Yet the essential thing about this book, I thought at my first reading, was its prodigality in the transforming magic which—heaven knows, in how few books!—quite incommunicably lends romantic beauty to this or that not necessarily unusual or fertile theme, somewhat as sunset tinges the wooded and the barren mountain with equal glamour. To me this book at once exposed Donn Byrne as a practitioner of that rare and unteachable wizardry without which one writes only words, and without which the most carefully made sentences tend but to bury one another like neat undertakers.
Technically, though, the construction of Messer Marco Polo must remain always to any novelist peculiarly interesting. To Mr. Byrne, in Westchester, N.Y., "at the second check of the hunt, came the message that a countryman and a clansman needed me," in the person of Malachi Campbell of the Long Glen: and it is the old Celt who tells of what, in a far-off golden yesterday, Marco Polo the Venetian saw and encountered in Cataia. So then does Mr. Byrne set about his magicking, to lure you from the prosaic to the wonderful, at last to leave you contentedly cuddled in the lap of the incredible. He raises for you, to begin, the milieu of his Westchester,—"the late winter grass, sparse, scrofulous, the jerry-built bungalows, the lines of uncomely linen, the blatant advertising boards." It is in, seen through, and continuously colored by, this almost Gopher Prairean atmosphere that Malachi evokes the old time and the great plenty of Ireland in the days of her championship, and the gleaming world of tall Dermot and Granye of the Bright Breasts and amorous fierce Maeve and Cuchulain in whose heroic looks were love and fire; and evokes too, seen as if beyond and colored by the glow of this Celtic wonderland, not merely the opulent sleek life of the heyday and prime of Venice, "that for riches and treasures was the wonder of the world"; since past even that, illuminate and tinged by all, is evoked also the Venetian's notion of the inscrutable, good-tempered, shining, evil East.
The tale, thus, seems a fantastic and gracious pageant, saddened somehow by the known evanescence of its beauty, regarded through three opalescent veils: or, rather, all that happens—just as we upon reflection prefer to have had it happen,—in the Chinese jasmine garden by the Lake of Cranes, is viewed through a rose-tinted gauze of mediæval fancies seen through thin aureate Celtic mists observed through the unhued but glazing window-panes of a Westchester, N.Y., drawing-room. I am by no means sure this curious tour de force was worth performing; but I am unshakably convinced that Mr. Byrne "brings it off" to a nicety.
Well, such was the romance which appeared some years ago without much heralding, and which, when I first read it, had existed as a book for a month or two without attracting any particular attention. And, reading, I wondered. For this tale, in itself delightful—for a reason to which I shall recur,—seemed to me to be told in words so "warm and colored," and so adroitly marshalled as to drive any honest-minded reader to the confessional. I confessed, then, to being uncritically seduced by the fact that Mr. Byrne, without apparent effort or shame, wrote perfectly of beautiful happenings and seemed no whit afraid of elaborated diction. I confessed to thinking that many of the episodes, perhaps most notably the efforts of Marco Polo to convert to Christianity the pagan girl who while he talks is merely conscious of the fact that she loves the talker, have a queer and heart-wringing loveliness that is well-nigh intolerable. And I confessed to finding the brief chapter which bridges seventeen years, and winds up the story to "the true rhythm of life," a small masterpiece of art and wisdom.
Above all, I now confess this is the only contemporary book that ever I actually sought the privilege of reviewing. And when this task was entrusted to me, by The Nation, I indited every word of Messer Marco Polo's encomium with a teasing faint suspicion that I was almost certainly writing high-pitched nonsense which I would some day re-read with embarrassment.
At all events, while the first rapture lasts, said I, let me profess that I most cordially admire this story, and seem to find no praise too exquisite. You, I advised potential readers, may derive from it a more temperate pleasure, you may not even enjoy what my more sophisticated juniors, I confess, are deprecating as "this pseudo-Celtic stuff": and, in fact, the tale can hardly appeal to any considerable audience, just now, since it "exposes" and "arraigns" nothing whatever. With that I had no concern. It was merely my affair to tell everybody who would listen that, to my finding, Messer Marco Polo was a very magically beautiful book.
§ 19
So I said all this in a review which I have here more or less exactly iterated. I count myself to-day fortunate that this review achieved a brief bewildering sort of fame. Virtuosi thought well of it, it was quoted with approval by the literary editors of the leading papers of Des Moines and Walla Walla and Mobile. It seemed, indeed, to be reprinted illimitably in papers everywhere throughout the country, so that The Nation's honorarium but visited me in transit to the bank account of my clipping bureau. And the publishers reproduced this review at full length in their advertisements, and reproduced it, again virtually at full length, upon the novel's dust jacket.... I could open no periodical wherein reading-matter was advertised without encountering the proclamation, "James Branch Cabell says Messer Marco Polo is a very magically beautiful book." At first the phrase read like a ukase, it had the full and final ring of an imperial decree: later, with so constant repetition, it began to take on somehow the flavor of a taunt, and I would read on a bit further, in the next advertisement, hurriedly.... And people wrote to me about my pæans, some to thank me for, as they put it, "discovering" the novel for them, and some of course to rebuke me as the member of a petty clique of assassins, atheists and tomb-defilers who combined thus shamelessly to puff one another's books. And in fine there was rarely seen so much bombilation over any one brief and not especially remarkable criticism, whose only striking characteristics were the dubious ones of enthusiasm and sincerity.
But this to-do had the merit of drawing people's attention to Messer Marco Polo and of provoking people to read this small novel. And many thousands joyed in the reading of it, very much as I had done. For here again was the true formula and the hero with whom mankind peculiarly delights in imagination to identify itself,—the hero who wanders footloose and at adventure through lands which are to him and to the reader in nothing familiar. It is the formula of the Odyssey, the formula of picaresque romance, and of all fairy stories properly equipped with quests and an indomitable third prince. It is of course precisely the one formula which cannot ever lose its charm so long as men retain that frame of mind which seems coeval with recorded history, of being bored by the routine of their daily living.... And people also found in Messer Marco Polo just the quality I had ascribed to this book, the quality which I have vaguely indicated as wizardry.
§ 20