Chapter I: Cabell Minor

There are more arguments to prove that James Branch Cabell is a legend than to prove that he is a fact. The most dependable of contemporary authorities says of him that he is an “author; _b._ Richmond, Va., Apr. 14, 1879; _s._ Robert Gamble and Anne (Branch) C.; A. B., William and Mary, 1898; _m._ Priscilla, _d._ William Joseph Bradley, of ‘Auburn,’ Charles City Co., Va., Nov. 8, 1913. Instr. French and Greek, William and Mary, 1896-7; worked in pressroom Richmond (Va.) Times, 1898; on staff New York Herald, 1899-1901, and Richmond (Va.) News, 1901; contbr. short stories, etc., to mags., 1902-10, and conducted geneal. and original research work in America, France, Ireland and Eng.; engaged in coal-mining in W. Va., 1911-13; genealogist Va. S. R., 1919-20; historian Va. Soc. Colonial Wars, 1916--and Va. Soc. S. A. R., 1917--; pres. Va. Writers’ Club, 1918-21; editor Va. War History Commn., 1919--; mem. Kappa Alpha (Southern), Phi Beta Kappa. Episcopalian.” To these details this most juiceless of contemporary authorities adds only the titles of Mr. Cabell’s various books and his address. Remarkably little else about him as a person has been made public: a few attractive but non-committal photographs, a few bits of information little above the level of amiable gossip. All that emerges is the evidence that he is a Virginian of the old stock, cultivated and reticent, who with unvarying fidelity if with varying fortunes has given himself to the writing of books.

The legend which has grown up about Mr. Cabell no doubt owes its exuberance to the scarcity of the facts upon which it has been fed. It babbles, as he has pointed out, about his “romantic irony, his cosmic japes, his bestial obscenities, his well-nigh perfect prose, his soaring imagination, his corroding pessimism,” with tiresome reiteration. It speaks largely about his great acquisitions of medieval lore, and hints less largely at his excessive learning in various forbidden topics. It whispers, elsewhere, of such spiritual misdemeanors as in other ages were called compacts with the devil. It goes, even, to the length of mentioning, at a safe distance from the laws concerning libel, misdemeanors not so spiritual. That the legendary aspects of Mr. Cabell, however unwarranted, have such vitality shows well enough that they spring from the rich soil of public ignorance. It may, nevertheless, be admitted that he has enriched the growth by his habits of secrecy and innuendo and mystification and by his obvious disregard of the patterns of thought and sentiment by which his readers naturally expect him to cut his fictions. If he conceals so much, they reason, he must have still more to withhold from the light of day. If he disregards the customary patterns, he must himself regard dark and dangerous ones.

Meanwhile Mr. Cabell, keeping the facts to himself and doubtless smiling at the legend, has gone on in his avowed practice of the desire “to write perfectly of beautiful happenings.” And the time has come when it is no longer possible to resist the temptation to examine his aims and his achievements in the chapter of his career which he is just now concluding.

Nor is it easy to resist the temptation to say, at the outset, that Mr. Cabell is already a classic if any American novelist of this century is. The shifts of taste from age to age may now depress and now exalt the credit of the famous _Jurgen_, but so have they done during the past five generations with _Tristram Shandy_, another masterpiece frequently baited by the sort of censor who dreads wit unless it picks its topics with caution. Both by its wit and by its beauty, _Jurgen_ is entitled to survive. Moreover, it is far from being its author’s only claim to eminence. Certain of his admirers debate among themselves whether _Figures of Earth_ is not profounder than _Jurgen_, or _The High Place_ more artfully narrated, or _Domnei_ lovelier. _Chivalry_ was a particular favorite of Mark Twain, who kept it at his bedside. And these are but five of the fifteen Cabell books which stand closely linked together in the careful scheme according to which they are all arranged. Even though, as is inevitable, two or three of them will outlive the others, the entire fifteen must be taken into account.

There they stand, graceful and compact, devoted to the record of beautiful happenings in a language which never falls below a high level of perfection. They deal with a world which at first may seem extraordinarily remote from the concerns of most recent fiction. That world, however, the invented medieval province of Poictesme, speedily grows familiar to any imagination which ventures into it without undue prejudice, for it has its own logic, as well as its own history and geography. Human life is there as vain a thing as in Ecclesiastes, but it abounds in the dramas of aspiration and desire by which the thread of existence is carried on. Only through the gate of irony, indeed, may this imagined universe be entered. Solemn souls will miss the gate and fumble along an impenetrable wall. But less solemn spirits, passing blithely through the gate, find one of the most exquisite worlds in fiction. It is full of magnificent adventures, high speeches, chivalrous and gallant personages. The landscapes are of agreeable proportions, with smooth lawns and fragrant orchards, with forests and mountains ripe with color. The costumes and the interiors are scrupulously considered, that they may all be beautiful, or at least significant. The cross roads of history meet in this world, and space no less than time comes to a focus there. Yet nothing tawdry or sprawling has been admitted. All is order and art. While there is plenty of satire, it rarely concerns itself with temporary matters. There is learning, but it lays no serious burden upon the stories; there are opinions, but they waste little time in wrangling over controverted issues. Whoever reads these books and comprehends the scheme which now binds them into unity, will feel that Mr. Cabell, like another Adam, has found his Eden, has dressed and tended it, has populated and civilized it, and has made it the home of valor and beauty and wit.

