The following has been prepared by counsel, with full appreciation of the fact that the book under review must, in the last analysis, speak for itself, and that every book makes its different impression on each mind that it reaches. The only possible aid to reflection which this writing can constitute therefore, lies in such suggestion as it fairly may convey, that Mr. Cabell’s book is literature, in the accepted sense of that term, which is, as the foregoing brief shows, the legal sense as well. It presents a theme and its object is to stimulate reflection.
The book in question is a criticism of life. It treats with satire certain of the thoughts so current among us. It is Matthew Arnold and Carlyle in different guise. But the guise adopted is not new or novel. In the Sixteenth Century Erasmus put forth his comments on the ruling ideas of his time by writing a book “In Praise of Folly”. Mr. Cabell has adopted the same method of treatment. To his book can be applied the words which Professor Wells spoke of a book which our Court of Appeals has recently held not to be within the condemnation of the statute invoked in the present case: “With a springboard of fact in the seventeenth century to start from, he * * * transfers the adventures from the real world to a sort of forest of Arden, where the Rosalind of Shakespeare might meet a Watteau shepherdess and a melancholy Jacques.” (Halsey v. N. Y. Society, 234 N. Y. 1, 5.)
But that is not the only motive of the book. It deals also with aspirations for the unattainable, aspirations which it falls to the lot of some men to feel,—aspirations whose portrayal finds expression in books ranging from Goethe’s “Faust” to Sinclair Lewis’s “Babbitt”. These are things which, to use the words of Magistrate Simpson in the recent (and still unreported) case of People v. Seltzer, are not “naturally calculated to excite in the susceptible impure imaginations”. And if we want a moral lesson, we have it, because these desires are shown to be useless. The conventional cannot be escaped by fleeing to sin, for wickedness itself is conventional.
And may we observe in passing that the author, Mr. Cabell, is no radical? He makes no plea for reform by way of sociological experiment. Indeed, as expressed in “Beyond Life”, his contempt for sociology has been condemned by one of the apostles of the new Reign of Science and a lecturer in the Rand School (Robinson, “The Mind in the Making”, page 208). “What we want”, said Mr. Gradgrind, “are facts”. Mr. Cabell’s book now under attack deals with things not within the spectrum of the Gradgrind School,—eternal things which continue whether the world happens to be of the “New Philosophy” mode of thinking, or to have returned to the Age of Faith. How well he succeeds with what he has undertaken is quite another matter; in law it is sufficient that he has assumed the task. And with this in mind, the following undertakes to tell what one reader, at least, may think that “Jurgen” is about.
Jurgen’s name is “derived from jargon, a confused chattering such as birds give forth at sunrise” (183).[5] He is a pawnbroker, and he lives in Poictesme, but it might just as well be Kennaquhair. In his youth he had been in love with a Lady Dorothy; at forty-four we find him a pawnbroker, settled down to business, with a wife who has all the virtues of the good wife; somewhat henpecked, longing, like Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt, for he knows not what. He has not the culture of Faust, he is not a Ph.D.; but, like the doctor of Leipzig whose venturings as set forth in legend attracted Marlowe and then Goethe, Jurgen yearns for “the distant land”, where he shall be able “to grasp infinite nature”. He thinks that he is a “monstrous clever fellow”;—so did Faust, the learned doctor,—in the end he reaches his salvation through a return to the routine from whence he came. Like Faust he assumes to unravel a tangled knot. Life is a riddle, nature is a mystery, justice has an indefinable basis. The learned man in Goethe’s poem seeks to find out why these things are so; Mr. Cabell’s hero is a man of ordinary station, but he, too, pursues the quest.
Jurgen passes from his routine of life, as Faust does, through communion with spirits that partake of the power of darkness. It all starts with one night when, on his way home from a day of trafficking in his shop, Jurgen passes a Cistercian monk who, having stumbled over a stone, is cursing the devil that had placed it there. “Fie, brother”, says this wordly wise, this all sufficient Jurgen, “have not the devils enough to bear as it is?” (1) This attracts the attention of an earth spirit, one Koshchei, “who made things as they are”.
For that reason this spirit, Koshchei, has his limitations. To him love is impossible—not carnal love, but the love of God, such love as never enters into Hell (257); such love as Jurgen’s grandmother, instructed by the priest, has for God (299, 302). Also to this earth spirit, Koshchei, is pride impossible (303). Of heavenly love the earth spirit cannot conceive, because he “made things as they are, and day and night he contemplates things as they are”. “How then”, says God Himself, “can Koshchei love anything?” (303). Pride, as the philosophical Satan tells Jurgen, is impossible to whoever it was that made things as they are, because he has to look at them, having nothing else to look at, so how can he be proud? (257). Almost, having in mind a certain treatise, De Civitate Dei, we can imagine St. Augustine speaking. The things of this world, the things as they are, are not to be loved, and he who made them, assuredly not the real God, finds love foreign to his breast.
Anyhow, this Koshchei, “monstrously pleased” with Jurgen’s defense of the devils against the Cistercian monk, puts himself in Jurgen’s way. Appearing to the hero in the shape of a small black gentleman, the earth spirit promises Jurgen a reward (10–11).
What that reward is to be soon develops. Arriving home, Jurgen finds his wife has vanished. She has gone to a cave, of evil magic, across Amneran Heath. On Walpurgis night, that night renowned in the calendar of demonology, Jurgen follows her there; but first, at her bidding he must remove from his neck a cross which had hung there, the gift of his dead mother (13).
Then comes a medley of classic, of Russian, and of Norse mythology. Jurgen finds in the cave a centaur, who gives him a Nessus-shirt (16)—“an old poet, loaned at once a young man’s body and the Centaur’s shirt” (131)—the young man’s body which Faust desired, but the Nessus-shirt which even Hercules could not wear for long. Jurgen is now off for his tour of the infinite.