3.  JAMES BRANCH CABELL

Although most novelists with any historical or scholarly hankerings are satisfied to invent here a scene and there a plot and elsewhere an authority, James Branch Cabell has invented a whole province for his imagination to dwell in.  He calls it Poictesme and sets it on the map of medieval Europe, but it has no more unity of time and place than has the multitudinous land of The Faerie Queene.  Around the reigns of Dom Manuel, Count and Redeemer of Poictesme, epic hero of Figures of Earth, father of the heroine in The Soul of Melicent (later renamed Domnei), father of that Dorothy la Desiree whom Jurgen loved (with some other women), father also of that Count Emmerich who succeeded Manuel as ruler at Bellegarde and Storisende—­around the reigns of Manuel and Emmerich the various sagas of Mr. Cabell principally revolve.  Scandinavia, however, conveniently impinges upon their province, with Constantinople and Barbary, Massilia, Aquitaine, Navarre, Portugal, Rome, England, Paris, Alexandria, Arcadia, Olympus, Asgard, and the Jerusalems Old and New.  As many ages of history likewise converge upon Poictesme in its ostensible thirteenth or fourteenth century, from the most mythological times only a little this side of Creation to the most contemporary America of Felix Kennaston who lives at comfortable Lichfield with two motors and with money in four banks but in his mind habitually bridges the gap by imagined excursions into Poictesme and the domains adjacent.

Nothing but remarkable erudition in the antiquities as Cockaigne and Faery could possibly suffice for such adventures as Mr. Cabell’s, and he has very remarkable erudition in all that concerns the regions which delight him.  And where no authorities exist he merrily invents them, as in the case of his Nicolas of Caen, poet of Normandy, whose tales Dizain des Reines are said to furnish the source for the ten stories collected in Chivalry, and whose largely lost masterpiece Le Roman de Lusignan serves as the basis for Domnei.  One British critic and rival of Mr. Cabell has lately fretted over the unblushing anachronisms and confused geography of this parti-colored world.  For less dull-witted scholars these are the very cream of the Cabellian jest.

The cream but not the substance, for Mr. Cabell has a profound creed of comedy rooted in that romance which is his regular habit.  Romance, indeed, first exercised his imagination, in the early years of the century when in many minds he was associated with the decorative Howard Pyle and allowed his pen to move at the languid gait then characteristic of a dozen inferior romancers.  Only gradually did his texture grow firmer, his tapestry richer; only gradually did his gaiety strengthen into irony.  Although that irony was the progenitor of the comic spirit which now in his maturity dominates him, it has never shaken off the romantic elements which originally nourished it.  Rather, romance and irony have grown up in his work side by side.  His Poictesme is no less beautiful for having come to be a country of disillusion; nor has his increasing sense of the futility of desire robbed him of his old sense that desire is a glory while it lasts.