The Holy Bottle

One has a way of setting up principles in haste and repenting them at leisure. So it is with my principle—or prejudice—against the use of archaic words. I am strongly of the persuasion that a writer, and especially a writer of prose, should keep to the language of his own time, and that a resort to bookish and archaic diction is a confession of weakness. And so when I began reading Mr. Cabell’s “Beyond Life” I said, This will never do, this affectation of a flavor and a cut of phrase long outmoded. And I doubted whether I should be able to finish the book. But I got interested in John Charteris and his amusing rehearsal of literary history. Before I knew it he had conducted me from Homer to Marlowe, from Marlowe to Congreve, and from Congreve to Sydnor Harrison. And then, while I still shared the author’s notion that this Charteris had been giving us a treatise on the writing of novels, there came his peevish denial of that intention, and I realized that what we had been shown upon this lively screen I was a philosophy of life. So that when I turned back to confirm my first impressions on his reprehensible affectation in style, I found that I had above all things a great respect for his spirit and thought.

And long before “Straws and Prayer-Books” renewed the challenge to my pedantry I realized that I had always been, like everybody else, an affectionate admirer of Charles Lamb, than whom no one ever used more constantly the diction and syntax of old bookish writers. And I remembered that Hazlitt, who wrote incomparably well the plain English of his own day, and on principle preferred the simple and contemporary, had made an exception in the case of Lamb, on the grounds that Lamb had so completely assimilated the manner of the seventeenth century masters that he was practically one of them. And the case of Stevenson next assailed me, a writer whose essays and narratives alike are well spiced with whatever was quaint and racy in the chroniclers of an earlier day. And last I had to acknowledge that I had surrendered completely to the archaism of Charles Doughty, at least in his prose, and—after long challenging his right to the words of Chaucer and Spenser and the King James Bible—had come to the conclusion that notlnng could suit better his own spirit and theme in “Arabia Deserta” than this apparel in the antique mode.

In all these cases I concluded it was the fitness of the medium that justified the exception, and its perfect mastery. It suited the man, and moreover he proved his right to it by the fineness of his stroke. Where I object to archaism—and that remains almost everywhere—is in writers of little force and color who try to win from an occasional borrowed word a grace and piquancy that is not in them, pinning on to garments of nondescript plainness some ineffectual patch of scarlet. In the case of Charles Doughty there is the subject: Semitic peoples inhabiting a desert bordering on the Holy Land, dwelling in tents, making their stage from well to well like the people of Moses, with, moreover, the hue of buried cities, and ancient inscriptions to be patiently traced by the hand of the archaeologist. But more than that is the man himself, the sincere and cheerful gravity of his approach to life, his rock-like integrity and simplicity of nature, his loyal acceptance of all received values, all manly and humane notions of right and wrong and truth and goodness. All that is Biblical and old English. And that is no description at all of John Charteris elaborating his theory of the Demiurge, as he “pretentiously called” the power of romance. Moreover, the locutions of Doughty are biblically plain, compact, and sinewy like monumental inscriptions; they are good as skilled joiner’s work is good; and the smell of them is as the smell of cedar-wood, out of the fibre and substance of the thing itself. Whereas the author of “Beyond Life” has described the style of his theorizing novelist in a manner recalling Carlyle’s description of the style of Teufelsdroeckh, with the same pretence of irritation over his want of naturalness. “Meanwhile he talked: and he talked in very much that redundant and finicky and involved and inverted ‘style’ of his writings; wherein, as you have probably noted, the infrequent sentence which does not begin with a connective or with an adverb comes as a positive shock. . . .”

There is in Cabell none of the downrightness of Doughty and the Bible. He writes in the characteristic manner of a scientific age, that hesitating and hair-splitting manner of men seeking the last refinement of truth, full of reservations and qualifications and after-thoughts (the footnotes all included in the text, as De Quincey rather suggests they should be), and with every grade of subordination duly recorded in the flexible medium of adverbial modifiers: that manner with which we have been made so well acquainted by Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater, by Henry James and Marcel Proust. And he has none of the naïveté that gives to Doughty so much of his freshness and sweetness. There is nothing biblical about his thought unless it be the jaded wisdom of Ecclesiastes. He asserts nothing and accepts nothing as truth. All standards and values he brings in question. Men do not appear to him as the central object of God’s concern, but as “wingless bipeds . . . left to their own devices among much noncommittal stardrift.” Beneath his grinning mask he bears a face both sad and grave, and one comes to understand that he does most decidedly care about man’s destiny and the goal of his activities. But he cannot seriously consider that, in the cosmic scale and as judged by reason, any great importance attaches to what man thinks and does. Not wishing to be the fool of his own illusions, he clings instinctively to his tone of playful badinage.

