The Comedian

In Which a Novelist Attempts to Discover and Appraise His Hero

JAMES BRANCH CABELL

IT is salutary enough, in the teeth of average opinion, for a writer to consider his own hooks. For he then, unique among mankind, enjoys the wholesome privilege of laying hand and eye upon just what, precisely, his life has amounted to; and the spectacle, one estimates, is very ill adapted to betray either the great or the popular into much self-conceit. No matter whether the assembled volumes compose a monument to the man's talents or to his more generally companionable lack of them, the upshot of all his existence is there before him, a tangible and visible and entirely complete summing-up within humiliatingly few inches.

So for my soul's health, when the day's stint of work is over, I sometimes appraise a foot and a half of book-backs—the dispiriting total of all that to which, whether for good or ill, I have amounted,—and I wonder just what, precisely, it is that I have been doing in these last twenty years. I try to make apparent, if only to myself, my real object in writing so much as is now written of this Biography, which seems to me an endless history of the life of Dom Manuel of Poictesme, and in which each of my books, when rightly considered, I take to compose a chapter.

WELL, on the face of it, this Biography, made up of thirteen books, is now a disjointed chronicle of the terrestrial feats of Poictesme's squinting hero and of some twenty-two generations of various persons variously descended from him. So the precise would incline to describe it as a family tree; and yet in fact, I think, it is a true biography; a biography of nine centuries of Dom Manuel's life. For, of course, the life that informed tall Manuel the Redeemer did not become extinct when the gray champion rode westward with Grandfather Death: the body and the appearance of Dom Manuel was gone, but his life remained perpetuated in five children, who afterward transmitted this life to their progeny, as did they in turn to their own offspring; so that this life flowed on through time—and through such happenings in France and England and America as, one by one, my books have recorded,—with every generation dividing and subdividing the troubled and attritioned flowing into more numerous streamlets. And Manuel's life came thus to Lichfield and the twentieth century, by and by, and is not yet extinct in my contemporary Townsends and Kennastons and Musgraves, of all whom these books trace the descent, in the twenty-third degree, from Manuel.

Thus too, I perceive, it is about this life that I have been writing always, in many places, in various chapters of a Biography which is largish now, but stays incomplete, and will not ever be completed. For this human life, as I consider it, appears to me a stream that, in journeying toward an unpredictable river, is fretted equally (still to preserve the fluvial analogue) by the winds of time and by many pebbles of chance. So are there various ripples raised upon the stream as it goes—ultimately—seaward; and, noting these, we say this ripple is Manuel, that Ormskirk, and the other Charteris; noting also that while we name it the small stir is gone. But the stream remains unabated, nor is the sureness of its moving lessened, any more than is the obscurity of its goal.

Yet, with reflection, this metaphor appears to me less apt than does another figure, to which I thereupon shift fancy. I begin to liken this continuously reincarnated life of Manuel to an itinerant comedian that with each generation assumes the garb of a new body, and upon a new stage enacts a variant of yesterday's drama. For I do not find life's comedy ever to be much altered in its essentials. The first act is the imagining of the place where contentment exists and may be come to: and the second act reveals the striving toward, and the third act the falling short of, that shining goal, or else (the difference here being negligible) the attaining of it, to discover that happiness, after all, abides a thought farther down the bogged, rocky, clogged, befogged heartbreaking road, if anywhere. That is the comedy which—to my finding, to-night, in my unmeritedly comfortable and quiet library— the life I write about has enacted over and over again on every stage between Poictesme and Lichfield.

I call it a comedy. Really there is thin sustenance for the tragic muse in the fact that with each performance the costume of the protagonist is spoiled, and the human body temporarily informed with life is thrown perforce to the dust-heap. There is not even apparent, to reflection, any economic loss: for the wardrobe of this mundivagant posturer is self-replenishing, in that as each costume is used it thriftily begets new apparel for the comedian to ruin in to-morrow's rendering of the old play. The parent's flesh is flung by like an outworn coat: but the comedian, reclad with the child's body, tricked out with strong fresh sinews and rerouged with youth, is lustily refurbishing, with a garnish of local allusions and of the latest social and religious and political slang, all yesterday's . archaic dialogue and inveterate "situations".

