy of life and the fatal impotence of the dreams whereby living was to become an enfranchisement of all things noble and lovely and gracious? And having perceived this, to say, smilingly, al most casually: "Live your life, acquiesce in life, as becomes a gentleman; dream your dreams, love your dreams as becomes a child. In neither case will you be assured of happiness, yet it may be that you will find content. It is enough." Hereafter one is to follow the adventures of Felix Kennaston, alias Horvendile, in quest of the elixir of "something else." And in the man's pathetic fumbling at locked doors, in his patient deciphering of the Sigil of Scoteia, one may divine an allegory , composite of this world and all the worlds that never were or shall be. The riddle stays insoluble, yet in the words of Jean Dolent the riddle find explicitness: "La vie: C'est la femme que l'on a; L'art: C'est la femme que l'on desire." Harold Ward New York 30 October, 1922. We turn now to the last of the books by Richard Fentor Harrowby, which is The Cream of The Jest. Meanwhile, continuing directly with the matter of The Eagle's Shadow, I must tell you−−since Harrowby has omitted this information,−−that Kathleen Saumarez and Felix Kennaston were married in June 1904, to confront, as it seemed, a future of genteel poverty. But, within four months, the death of old strange Henry Kennaston, the squire of Alcuid, had changed all that gray prospect materially. I avoid, though, any further entrance into affairs with which the Biography of Manuel's life has no close concern, and which in any case are more properly set forth in J. V. A. Froser's Biography of Felix Kennaston. You may read therein how the elopement of Kennaston's parents, in 1867, had begun the feud between their two families,−−a feud which had resulted in Kennaston's being reared by the Bulmers, without any contacts with his father's kindred,−−so that, when Henry Kennaston was killed, in October 1904, his only surviving nephew acquired a competence from a person whom Felix Kennaston had not ever known or talked with, nor even seen from a distance.... The point here is that Felix Kennaston in his middle thirties became economically independent and was made free to devote the rest of his days to whatsoever amusements he might prefer; and that he gave over his life to the grinding thraldom of creative writing. −−Whereby, of course, American literature was enriched with Men Who Loved Allison.... Of the actual and eventual worth of this romance I cannot pretend to be an unprejudiced judge. The tale seems to me one of those many books which have profited, very dubiously indeed, by having obtained, in one way of another, the repute of being indecent. Such books tend to endure, but their tenure of survival is upon depressingly twilit terms. And they make for a most dolorous deal of dreary time−wasting. It is quite dreadful to consider with what sad and futile perseverance the sloppy and soporific catalogues of Rabelais, the pale inanities of the Heptameron, and the unendurably dull botcheries of Boccaccio−−or, for that matter, of Fielding and of Smollett,−−have been toiled through by misguided millions in quest of these authors' rumored obscenity.... But it is even more dreadful, for the ears of the fairly honest, to hear any one of these readers protest, as they all do invariably, that he reads not for the story's sake, but because of the delicate art and the sparkling wit with which the tale is told. Besides, he does get, in the way of indecency, so very little for his trouble. Well, and just so I doubt if Men Who Loved Alison, in common with a great many other modern masterpieces, does not continue to be read to−day upon somewhat similar grounds. As books go, it has had a long life: indeed, The Cream of the Jest 2 The Cream of the Jest the tale has survived its publication now by some twenty−one years; and it is handsomely written of course, in its own over−ornate and self−conscious and clogged fashion. But I fancy that the most of this book's readers are, here again, those immature−minded persons who are content to put up with the diction and the stylistic devices for the sake of the atoning talk about unnatural amors which, howsoever sparsely, here and there adorns and cheers the pornoscopic reader's laborious way. It is though, now that I think of it, with another book that this Author's Note should be concerned. And my appropriate point is, rather, that with the volume now in your hand the Biography completes the portrayal, begun in "The Eagle's Shadow," of Felix Bulmer Kennaston and of his adoption of the poetic attitude toward life, in the very same Lichfield which Robert Etheridge Townsend and Colonel Rudolph Musgrave coetaneously inhabited, and of Kennaston's ultimate success as an Economist. Hereinafter, then, as I have written in another place, the story of the Biography is rounded off by presenting the poet−−the poietes, the "maker,"−−in modern conditions; and by presenting, too, the manner of this Felix Kennaston's return into Poictesme−−into that all accommodating country wherein almost anything is rather more than likely to happen,−−so that, through this return, the prepetuated life of Manuel ends its seven hundred years of journeying at the exact point of its outset.

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