Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and PG Distributed Proofreaders
1921
"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 yearsor more the man wrote and wrote—good stuff, sound stuff, extremelyoriginal stuff, often superbly fine stuff—and yet no one in the whole ofthis vast and incomparable Republic arose to his merit—no one, that is,save a few encapsulated enthusiasts, chiefly somewhat dubious. It wouldbe difficult to imagine a first-rate artist cloaked in greater obscurity,even in the remotest lands of Ghengis Khan. The newspapers, reviewinghim, dismissed him with a sort of inspired ill-nature; the critics of amore austere kidney—the Paul Elmer Mores, Brander Matthewses, HamiltonWright Mabies, and other such brummagem dons—were utterly unaware ofhim. Then, of a sudden, the imbeciles who operate the Comstock Societyraided and suppressed his "Jurgen," and at once he was a made man. Oldbook-shops began to be ransacked for his romances and extravaganzas—manyof them stored, I daresay, as "picture-books," and under the name of theartist who illustrated them, Howard Pyle. And simultaneously, a greatgabble about him set up in the newspapers, and then in the literaryweeklies, and finally even in the learned reviews. An Englishman, HughWalpole, magnified the excitement with some startling hochs; a singlehoch from the Motherland brings down the professors like firemensliding down a pole. To-day every literate American has heard of Cabell,including even those presidents of women's clubs who lately confessedthat they had never heard of Lizette Woodworth Reese. More of his booksare sold in a week than used to be sold in a year. Every flapper in theland has read "Jurgen" behind the door; two-thirds of the grandmotherseast of the Mississippi have tried to borrow it from me. Solemn PrivatDozenten lecture upon the author; he is invited to take to thechautauqua himself; if the donkeys who manage the National Institute ofArts and Letters were not afraid of his reply he would be offered itsgilt-edged ribbon, vice Sylvanus Cobb, deceased. And all because a fewpornographic old fellows thrust their ever-hopeful snouts into the man'stenth (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 Idoubt that he enjoys the actual pawing that he has been getting—any morethan he resented the neglect that he got for so long. Very lately, in themidst 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 standabove all public-clapper-clawing, pro or con. He writes, not to pleasehis customers in general, nor even to please his partisans in particular,but to please himself. He is his own criterion, his own audience, his ownjudge and hangman. When he does bad work, he suffers for it as no holyclerk ever suffered from