No wonder that, twenty years after the appearance of his first book, Mr. Cabell, substantially intrenched behind the uniform edition of his works, looks back with a resentful eye upon the early and scattered volumes which are hunted by collectors and bibliographers as the rarer volumes of no other contemporary American are hunted. Like Holofernes, this iconoclastic Virginian would prefer to hack the Cabell of yesterday merrily into pieces and give him to the Cabell of to-morrow for his breakfast. “Were the choice afforded me,” the Holofernian Cabell says, “no one of these first editions ... would to-day exist.” Such iconoclasm, however, cannot be permitted, or at least will not be permitted so long as a single investigator is curious about the steps by which Mr. Cabell, with seldom matched fidelity, has advanced from the region of tentative experiments to the region through which he now manœuvers on surer, more ironic feet. The miracle of his emergence from the world in which he grew up is at once too exciting and too edifying to be forgotten in the stir caused by his arrival in a very different world. Even the most secular scripture need not hesitate to begin with some kind of Genesis.

Concerning the ardent, absurd youth who wrote _The Eagle’s Shadow_ the Cabell who wrote _Straws and Prayer-Books_ speaks disarmingly in a late autobiographic note. “I would like,” that youth is made to say, “to write the very nicest sort of books--like Henry Harland’s and Justus Miles Forman’s and Anthony Hope’s. They would be about beautiful, fine girls and really splendid young men, and everything would come out all right in the end.... I simply want to contribute to the best magazines, and write some wholesome ... entertaining books, that will sell like _The Cardinal’s Snuff-Box_ and _The Prisoner of Zenda_.” In 1902, of course, such aspirations were not entirely quaint. Cloaks and masks were in the mode. Approved heroines waited in Ruritanias or Graustarks for the dashing heroes who should come from England or the United States and rescue them from the thorns by which they were surrounded. The paths of romance led to the greenwood, to the medieval tournament or pleasaunce, to the age of periwig and patch and small sword and furbelow, to the more recent drawing-room or terrace where repartee glittered over tea-tables. _The Eagle’s Shadow_, let it be remembered, appeared as a serial in what was shortly to be the most popular of all the popular magazines, and the brief tales by its author which dressed this weightier dish found their way into periodicals of established reputation, to be illustrated by established illustrators. There was no serious disregard of current fashion in Mr. Cabell’s tender reinterpretations of Falstaff or Villon or in his heartening discovery that the most frivolous beau and belle had really hearts of gold. Few readers of these stories noticed the hand of irony within the glove of velvet.

The hand, nevertheless, inhabited the glove. Mr. Cabell was already in several respects a scholar and a critic. At William and Mary he had taught French and Greek while still an undergraduate; in his first acknowledged contribution to belles-lettres he had taken Congreve for his theme and had defended that insouciant wit against either moralists or apologists. The infection of maturity had commenced to work. “From the start,” the latest Cabell was subsequently to warn the earliest, “will be tugging at your pen a pig-headed imp that will be guiding it his way instead of the way you intended. And with each book he will be growing stronger and more importunate and more cunning, and he will be stealing the pen away from you for longer and longer intervals. And by and by that imp, full grown now and the very devil of a taskmaster, will be dictating your books from beginning to end--not to speak here of his making you sweat blood when you revise, at his orders, all the earlier ones.... You ... will call him the desire to write perfectly of beautiful happenings.”

The maturer Cabell has so carefully obliterated his tracks, with what looks, at many points, like an amused mendacity, that it is difficult now to guess just when in his career he settled upon the design which has finally come to govern all his material. He himself explains that the inception of his scheme goes back to 1901, “when I wrote the first of the stories bound up together as _The Line of Love_. And the general ‘method’ followed in that volume--of depicting a decisive event in the lives of two persons, then a similar untying of knots in the life of a child of that couple, and yet afterward in one of the grandchildren’s life-history--has been extended, but never altered, in my succeeding volumes.... And all traces--pretty clearly now--from Dom Manuel, and the descendants whom he and Alianora left in England, and the other descendants whom he and Niafer left in Poictesme, and from the eleven images that he and Freydis informed with fire from Audela, and set to live as men among mankind.” Whenever Mr. Cabell definitely undertook to elaborate his richly colored genealogy, at least he did not, as a careful examination of those anathematized first editions shows, for some time unmistakably reveal his scheme. The unity of his work lay in his temper, in his comparative disinclination, or inability, to invent, in the gradual drift of his imagination toward two or three settings and two or three sets of characters for which eventually he gave up all others. While this unity was asserting itself, he moved about through medieval France and eighteenth-century England and contemporary America, searching for episodes worthy to be recounted in his tone of mingled rapture and skepticism.

