James Cabell - The Line of Love. Dizain des Mariages

So I desist to follow the line of love across the Atlantic; and, for the while at least, make an end of these chronicles. My pen flags, my ink runs low, and (since Florian wedded twice) the Dizain of Marriages is completed.

I have bound up my gleanings from the fields of old years into a modest sheaf; and if it be so fortunate as to please you, my dear Mrs. Grundy,—if it so come about that your ladyship be moved in time to desire another sheaf such as this,—why, assuredly, my surprise will be untempered with obduracy. The legends of Allonby have been but lightly touched upon: and apart from the Aventures d'Adhelmar , Nicolas de Caen is thus far represented in English only by the Roi Atnaury (which, to be sure, is Nicolas' masterpiece) and the mutilated Dizain des Reines and the fragmentary Roman de Lusignan .

But since you, madam, are not Schahriah, to give respite for the sake of an unnarrated tale, I must now without further peroration make an end. Through the monstrous tapestry I have traced out for you the windings of a single thread, and I entreat you, dear lady, to accept it with assurances of my most distinguished regard.

And if the offering be no great gift, this lack of greatness, believe me, is due to the errors and limitations of the transcriber alone.

For they loved greatly, these men and women of the past, in that rapt hour wherein Nature tricked them to noble ends, and lured them to skyey heights of adoration and sacrifice. At bottom they were, perhaps, no more heroical than you or I. Indeed, neither Florian nor Adhelmar was at strict pains to act as common-sense dictated, and Falstaff is scarcely describable as immaculate: Villon thieved, Kit Marlowe left a wake of emptied bottles, and Will Sommers was notoriously a fool; Matthiette was vain, and Adelais self-seeking, and the tenth Marquis of Falmouth, if you press me, rather a stupid and pompous ass: and yet to each in turn it was granted to love greatly, to know at least one hour of magnanimity when each was young in the world's annually recaptured youth.

And if that hour did not ever have its sequel in precisely the anticipated life-long rapture, nor always in a wedding with the person preferred, yet since at any rate it resulted in a marriage that turned out well enough, in a world wherein people have to consider expediency, one may rationally assert that each of these romances ended happily. Besides, there had been the hour.

Ah, yes, this love is an illusion, if you will. Wise men have protested that vehemently enough in all conscience. But there are two ends to every stickler for his opinion here. Whether you see, in this fleet hour's abandonment to love, the man's spark of divinity flaring in momentary splendor,—a tragic candle, with divinity guttering and half-choked among the drossier particles, and with momentary splendor lighting man's similitude to Him in Whose likeness man was created,—or whether you, more modernly, detect as prompting this surrender coarse-fibred Nature, in the Prince of Lycia's role (with all mankind her Troiluses to be cajoled into perpetuation of mankind), you have, in either event, conceded that to live unbefooled by love is at best a shuffling and debt-dodging business, and you have granted this unreasoned, transitory surrender to be the most high and, indeed, the one requisite action which living affords.

Beyond that is silence. If you succeed in proving love a species of madness, you have but demonstrated that there is something more profoundly pivotal than sanity, and for the sanest logician this is a disastrous gambit: whereas if, in well-nigh obsolete fashion, you confess the universe to be a weightier matter than the contents of your skull, and your wits a somewhat slender instrument wherewith to plumb infinity,—why, then you will recall that it is written God is love , and this recollection, too, is conducive to a fine taciturnity.

EXPLICIT LINEA AMORIS