AND in the light of this comcedic metaphor —the metaphor which upon the whole I prefer,—my books appear to deal with a ludicrously small portion of the vagabond's wardrobe. For I have in my books concerned myself with only that relatively brief part of the tour wherein life has worn human bodies. Previously—I now reflect—the scenery was arboreal, and my comedian wore fur and a tail; as before that his costume was reptilian, and yet earlier was piscine. So do the scientists trace backward his career to life's first appearance upon the stage, when the vis comica which later was to animate the thews of Manuel, and of all men that have ever lived, had for its modest apparel only a small single bubble embedded in primeval slime.

Always, I perceive, my comedian has dressed his role with increasing elaborateness, progressing from a mere pinhead of sentiency to all the intricate fripperies of the human body, with its wealth of modern improvements in the form of forward-looking bifocal eyes and prehensile fingers and multiloquent lips. And so magnificently has he, through many centuries of endeavour, reorganized his stage-setting in the sundry nooks of Earth enriched with his main centres of civilization and his stupendous fulminating wars that it is not past the reach of poetic imagining to suppose the telescopes of Earth's nearest neighbour may quite possibly have detected some one of these fermenting pustules.

That proud contingency as yet remains guesswork, but less remotely this comedian has made sure of his art's last need. For upon Earth's epidermis he has created an audience more certain and immediate than those it may be interested Martians, by very patiently training some cells in the human brain once in a while to think. And since every form of aesthetic effort is spurred by any prospect of applause from any source however trivial, one must surmise that the performance is given with renewed gusto now the comedian's antics may be marvelled over by this gray beading so unobtrusively inwrought into his latest costume.

YET there is a grave drawback, I suspect, to this evolving of man's brain as a dramatic critic. It is that the one honest verdict to be wrung from the small wet sponge, which lines, they say, the skulls of patriotic orators and of our popular clergy too, must always be a lament that, even in the primordial ooze, the drama was (and, for that matter, bids fair to remain, in the last cold electric-lit futurity) a bit depressingly confined to this theme of striving toward a goal which, gained or lost, proves not to be the true goal, after all. And then da capo! . . . Yes, it really is depressing, because there is in this unending captaincy of a forlorn hope, in this futile and obstinate romanticism of life's vaudeville, just the element to which our most applauded "realists" most strenuously object as being untrue to life; and in the withering light of our best aesthetic theories the performance seems rococo and unreal.

And I speak overrashly of futurity, before which, really, my imaginings baulk. Tomorrow the age-old comedian will be wearing none knows what, though in reason the restless artist that we call life cannot long stay content* with human bodies for his apparel and medium. Already, in considerate eyes, life tends to some more handsome expression, by means of the harnessed chemistries and explosions, and collaborating fly-wheels and vapours, and wire-dancing thunderbolts, that in all our cities dwarf the human beings who serve as the release levers. Already, as many philosophers recognize, we are so generally fed and clothed and sheltered and carried everywhither by machinery that we can lay no grave claim to be thought more than its parasites. And already the era appears well in sight when every need of civilization and every business of life will be discharged by the pressure of electric buttons, and when, in America at least, the one essential part of man will be his forefinger.

But at prophecy, I repeat, I baulk. I am duly tempted to weigh the likelihood that with disuse the other members of the inhabitants of these states will disappear, and that our national nicety will then make an end of all by suppressing this surviving forefinger as considerations there is happily no need to enter. It may seem to hidebound logic quite certain that human beings are just one season's fashion in life's clothes, and that next season something entirely different will be worn. With such sartorial forecasts I have no quarrel, and if I do not blurt out the real truth of the matter it is merely because I do not know it. I merely know that, even though the life of our planet may bye and bye discard mankind just as it has discarded the dodo and the dinosaur, at present men and women are life's latest clothing: and I take it to be the part of urbanity to accept the mode of our day. So I must tacitly confine myself to this one season in Dom Manuel's life—and in all our human existence so far as known to me,—and neither here to-night nor in my books may I presume to prattle of apotheoses.

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With which decision I very lightly pass my finger-tips over a foot and a half of book-backs, and touch in this small gesture, so didactically small, the whole of that to which, for good or ill, I have amounted. And thereafter, with a continuing sense of wholesome allegory, I go quietly to bed.