Part 1

_From The Hidden Way_

BOOKS _by_ MR. CABELL

_Biography_:

BEYOND LIFE FIGURES OF EARTH DOMNEI CHIVALRY JURGEN THE LINE OF LOVE THE HIGH PLACE GALLANTRY THE CERTAIN HOUR THE CORDS OF VANITY FROM THE HIDDEN WAY THE RIVET IN GRANDFATHER’S NECK THE EAGLE’S SHADOW THE CREAM OF THE JEST STRAWS AND PRAYER-BOOKS

_Scholia_:

THE LINEAGE OF LICHFIELD TABOO THE JEWEL MERCHANTS

JURGEN AND THE LAW (_Edited by Guy Holt_)

FROM THE HIDDEN WAY

_Dizain des Échos_

BY JAMES BRANCH CABELL

“_Tell me now in what hidden way is Lady Flora, the lovely Roman? Where’s Hipparchia? and where is Thaïs?... Where is Echo?_”

ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY NEW YORK : : : : : : 1924

Revised Version, Copyright, 1916, by JAMES BRANCH CABELL

_Printed in the United States of America_

Published, 1924

TO BEVERLEY BLAND MUNFORD

(_31 May 1910_)

“Most blithe and sage and gentle, and most brave! O true clear heart, so quick to wake and war Against despondency, lest questioning mar One hour of living, or foiled hopes enslave And sour another’s living! not to the grave Do we commit you,--we that, watching, are As men at twilight noting which bright star Is leaped at, missed, clutched, swallowed by which wave.

“The star is gone?--So be it. It will rise Elsewhere, and undiminished. Even thus We know that instantly in Paradise-- Yea, in the inmost court of Heaven’s house,-- A gentleman to God lifts those brave eyes Which yesterday made life more brave for us.”

