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    The Jewel Merchants: A Comedy in One Act
    The Jewel Merchants: A Comedy in One Act
    The Jewel Merchants: A Comedy in One Act
    Ebook70 pages43 minutes

    The Jewel Merchants: A Comedy in One Act

    By James Branch Cabell

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateSep 1, 1998
    The Jewel Merchants: A Comedy in One Act
    Author

    James Branch Cabell

    James Branch Cabell; (April 14, 1879 – May 5, 1958) was an American author of fantasy fiction and belles-lettres. Cabell was well-regarded by his contemporaries, including H. L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, and Sinclair Lewis. His works were considered escapist and fit well in the culture of the 1920s, when they were most popular. For Cabell, veracity was "the one unpardonable sin, not merely against art, but against human welfare." Although escapist, Cabell's works are ironic and satirical. Mencken disputed Cabell's claim to romanticism and characterized him as "really the most acidulous of all the anti-romantics. His gaudy heroes ... chase dragons precisely as stockbrokers play golf." Cabell saw art as an escape from life, but found that, once the artist creates his ideal world, it is made up of the same elements that make the real one

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      Book preview

      The Jewel Merchants - James Branch Cabell

      The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Jewel Merchants, by James Branch Cabell

      This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

      Title: The Jewel Merchants A Comedy in One Act

      Author: James Branch Cabell

      Posting Date: October 29, 2011 [EBook #9829] Release Date: February, 2006 First Posted: October 22, 2003

      Language: English

      *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE JEWEL MERCHANTS ***

      Produced by Suzanne Shell, Clare Boothby and PG Distributed Proofreaders

      The Jewel Merchants A Comedy in One Act

      By

      James Branch Cabell

      "Io non posso ritrar di tutti appieno:

             pero chi si mi caccia il lungo tema,

          che molte volte al fatto il dir vieti meno."

                         NEW YORK

                           1921

      TO LOUISE BURLEIGH

      This latest avatar of so many notions

                 which were originally hers.

      THE AUTHOR'S PROLOGUE

      Prudence urges me here to forestall detection, by conceding that this brief play has no pretension to literary quality. It is a piece in its inception designed for, and in its making swayed by, the requirements of the little theatre stage. The one virtue which anybody anywhere could claim for The Jewel Merchants is the fact that it acts easily and rather effectively.

      And candor compels the admission forthwith that the presence of this anchoritic merit in the wilderness is hardly due to me. When circumstances and the Little Theatre League of Richmond combined to bully me into contriving the dramatization of a short story called Balthazar's Daughter, I docilely converted this tale into a one-act play of which you will find hereinafter no sentence. The comedy I wrote is now at one with the lost dramaturgy of Pollio and of Posidippus, and is even less likely ever to be resurrected for mortal auditors.

      It read, I still think, well enough: I am certain that, when we came to rehearse, the thing did not act at all, and that its dialogue, whatever its other graces, had the defect of being unspeakable. So at each rehearsal we—by which inclusive pronoun I would embrace the actors and the producing staff at large, and with especial (metaphorical) ardor Miss Louise Burleigh, who directed all—changed here a little, and there a little more; and shifted this bit, and deleted the other, and tried out everybody's suggestions generally, until we got at least the relief of witnessing at each rehearsal a different play. And steadily my manuscript was enriched with interlineations, to and beyond the verge of legibility, as steadily I substituted, for the speeches I had rewritten yesterday, the speeches which the actor (having perfectly in mind the gist but not the phrasing of what was meant) delivered naturally.

      This process made, at all events, for what we in particular wanted, which was a play that the League could stage for half an evening's entertainment; but it left existent not a shred of the rhetorical fripperies which I had in the beginning concocted, and it made of the actual first public performance a collaboration with almost as many contributing authors as though the production had been a musical comedy.

      And if only fate had gifted me with an exigent conscience and a turn for oratory, I would, I like to think, have publicly confessed, at that first public performance, to all those tributary clarifying rills to the play's progress: but, as it was, vainglory combined with an aversion

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