The episodes in his volumes of short stories, _The Lane of Love_, _Gallantry_, _Chivalry_, _The Certain Hour_, are essentially gestures. With poets and warriors as their almost invariable heroes, and love as their almost invariable theme, they set forth each of them some high moment of valor or renunciation in which much is demanded of the hero, who meets it with even more than is demanded. François Villon, in _In Necessity’s Mortar_, for the last time sees Catherine de Vaucelles, who has jilted him and shamed him, discovers that she still loves him, but, now that through years of despair he has become a mere “hog with a voice,” decides that he must kill her love to save her, and so disavows any preference for her whatever. The Prince de Gâtinais, in _The Scapegoats_, having with one dire gesture poisoned his son’s low-born sweetheart to give the younger man to his high-born duty and to France, with another tremendous gesture poisons himself in expiation for a deed which he does not in the least regret. At such moments the protagonists of this universe rise above the customary stature of mankind, touching the cold stars with heads full of mad, glorious conceits. Mr. Cabell knows that the gestures are for the most part vain. Villon, crying out in agony over his obligation, finds that his cry suggests a neat ballade. “So, dismissing for the while his misery, he fell to considering, with undried cheeks, what rhymes he needed.” Louis de Soyecourt, by his father’s action made Duke of Noumaria, in the end escapes from the boredom of his duty to a happy vagabondage as a piano-timer. Yet though the conceits are mad, they are glorious. Who would live forever? Who would take love at less than the peak and then, through dwindling years, have nothing supernal to remember? Who would miss the chance once in a lifetime to confound all foes and rivals with a magnanimity which though bitter must seem immense? Mr. Cabell has a weakness for these gestures that gives him, as an artist, strength.

The danger which has always hung over Mr. Cabell in his chronicling of such gestures is the danger of sentimentalism. Lovely as a bubble may be, it can be broken by one puff too much, and then nothing is left of its iridescence. The puff too much he occasionally gave in his earlier versions. As _The Housewife_, for instance, at present stands, King Edward is content to speak thus of his queen when he hears of her great loyalty: “She waddles now.... Still, I am blessed.” But once the passage ran more loftily: “Now at last he understood the heart of Philippa. ‘Let me live,’ the king prayed; ‘O Eternal Father, let me live a little while that I may make atonement!’” There was a time, that is to say, when Mr. Cabell blurred the fine edge of his rapture by moments of passion wherein he forgot to be sophisticated. Verbal changes here and there in the revision have been necessary to cut away an earlier softness, particularly when his warriors tended to be poets or orators at dramatic crises. This difficulty does not arise when his heroes are technically poets, as they are in _The Certain Hour_. Of them it may reasonably be expected that they will bear themselves with a zest and wit which would hardly be allowed them, even at the most striking turns of their careers, were they men of some more prosaic calling and language. But then Mr. Cabell’s heroes are all actually, in one degree or another, poets, much like those young men who lift and enliven the plays of Shakspere. Again and again the Cabellian theme is the conflict between a poet and a warrior for the same lady; and though the poet as a rule has the neater tongue and the quicker intelligence, he has no marked advantage over his rival in goldenness of speech. The poets are warriors and the warriors are poets. To keep such equations credible, Mr. Cabell has been obliged to lay his scenes ordinarily in ages which cherished both valor and poetry and which held them interwoven with delicate codes of honor. With one of his favored ages he associates the cult of Chivalry; with the other, Gallantry.

“The cornerstone of Chivalry I take to be the idea of vicarship: for the chivalrous person is, in his own eyes at least, the child of God, and goes about this world as his Father’s representative in an alien country. It was very adroitly to human pride, through an assumption of man’s responsibility in his tiniest action, that Chivalry made its appeal; and exhorted every man to keep faith, not merely with the arbitrary will of a strong god, but with himself. There is no cause for wonder that the appeal was irresistible, when to each man it thus admitted that he himself was the one thing seriously to be considered.... So man became a chivalrous animal; and about this flattering notion of divine vicarship builded his elaborate mediæval code, to which, in essentials, a great number of persons adhere even nowadays.” Had Mr. Cabell been less a poet himself, he might have fallen into astringency with such a conception as his starting-point. As it is, the conception merely furnishes the ironic edge which shears away the exuberance to which his love of gestures might have led him. He does not, on account of this comic attitude, take less interest in the chivalrous impulses which his characters exhibit. Bound by their sense of responsibility to an extent which he knows is comic, they yet conduct themselves with a high seriousness which, while it lasts, is the breeder of superb rhetoric and noble actions, and incidentally of admirable drama. Each of them, man or woman, in _Chivalry_ and in the allied stories of the other volumes, is ringed round with perils, and each of them bears himself magnificently to the point of death or whatever different reward awaits him.