CONTENTS

PAGE

APOLOGIA AUCTORIS 3

I.--MIGONITIS

AT OUTSET 13

THE OLDEST STORY 15

FALSE DAWN IN TROY 19

EASTER EVE 23

ST. MAGDALENE 24

MARCUS AURELIUS: A SUPPRESSED “MEDITATION” 26

AMAIMON VISITS THE THEBAID 28

DAME VENUS IN THURINGIA 33

II.--EPISTROPHIA

ONE END OF LOVE 37

VILLON QUITS FRANCE 40

INVOCATION: TO THE DARK VENUS 42

RONSARD RE-VOICES A TRUISM 45

JAUNTS FROM STRATFORD 47

INVITATION TO THE VOYAGE 49

STORY OF THE FLOWERY KINGDOM 52

THE HOIDENS 54

III.--LIBITINA

ACCORDING TO THEIR FOLLY 59

FOOT-NOTE FOR IDYLS 61

THE GOD-FATHER 63

BALLAD OF THE DESTROYER 66

EXHORTATION TOWARD ALMSGIVING 69

COMFORT FOR CENTENARIANS 71

THE CONQUEROR PASSES 73

THE MENDICANTS 76

IV.--HORTENSIS

ALONE IN APRIL 81

“--BUT WISDOM IS JUSTIFIED OF HER CHILDREN” 83

THE LOVERS’ DOXOLOGY 85

OF ANNUAL MAGIC: AT TWENTY 86

OF ANNUAL MAGIC: AT TWENTY-FIVE 87

OF ANNUAL MAGIC: AT TWENTY-EIGHT 89

OF ANNUAL MAGIC: AT THIRTY 91

THE DOTARD CONJURER 92

V.--MELÆNIS

UNCHARTED 97

SCHOOL-SONG 99

“AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING--” 101

BALLAD OF THE DOUBLE-SOUL 102

WHEN TRAVELLERS RETURN 105

ANNALS 106

“--AND EVER SHALL BE” 109

THE PERFECT REASON 111

VI.--SCOTEIA

TWO IN TWILIGHT 115

“IN FINE,--” 118

STY-SONG 119

THE TOY-MAKER 121

THE CASTLE OF CONTENT 122

THE PARODIST 124

THE DARK COMPANION 125

SEA-SCAPES 127

VII.--VERTICORDIA

THE AGELESS MAID 131

FROM AFAR 133

COMPETITORS 135

THE STRIKING HOUR 137

LIGHTS OF THE WORLD 140

“--OF ANISE AND CUMMIN ALSO” 142

“SWEET ADELAIS” 144

LOVE’S LOVERS 148

VIII.--RIDENS

BALLAD OF PLAGIARY 153

TOUCHING UBIQUITY 156

FANCIES IN FILIGREE 158

IT IS ENOUGH 160

AN ARCADIAN APOLOGIZES 162

ARCADIANS CONFER IN EXILE 163

THE EAVESDROPPERS 166

NOSTALGIA 168

IX.--APATURIA

GRAY DAYS 173

A WOOD-PIECE 175

LOVE GOES INTO WINTER QUARTERS 176

FLOTSAM 179

HEIRS UNAPPARENT 180

THE SUN’S HIGHWAY 182

THE OLDEST DITTY 185

TO THE SAME AIR AS THE PRECEDING 186

X.--ARMATA

LIGHT COINAGE 189

GRAVE GALLANTRY 191

BY-WORDS 194

ANOTHER LABORER WEIGHS HIS HIRE 195

RETRACTIONS 197

GARDEN-SONG 208

THE CAVERN OF PHIGALIA 210

AT PARTING 211

APOLOGIA AUCTORIS

“_Vous entendez bien joncherie?_”

APOLOGIA AUCTORIS

In agreeing to collaborate with Mr. Cabell, in preparing this volume of his selections from my inedited verses, I have been influenced by a number of considerations. I am attempting in this place to indicate a few of these.

To begin with, it is generally known--according to the literary reviewers,--that nowadays we are producing an indigenous “new” poetry, of hitherto unknown directness and simplicity; and that, in consequence, America is rendering her poets the unprecedented tribute of purchasing their volumes. That, of course, is one consideration.

Conceivably, too, I think, it may be not unsalutary, at this especial moment, to contrast the output of what has been, in another place, not inappropriately described as “the new naïveté” with the productions of poets who were in reality naïve. Conceivably, at least, one way of learning what is actually “natural” is to observe the ways of unsophisticated persons. This much preamble comes as warning that hereinafter you may look to encounter, in default of the debatable simplicities of “new” poetry, those genuinely simple melodies which were born of ages less complex.

§

I admit that, poetry having become in some sort a salable commodity, a book of verse no longer absolutely demands, as in the old days, a preface to explain and palliate its existence. None the less, these verses based upon pre-Renaissance formulæ must keep to the fashion of their time, and come with a prose pursuivant.

For the way needs clearing, since the road is clogged with the makings of an ugly syllogism. No matter with what joy we may admire “the new naïveté,” the poverty of thought evinced in mediæval poetry remains notorious; and it is, after all, only the mental gist of a poem which is translatable.

Yet, in truth, the feature which repels, and troubles us, is not so much that the thoughts of these men were feeble as that their beliefs were firm. The springtide awakens loveliness and human joy therewith, true love ennobles the lover, and death is a terrific adventuring into the dark; such was their simple _credo_: and their belief in its tenets was unquestioning. Now, it is perhaps more subtle to consider spring as a meteorological phenomenon, love as an ingenious device for perpetuating the species, and death as a logical progression toward higher spheres of activity; yet each may be a miracle, for all that; and not any longer to see its wonder may quite conceivably be loss rather than gain. Ophthalmia is at the best an infirm basis whereon to assume airs of superiority.

Just so, these mediæval rhymesters wrote by choice of what to us seems prosaic because to them it was throughout heart-shakingly strange. Their more alert perceptions were aware of a continuous wonderfulness, on every side, which we have learned to overlook. It really is astounding, when you come sanely to think of it, to find a frost-nipped world converted overnight into a place of warmth and beauty; and they said so, in the best language they could muster. We heirs of more sophisticated ages cannot but assent; yet even those few of us who are still guilty, say, once in a blue moon, of reading a little time-honored verse, avert with more congenial interest toward the straggling eccentricities of _vers libre_ and of polyphonic prose, with such eye-arresting gambits as “We maidens are many of us older than sheep,” and “Hey, old world, shove your staid bonnet over your ear!”