It is clear that Mr. Cabell has not at all the same claim as Mr. Doughty upon the theatrical wardrobe of the old writers. But that he must have some kind of a claim upon it is a presumption made stronger by our realization that he is, in general, a master of words, using them with fine and sympathetic discrimination, that he is at infinite pains to seek out the right word, and that he does actually hit upon it much more often than not. He has precision as well as flavor. So that when we find him using tall words, as Hazlitt calls the words of Dr. Johnson, they are not generally “tall, opaque words,” as Hazlitt asserts of Dr. Johnson’s; some light shines through them of thought and whimsy; and there is a strong presumption that they are not, like the tall words which Mr. Van Vechten transfers so ostentatiously from the dictionary to his romances, a mere pedantic ornament to an otherwise rather undistinguished page. And this is the more likely when we consider that Mr. Cabell has treasured from the old masters not merely the tall words, which were always bookish, but still more the sturdy little words that were never bookish, and are not bookish even now except as, in their modesty and plainness, they have a sharper and brighter appeal to the imagination than their flabby equivalents in contemporary style. Thus in the sentence in which he describes the offering up of the author’s life to his art. “He breaks his implements with ruthless usage; he ruins all that time will loan; meanwhile the work goes forward, with fair promise” We have mostly lost the art of saying things with that appealing plainness; we say it in some more round-about, unimaginative way: “and yet he is making appreciable progress in his work, and has reason for being optimistic.” And in our revision we lose both rhythm and savor.

Very often, when we are aware of an antique flavor in Cabell, we cannot trace it to any form of words not in current usage, but to something more intimate still in his handling of order and syntax, a phrasing no lexicographer would recognize as obsolete, but which does none the less suggest the manner of a seventeenth or eighteenth century master by something indefinable—but which at a pinch might be defined!—in the turn of the logic. Speaking of the tendency of an author to use and study his own experience for the benefit of his art, Mr. Cabell says: “All that which is naturally fine in him he will so study, and regard from every aspect, that from much handling it grows dingy.” Perfect English of our day, but so fashioned as to suggest the prose of Dryden. He says of Millamant, the famous heroine of Congreve’s comedy, “Of course she was the cause that Congreve never married.” And we have a thing turned as Bacon might have turned it. Of the effect of Sheridan’s speech against Warren Hastings, he says, “I do not expect you to believe this, but it is a matter of record.” And we seem to hear the voice of Swift or Arbuthnot. Or he says, “Dryden was a fine poet, and wears Morocco worthily,” and we recognize the hand of Lamb.

But now i cannot be persuaded to say that Mr. Cabell is simply an imitator of our fine old writers. I am constrained to hold that, somehow, as with Doughty, though not in the same way as with Doughty, the tinge of archaism suits his turn of thought, serves his purpose, and matches his idiosyncrasy. It suits for one thing his type of wit and humor. No, not his type of wit precisely, for in wit there is no type, no new and old. He may suggest the ancients by being witty. But when we actually take under observation an instance of his wit we find nothing archaic in it but the tradition of wit itself. Of clergymen who confuse the material welfare of their own church with the cause of Christianity, he says, “They come to mistake for the light of the world the candle that illuminates the altar.” It might have been said by Newman himself. Or again he is discussing the tendency to praise the great classics and leave them unread. “As a case in point, one may well consider that especial glory of English letters, the much-vaunted plays of the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, which justly rank so high in literature that few can endure the* altitude.” There is here no hint of obsolete or elaborate phrasing. All that Mr. Cabell has done is, with a quick malicious play of wit, to apply literally a figure of speech, taking advantage of one of those analogies in things which it is the nature of the wit and the poet, according to Hobbes, instinctively to perceive.

It must be strictly speaking his humor then that suits with the antique and often elaborate fashion of his style. As in Lamb and Carlyle, it is almost invariably a touch of the mock heroic that betrays the mimicry of the old writers. As both Cabell and Carlyle are much beholden to Swift for the manner of expression, so they are both not a little like him in the general view of human kind that makes the substance of their humor. Cabell has none of the savagery of Swift and little of the moral earnestness of Carlyle. In each writer the elements are present in different proportions, but in them all is a strong infusion of both pity and scorn for the race of man, whom they all view from a distant height as if they were gods, albeit with something of the impatience of men judging their fellows. Mr. Cabell’s panegyric on Dullness is reminiscent of Swift or Pope. There is something of the “Battle of the Books” in the unctuous learnedness of Charteris and of the editor supplying foot-notes to explain the term Prohibitionists, or to explain, of writers like Winston Churchill to whom Charteris refers, that they were novelists “in vogue at the time he spoke.” Some of Mr. Cabell’s tall words are typical Carlylese, as where he speaks of “thousands of calligraphic persons,” referring to authors who have no more of the divine craft than a fountain pen. Carlyle is a hard hitter; but many of his most telling strokes are made by him when he would stay his hand, and a sudden mildness of understatement betrays a wearied and indulgent judge of human folly! Somewhat in this vein is Mr. Cabell’s qualified suggestion that the brain was not originally designed as an implement of authorship. “By any creative: writer . . . the human brain is perverted to uses for which it was perhaps not especially designed; nor is it certain that the human body was originally planned as a device for making marks on paper.”

