My lady Evelyn and I.
R. P. CRENSHAW, JR.
Book Reviews
The High Place. By James Branch Cabell. (McBride.)
The hearts of young men have always provided Mr. Cabell with a ready stamping-ground. Youth which has not yet lost its imagination, which is still hoping its disillusionments are bad dreams, slips into the spirit of the Cabellian fantasy with too ardent asperity, so that when Jurgen or Manuel awakens in the world of things as they are, youth suffers more than any old man may. None of us have ever had much sympathy with the church-league critics of the manners of Poictesme, since the very elements which aroused the righteousness of these people formed an essential and legitimate part of our dreams and our ideals. We were thankful that if life held little promise to our masculine delicacy of desire, Jurgen at least provided us with a satisfactory literature. That is more or less our reason for wishing Mr. Cabell’s tales to go unchallenged, and for our thinking his formerly slight eroticism a necessary factor in the weaving of his enchantments.
Now, even the illusion of Poictesme has worn thin from over-handling. Still in the High Place there are those rare moments of adventure or frustration we have learned to expect and love. But Mr. Cabell has disclosed that his mind can be filthy as well as fantastic. His double meanings are here inexcusable both for their schoolboy crudity and for their quite obvious irrelevance to the general scheme of things; it is not a question of morals, but of taste. When certain passages remain inexplicable except as unadulterated smut, we cannot help smiling at the irony of the exalted title. What Mr. Cabell regard as his High Place is sometimes far too low to sustain his reputation. We advise those who are unacquainted with this author to begin elsewhere in his works.
D. G. C.
Hassan. By James Elroy Flecker. (Alfred A. Knopf.)
James Elroy Flecker is dead. But from London comes word that “Hassan”, his latest and great work, is playing, and has for months played, to packed houses. Flecker lived most of his life in the Orient, and has in this play indelibly caught its beauty, its poetry, and its cruelty.