It were flippant to suggest this is the interest that we accord, with livelier concern, to any other approach of the mentally unbalanced. Yet wonder, not bewilderment, is the gateway to the palace of art. The grand power of poetry, in particular, is its interpretative faculty of so dealing with familiar things as to awaken a full and new sense of their strangeness. And life affords nothing more remarkable than its truisms. There is a waggish saying somewhere as to how eagerly we would all scramble for the best seats if God heralded the coming of the crocus by mailing circulars or announced a sunrise via the public journals. The conceit is sound; for Omnipotence would, so to speak, be versifying the commonplace by stressing its importance, much as a noble rhyme and meter emphasize so insistently the thought they clothe that the whole matter dwindles into bathos if (after all) the thought prove mediocre. Yet the real wonderfulness of the terrestrial pageant, even then, would consist, not in its felicities of color, but in its commonplaceness. For the most beautiful and terrible thing about a sunrise is that it happens every day. Just so the sun arose when Pliocene monstrosities held the earth as their heritage, just so it arose to waken the laborers of Nineveh, just so it arose as the cock crew and Peter for the third time denied his Master: and just so, too, it will arise--every day,--when Earth is a frozen clod, trundling voiceless and naked through infinity. A sunrise has nothing to do with man’s existence, for all that it serves to time his clocks and rouse his factory-whistles; and therein lies the fundamental beauty of a sunrise, which is above and beyond and indifferent to the utmost reach of human achievement, and is therefore worthy to furnish recreation for human thought.

§

Here, too, we touch one fallacy of our modernists who insist that poetry should deal with workaday life, and develop the poetic side of shopwindows and streetcars and pessimism. But in shopwindows and streetcars and consistent pessimism is to be contemplated nothing save what man, whether for good or ill, has heaped together in defiance of nature. He made these things, however curious; he knows the elements whereof they are compounded; and he comprehends--there wakens disenchantment--that at a pinch he can patch up something else of pretty much the same sort. Not hereabouts is to be found aught fore-ordained and uncontrollable, or the beauty of fatality--of Ἀνάγκη--and human inefficiency thereunder, such as the old Greeks knew was necessary to art’s highest strivings.

And what is this Hellenic Ἀνάγκη, after all, but the commonplace deified, with humanity as pawns? It is assuredly sheer commonplace to point out that more or less unpleasantness inevitably follows an elopement with another man’s wife, or that miscegenation tends to shorten life; yet works of very real merit have been based upon these truisms, and nobody worth hearing questions the poetry of the _Iliad_ or of _Othello_. Nor is in either case the commonplace an inessential; attempting to imagine Helen as the fiancée of Menelaus, or Othello as a Caucasian, you flounder into the inconceivable.

An element of triteness, in fine, must be conceded as necessary to first class art. That which becomes a classic is, both by etymology and human nature, something which belongs to a class. It is not in any way unique; it is innocent of any “disturbing novelty.” Now, neither Ovid’s Lynceus or Poe’s Dupin, nor even the indestructible Mr. Holmes (of Baker Street, W. C.), could plausibly detect any disturbing novelty in the poets of Raynouard’s _Choix des poësies originales des Troubadours_ and Rochegude’s _Parnasse Occitanien_: and when we find these tinkling verses, played always on the two strings of love and death, astonishingly naïve, the thing is partly owing, no doubt, to our superior perception of the proper ends of poetry, but partly too to a more obtuse perception of life’s actual wonderfulness. So that in criticism it behooves us, like Agag of old, to tread softly. By the rarest luck, there is no such pressing obligation laid on many of us touching poets--whether immortal or minor,--as compels us either to criticize or to read.