There are other passages in “Beyond Life” which remind us of Carlyle’s ironic view of the vanity of human affairs. There is much of the tone of Teufelsdroeckh in the account of how men dress themselves for dances or for church, and go through the motions associated with the idea of amusement or worship— with his wonder at how “the cotillion, or dancing in any form, came to be employed as an arbitrary symbol for amusement.” And again there is the passage in the second chapter, reminiscent at once of “Sartor Resartus” and “Purvis at Umbra,” beginning, “Indeed, when I consider the race to which I have the honor to belong, I am filled with respectful wonder.” Cabell is filled with wonder at the obstinacy with which man, in the ignominy and insignificance of his circumstances, yet clings to the idea of his importance. Stevenson is filled with wonder at man’s inveterate goodness in these circumstances. Carlyle is filled with wonder at the divinity that gleams out fitfully from the dinginess of his character and surroundings. Carlyle has much more of the Calvinistic earnestness and constantly sounds the note of evangelical exhortation. The sentence quoted from Cabell has an almost Japanese suavity, he is so politely respectful in his wonder at the race to which he has the honor to belong. His mildness of statement, where he would be ironic, is even milder than Carlyle’s and more constant. When Cabell wishes to suggest the extreme indecency of Restoration comedy, and the consequent neglect with which it is treated in our time, he has a way of saying it as different as possible from Macaulay’s and easily distinguishable from Lamb’s. “But now, in reading, the formal cadences of these elaborate improprieties blend, somehow, into a dirge, hollow and monotonous, over an era wherein undue importance would seem to have attached to concupiscence/’ Macaulay judges these obsolete plays with the severity of a Puritan magistrate; Lamb praises them with the enthusiasm of an antic humorist. Mr. Cabell accepts them and dismisses them with Congreve’s own smile of “amused acquiescence,” according to the code of Gallantry which he has erected upon a verse of Horace. He will not take too seriously any of the circus-performances of men, having learned to see through all the “illusions” of mankind and judging them, in the light of reason, as all of about equally doubtful validity. In such an old gentleman’s philosophy there is no call for heavy hitting.

And this reminds us that the flavor of elegant and playful bookishness, with its discreet pervasive tincture of archaism, is particularly suited to the fundamental attitude of sceptical disillusionment from which Mr. Cabell proceeds. He who questions all values, all those motives of action which Ibsen calls life lies, and which he more pretentiously denominates “dynamic illusions,” naturally shrinks from a blunt and naked blurting out of unamiable doubts. Above all things he wishes to avoid the seriousness of his young contemporaries in American letters. He first invents an aging unsuccessful novelist and eccentric to be the screen between himself and a prying world. And he duly endow3 him with a style suited to the handling of these touchy matters of belief. For albeit that he has been obliged to give up for himself the one great illusion of rationality, he naturally hates like sin to give it up, and still more he hates to have any one catch him wincing at the odious necessity. And for that matter, he has not altogether given up his illusions: he has merely given up his faith in them as rational. His whole argument is for accepting them, or such of them as most appeal to him; he would have us cling to them as after all “dynamic” and necessary to life.

But still more, in recommending a procedure so irrational, he must avoid anything like a tone of pious gravity; he must involve himself in a cloud of humorous sophistication like an ancient goddess condescending to set foot upon earth. His thesis is very like that of Mr. Santayana in “Poetry and Religion.” Religion Santayana recommends not because it is true to fact and history, but because it rings true to our hearts, and is current coin in all our transactions with ideal things. But Mr. Cabell is a more nervous and self-conscious thinker. He cannot content himself with the quiet sedateness of a Santayana, philosophically conceding to us all of religion except faith. He cannot himself give up his fundamental illusions without many a grimace of pain; and his notions of Gallantry prescribe that his grimaces shall be comic ones. He wants us to understand that, while he has made a formal sacrifice of his reason, it is lively enough for all that, and will have its revenge wherever it can upon the imperious instincts that have repudiated it. Romance, which is a kind of faith, he has finally espoused. But like so many other true believers, he has come to his faith by way of the dark wood of utter scepticism. And he is forever casting nervous glances over his shoulder, in the manner of Lot’s wife, at the darkness whence he has so recently emerged. So that his most eloquent passages, such as those in which Charteris sums up the qualities which he craves in literature snd life, are shot through with whimsical concessions to the vigilant and fleering spirit of irony.

