But that is not the only motive of the book. It deals also with aspirations for the unattainable, aspirations which it falls to the lot of some men to feel,--aspirations whose portrayal finds expression in books ranging from Goethe’s “Faust” to Sinclair Lewis’s “Babbitt”. These are things which, to use the words of Magistrate Simpson in the recent (and still unreported) case of _People_ v. _Seltzer_, are not “naturally calculated to excite in the susceptible impure imaginations”. And if we want a moral lesson, we have it, because these desires are shown to be useless. _The conventional cannot be escaped by fleeing to sin, for wickedness itself is conventional._ And may we observe in passing that the author, Mr. Cabell, is no radical? He makes no plea for reform by way of sociological experiment. Indeed, as expressed in “Beyond Life”, his contempt for sociology has been condemned by one of the apostles of the new Reign of Science and a lecturer in the Rand School (Robinson, “The Mind in the Making”, page 208). “What we want”, said Mr. Gradgrind, “are facts”. Mr. Cabell’s book now under attack deals with things not within the spectrum of the Gradgrind School,--eternal things which continue whether the world happens to be of the “New Philosophy” mode of thinking, or to have returned to the Age of Faith. How well he succeeds with what he has undertaken is quite another matter; in law it is sufficient that he has assumed the task. And with this in mind, the following undertakes to tell what one reader, at least, may think that “_Jurgen_” is about. Jurgen’s name is “derived from jargon, a confused chattering such as birds give forth at sunrise” (183).[5] He is a pawnbroker, and he lives in Poictesme, but it might just as well be Kennaquhair. In his youth he had been in love with a Lady Dorothy; at forty-four we find him a pawnbroker, settled down to business, with a wife who has all the virtues of the good wife; somewhat henpecked, longing, like Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt, for he knows not what. He has not the culture of Faust, he is not a Ph.D.; but, like the doctor of Leipzig whose venturings as set forth in legend attracted Marlowe and then Goethe, Jurgen yearns for “the distant land”, where he shall be able “to grasp infinite nature”. He thinks that he is a “monstrous clever fellow”;--so did Faust, the learned doctor,--in the end he reaches his salvation through a return to the routine from whence he came. Like Faust he assumes to unravel a tangled knot. Life is a riddle, nature is a mystery, justice has an indefinable basis. The learned man in Goethe’s poem seeks to find out why these things are so; Mr. Cabell’s hero is a man of ordinary station, but he, too, pursues the quest.