§

And, truly, it is this consideration, above all others, which emboldens me to make a volume out of those verses that, for the most part, I “adapted” during my college life, from bardic byways of even more ancient eras.... For the rest, a formal bibliography of the sources of this little book was begun, and laid aside as entailing too much labor squandered to no utilitarian end. Petronius and Villon, at worst, require scant introduction to a generation which, the day before yesterday at any rate, was familiar with _Quo Vadis_ and _If I Were King_. With Alessandro de Medici, as he misconducts himself in de Musset’s _Lorenzaccio_, many of us preserve a bowing acquaintance, however few extend the intimacy to include his Latin or Italian verses; which, if not positively unknown, would appear to have been overshadowed, even for the specialist, by the similar diversions of Alessandro’s more gifted great-grandfather, Lorenzo the Magnificent. Then, too, Raimbaut de Vaqueiras and his beloved Belhs Cavaliers figure at respectable length in all books treating of Provençal poetry. And Nicolas de Caen has, at any event, afforded the late Mr. Howard Pyle the subject-matter for some striking paintings.

To the other side, apart from any poetical repute, oblivion has swallowed even Antoine Riczi’s queer part in the matrimonial affairs of King Henry the Fourth of England. Such unfamiliar names as Charles Garnier and Théodore Passerat and Alphonse Moreau are not likely ever to cut a dash in popular romance; and, for very obvious reasons, just as in the cases of Petronius and Villon, their verses have never been adjudged particularly suitable for undergraduates to worry through in colleges. These, therefore, are indisputably forgotten, if indeed in any general sense they were ever known. Yet here as elsewhere--one would like to think at least, with the discoverer’s thrill--the “iniquity of oblivion” has scattered her poppy with rather injudicious cæcity.

If Petronius be not precisely mediæval, he is past doubt more antiquated than his present company in nothing save an accident of birth. And the inclusion of those scattered pieces hereinafter given severally under the name of Paul Verville has seemed on various grounds desirable, in spite of their (comparative) modernity of tone. Into the making of such decisions must always enter, of course, an element of purely personal taste, wherewith proverbially there can be no disputing to the arraigner’s profit. To those who do not honor maxims, it can but be answered, with profound irrationality, that all the verses in this book possess at least the common feature of owing their existence in English to the fact that, once upon a time, to put them into English seemed to their transcriber a natural and desirable action. No other bond has ever united the contents of any book of English verse. And although this particular excuse for making rhymes may very often prove inadequate, experience tends to show that any other reason proves so invariably.

§

This book’s sub-title appears to me a bit affected. But Mr. Cabell believes that it will please reviewers, by enabling them to start off with a smart witticism about its applicability to other books: and so I yield.... Moreover, I find that, in printing a collection of “adapted” verses, there seems to be no Median or Persic makeshift whereby plodding translation may, with the desirable precision, be distinguished from those less faithful paraphrases in which the plagiarist has more temerariously pulled about his larcenies. Upon consideration, this has appeared as satisfactory a rule of thumb as any:--to indicate the latter class by mention of an author’s name; and with the former class, to include also the first words of the original. The curious may seek out at will the victims of some few unacknowledged borrowings.

ROBERT ETHERIDGE TOWNSEND.

LICHFIELD _April, 1924_.

I

MIGONITIS

“_Autant en emporte ly vens_”

1

AT OUTSET

--After NICOLAS DE CAEN.

_Depart, depart, my book! and live and die Dependent on the idle fantasy Of men who cannot view you, quite, as I_

_For I am fond, and willingly mistake My book to be the book I meant to make, And cannot judge you, for that phantom’s sake._

_Yet pardon me if I have wrought too ill In making you, that never spared the will To shape you perfectly, and lacked the skill._

_Ah, had I but the power, my book, then I Had wrought in you some wizardry so high That no man but had listened...._

_They pass by, And shrug--as we, who know that unto us It has been granted never to fare thus, And never to be strong and glorious._

_Is it denied me to perpetuate What so much loving labor did create?-- I hear Oblivion tap upon the gate, And acquiesce, not all disconsolate._

FOR I HAVE GOT SUCH RECOMPENSE OF THAT HIGH-HEARTED EXCELLENCE WHICH THE CONTENTED CRAFTSMAN KNOWS, ALONE, THAT TO LOVED LABOR GOES, AND DAILY DOES THE WORK HE CHOSE, AND COUNTS ALL ELSE IMPERTINENCE!

