The Cream of the Jest, James Branch Cabell [smart ebook reader .TXT] 📗

alluring him to believe that such ideals must also be cherished by Omnipotence. This poet loved his formal art to the extent of coming to assume it was the purpose and the origin of terrestrial life. Life seemed to him, in short, a God’s chosen form of artistic self-expression; and as a confrère, Kennaston found the result praiseworthy. Even inanimate nature, he sometimes thought, might be a divine experiment in vers libre.⁠ ⁠… But neither the justice of Kennaston’s airdrawn surmises, nor their wildness, matters; the point is that they made of him a vestryman who in appearance and speech and actions, and in essential beliefs, differed not at all from his associates in office, who had comfortably acquired their standards by hearsay. So that the moral of his theorizing should be no less obvious than salutary. XXVIII The Shallowest Sort of Mysticism

Through such airdrawn surmises, then, as I have just recorded did Felix Kennaston enter at last into that belief which is man’s noblest heritage.⁠ ⁠…

“Or I would put it, rather, that belief is man’s métier,” Kennaston once corrected me⁠—“for the sufficient reason that man has nothing to do with certainties. He cannot ever get in direct touch with reality. Such is the immutable law, the true cream of the jest. Felix Kennaston, so long as he wears the fleshly body of Felix Kennaston, is conscious only of various tiny disturbances in his brain-cells, which entertain and interest him, but cannot pretend to probe to the roots of reality about anything. By the nature of my mental organs, it is the sensation the thing arouses in my brain of which I am aware, and never of the thing itself. I am conscious only of appearances. They may all be illusory. I cannot ever tell. But it is my human privilege to believe whatever I may elect.”

“Yet, my dear sir,” as I pointed out, “is not this hairsplitting, really, a reduction of human life to the very shallowest sort of mysticism, that gets you nowhere?”

“Now again, Harrowby, you are falling into the inveterate race-delusion that man is intended to get somewhere. I do not see that the notion rests on any readily apparent basis. It is at any rate a working hypothesis that in the world-romance man, being cast for the part of fool, quite obviously best furthers the dénouement’s success by wearing his motley bravely.⁠ ⁠… There was a fool in my own romance, a character of no great importance; yet it was an essential incident in the story that he should irresponsibly mislay the King’s letter, and Sir Guiron thus be forced to seek service under Duke Florestan. Perhaps, in similar fashion, it is here necessary to the Author’s scheme that man must simply go on striving to gain a little money, food, and sleep, a trinket or two, some moments of laughter, and at the last a decent bed to die in. For it may well be that man’s allotted part calls for just these actions, to round out the drama artistically. Yes; it is quite conceivable that, much as I shaped events at Storisende, so here the Author aims toward making an aesthetic masterpiece of His puppet-play as a whole, rather than at ending everything with a transformation scene such as, when we were younger, used so satisfactorily to close The Black Crook and The Devil’s Auction. For it may well be that the Author has, after all, more in common with Aeschylus, say, than with Mr. Charles H. Yale.⁠ ⁠… So I must train my mind to be contented with appearances, whether they be true or not⁠—and reserving always a permissible preference for pleasant delusions. Being mortal, I am able to contrive no thriftier bargain.”

“Being mortal,” I amended, “we pick our recreations to suit our tastes. Now I, for instance⁠—as is, indeed, a matter of some notoriety and derision here in Lichfield⁠—am interested in what people loosely speak of as ‘the occult.’ I don’t endeavor to persuade defunct poetesses to dictate via the Ouija board effusions which give little encouragement as to the present state of culture in Paradise, or to induce Napoleon to leave wherever he is and devote his energies to tipping a table for me, you understand.⁠ ⁠… But I quite fixedly believe the Wardens of Earth sometimes unbar strange windows, that face on other worlds than ours. And some of us, I think, once in a while get a peep through these windows. But we are not permitted to get a long peep, or an unobstructed peep, nor, very certainly, are we permitted to see all there is⁠—out yonder. The fatal fault, sir, of your theorizing is that it is too complete. It aims to throw light upon the universe, and therefore is self-evidently moonshine. The Wardens of Earth do not desire that we should understand the universe, Mr. Kennaston; it is part of Their appointed task to insure that we never do; and because of Their efficiency every notion that any man, dead, living, or unborn, might form as to the universe will necessarily prove wrong. So, if for no other reason, I must decline to think of you and me as characters in a romance.”

Book Fifth

“This was the measure of my soul’s delight;
It had no power of joy to fly by day,
Nor part in the large lordship of the light;
But in a secret moon-beholden way
Had all its will of dreams and pleasant night,
And all the love and life that sleepers may.

“But such life’s triumph as men waking may
It might not have to feed its faint delight.”

XXIX Of Poetic Love: Treated with Poetic Inefficiency

So much for what Kennaston termed his “serious reading” in chance-opened pages of the past. There were other dreams quite different in nature, which seemed, rather, to fulfil the function of romantic art, in satisfying his human craving for a full-fed emotional existence⁠—dreams which Kennaston jestingly described as “belles lettres.”