“So I in point of fact desire of literature, just as you guessed, precisely those things of which I most poignantly and most constantly feel the lack in my own life. And it is that which romance affords her postulants. The philtres of romance are brewed to free us from this unsatisfying life that is calendared by fiscal years, and to contrive a less disastrous elusion of our own personalities than many seek dis-persedly in drink and drugs and lust and fanaticism, and sometimes in death. For, beset by his own rationality, the normal man is goaded to evade the strictures of his normal life, upon the incontestable ground that it is a stupid and unlovely routine; and to escape likewise from his own personality, which bores him quite as much as it does his associates. So he hurtles into these very various roads from reality, precisely as a goaded sheep flees without notice of what lies ahead. . . .

“And romance tricks him, but not to his harm. For, be it remembered that man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams. Romance it is undoubtedly who whispers to every man that life is not a blind and aimless business, not all a hopeless waste and confusion; and that his existence is a pageant (appreciatively observed by divine spectators), and that he is strong and excellent and wise: and to romance he listens, willing and thrice willing to be cheated by the honeyed fiction. The things of which romance assures him are very, far from true: yet it is solely by believing himself a creature but little lower than the cherubim that man has by interminable small degrees become, upon the whole, distinctly superior to the chimpanzee: so that, however extravagant may seem these flattering whispers today, they were immeasurably more remote from veracity when men first began to listen to their sugared susurrus, and steadily the discrepancy lessens. Today these things seem quite as preposterous to calm consideration as did flying yesterday: and so, to the Gradgrindians, romance appears to discourse foolishly, and incurs the common fate of prophets: for it is about tomorrow and about the day after tomorrow, that romance is talking, by means of parables. And all the while man plays the ape to fairer and yet fairer dreams, and practise strengthens him at mimickry. . . .

“To what does the whole business tend?—why, how in heaven’s name should I know? We can but be content to note that all goes forward, toward something. . . . It may be that we are nocturnal creatures perturbed by rumors of a dawn which comes inevitably, as prologue to a day wherein we and our children have no part whatever. It may be that when our arboreal propositus descended from his palm-tree and began to walk upright about the earth, his progeny were forthwith committed to a journey in which to-day is only a way-station. Yet I prefer to take it that we are components of an unfinished world, and that we are but as seething atoms which ferment toward its making, if merely because man as he now exists can hardly be the finished product of any Creator whom one could very heartily revere. We are being made into something quite unpredictable, I imagine: and through the purging and the smelting, we are sustained by an instinctive knowledge that we are being made into something better. For this we know, quite incommunicably, and yet as surely as we know that we will to have it thus.

“And it is this will that stirs in us to have the creatures of earth and the affairs of earth, not as they are, but ‘as they ought to be,’ which we call romance. But when we note how visibly it sways all life we perceive that we are talking about God.”

And so I have been at great pains to explain and justify a lively manner of writing which needs no more explaining than the simple statement that the author has a lively mind and takes pleasure in giving it exercise. For Mr. Cabell may have lost all his illusions; but he has clearly not lost, what is better than any illusion, the pleasure he takes in setting words in order. He may dismiss as a romantic illusion the author’s earnestness in seeking the approval of posterity; but the gusto he betrays in every turn of his thought shows there is present a joyous and instinctive play of the mind which has no need of an illusion to motive it, however much it may call for one to “rationalize” it. These “dynamic” illusions, this realism and romance, and doubt and faith, are but as balls which the juggler shies into the air, three or four at a time, by way of showing how many he can keep going at once. The argument of the book is as a tight rope on which he can balance himself, with an ease, the gift of natural grace and long practice, which disguises the extreme difficulty of the trick. He is at one with all lovers of paradox, the Chestertons and Shaws, the Swifts and Frances,—those subtle and lively thinkers in whom one thought begets another, assertion begets denial, denial assertion, and ideas come to stand upon their feet only when they are tired of standing on their heads. There is in him that mocking, will-of-the-wisp spirit, now you have me and now you don’t, which is the delight of jesting Pilates, and a thorn in the flesh of those who are forever staying for an answer.

In short he has drunken of the Holy Bottle,—for I will make my own interpretation of Rabelais’ oracle; and so inspired, he cannot content himself with those sober words and turns of thought which serve the purpose of more placid men. There are other ways of manifesting literary gusto, but this is Cabell’s way. And gusto is, according to his Charteris, a quality always distinguishable in books that are to endure. They have “a heartiness akin to the smacking of lips over a good dish. . . . It is not ecstacy, although to ecstacy it may approach. I think it is almost a physical thing: it certainly involves a complete surrender to life, and an absorption of one’s self in the functions of being. It is a drunkenness of the soul, perhaps; it is allied to that fierce pain and joy which we call ecstatic living, and which the creative artist must always seek to reproduce in his work. . . .”