2

THE OLDEST STORY

“_Jadis il était roy d’Argos_”

--ANTOINE RICZI.

He was a king in Argos, She was a queen in Tyre, And they went astray from the jogtrot way, In quest of the heart’s desire.

They had pillaged, in royal fashion, Rare raiments and spiceries From the marts of Argos, to furnish them cargoes For traffic in far-off seas; And before them bright waters parted, And the wind was fair.

_Because Love leads us_--they spoke, light-hearted,-- _Who is lord over man-made laws_.

The High Gods noted them, idly Lolling in Paradise, And remarked they were erring widely From rules the High Gods devise.

But the Most High Gods were wise, And conceded:--_They are not as We Whom no follies beguile; let them go for a while. Yet presently all men must see They attain not to where their desire is, Lest laxity lose Us men’s love._ --Thus Wotan ordained, or Osiris, Or Shiva, or Dagon, or Jove. --_We must think of Our pontiffs in Argos And praiseworthy prebends in Tyre, Who would suffer dismay did the parish essay To win to man’s heart’s desire._

So these two fared ever westward-- Elate, and in love with life-- Amid wide reprehension; for histories mention These were not husband and wife Who fared westward, ever westward. --Beyond the Hesperides, Where the slow long stroke of their gilt oars broke The lisping of virgin seas,

They viewed the ends of the earth, Where the Singing Maidens are Enthroned above death and birth: And they still fared ever westward-- Elate, and alone, and afar From the yelpings of little people,-- For they viewed the ends of the earth.

Then the Gods gave word: and Their thunders stirred To requite, and to silence mirth; And that roving vessel was shattered As a handful of shaken dust Ere twice They thundered.

All peoples wondered, And cried:--_Lo, the Gods are just, And, look you, abated no tittle Of punishment due these twain. Even though They slumbered a little, We knew They would waken again: And, whether it was Bubastis, Or Milcom, or Artemis Or Baäl, or Zeus, interrupted this cruise, We knew it would end in this When he was a king in Argos, And she was a queen in Tyre, And they went astray from the jogtrot way, In quest of the heart’s desire._

THE OLD SONOROUS NAMES OF THESE THAT FARED BEYOND THE HESPERIDES IN QUEST OF REST AND JOY AND EASE, LONG SINCE WERE MOCKED AT; AND WERE HISSED TO SEEK, THEY SOUGHT,--AND VIEWED, AND MISSED.

BUT LIFE REMAINS LIFE’S PLAGIARIST.

3

FALSE DAWN IN TROY

“_Helenam omnes amant; invidia semper movente_”

--ALESSANDRO DE MEDICI.

There is no man but loves her, I well know; Yet mutinous women, muttering with pinched lips, Cast side-long glances always when--unvexed-- Queen Helen passes; for she is very fair, And they have only right and truth with them.

Women remember all the fevered years This siege has lasted; all its many ills; The plague; the hunger; the unnumbered men Who died because this queen is beautiful,-- Men whom they loved, and she loved not at all Nor even knew by name.

None but remembers How coldly loved lips kissed her in farewell-- Coldly, because for fairer lips than hers, And for the sake of brighter and tearless eyes, This man went forth to battle. He thereafter Beheld the plume of lithe Achilles leap As flame among the fighting, or beheld The sudden splendor of swart Diomed Crash through the press of spears; and lay quite still, Remembering that way Queen Helen has Of laughter, when the little sigh breaks through And spoils the music, or her way of speaking, Which turns to music the most trivial words Wherein that wonder and that wistfulness Her voice has always held since Hector died, Commingles with our rude and alien tongue As honey with sharp wine. Such idle words As any man who, with uncovered head, Waits and makes way when princes will to pass, May hear of her in passing, gladdened him, For all that death was fingering his throat Even now. He was content, remembering her The Queen.