Mr. Cabell’s Gallantry is enough like his Chivalry in its consequences to those who live by it. “Now the essence of Gallantry, I take it, was to accept the pleasures of life leisurely and its inconveniences with a shrug.... A gallant person will ... always bear in mind that in love-affairs success is less the Ultima Thule of desire than its _coup de grâce_, and he will be careful never to admit the fact, especially to himself.... He will prink; and he will be at his best after sunset. He will dare to acknowledge the shapeliness of a thief’s leg, to contend that the commission of murder does not necessarily impair the agreeableness of the assassin’s conversation; and to insist that God is kindlier than the genteel would regard as rational. He will, in fine, sin on sufficient provocation, and repent within the moment, quite sincerely, and be not unconscionably surprised when he repeats the progression: and he will consider the world with a smile of toleration, and his own doings with a smile of honest amusement, and Heaven with a smile that is not distrustful.” Gallantry, indeed, is a sort of frivolous Chivalry, living up to its code on a plane of life where less seems to be involved in the issue of any given event than on the plane of vicarship. But there is for all that a rapier in every ruffled hand which is celebrated in _Gallantry_. John Bulmer, Duke of Ormskirk, protagonist of _In the Second April_, is the quintessential Cabell hero of the earlier books. Like all his fellows, he reflects often upon the boy he used to be and makes much of an old love, but he knows that he does not too violently regret his past nor too poignantly remember the Alison of his first April. Now seasoned in the world, he matches and overmatches it with a cunning which he cannot forego even in his courtship of Claire de Puysange. He distresses her, who is less than half his age, with his persistent lightness on the most desperate occasions, yet at their great occasion he meets his enemies with a courage as unassailable as if he did not accompany it with words of such laughing eloquence as madden her before they convince her. Bulmer cuts the figure that every quick-spirited youth and every full-hearted man would like to cut. He is, to be sure, a dream of gallant perfection, and no more; but he curiously stirs the blood of man and boy alike. And with what art Mr. Cabell constructs the drama of Bulmer’s wooing and winning: the incognito sustained yet recognized, the rejection endured with pain yet with gay fortitude, the magnificent duel on the tower! It is, perhaps, the art of Congreve, but of a Congreve warmed with rich colors and a generous audacity.

In the towered cathedral which Mr. Cabell has gradually built, on the level plain of current life, for his undeviating worship of beauty and heroism, the short stories of these four volumes are the smaller chapels braced against the central structure, the ornaments carved boldly on the weather side or tucked away in shadowy corners to tempt the curious. Without, it should be made clear, unparalleled erudition, he has nevertheless ransacked many remote places for his materials and his patterns. His universe in various fashions resembles that of _The Faërie Queene_, wherein geographical and chronological boundaries melt and flow, wherein fable encroaches upon history, and the creative mood of the poet re-cuts his shining fabrics as if they were whole cloth intended solely for his purposes. Mr. Cabell has a partiality for the Middle Ages, when the fates of the European nations were tangled with contending dynasties, and for the eighteenth century, but, like Spenser, he draws upon the ancient world and the world of dreams. In choosing those dramatic moments which he has elected to record, he tends to choose occasions about which history is partly silent in the lives of its eminent men and women: a late meeting of Falstaff with a boyhood sweetheart, the forced decision of Villon to turn thief, the final interview of Marlowe with the girl he loves, the apocryphal courtship of Katharine of Valois and Henry V, the philosophical plagiarism of Shakspere in writing _The Tempest_, the mysterious death of Herrick, the marriage of Wycherley to the Countess of Drogheda and of Sheridan to Miss Ogle. Not that Mr. Cabell is confined to history, even thus lightly handled; he has no objection to inventing poets and warriors when he needs them, nor to being as circumstantial about them as about the genuine personages of his tales. But he requires the added glamour which is given to fiction by its association with remembered or rumored facts. Beautiful happenings, he knows, seem more beautiful when they have already been looked upon as memorable.

The temper with which he approaches all these themes has from the first been ironic, so much so that he regularly distresses readers who prefer to have their romances entirely romantic. His heroes are not forever heroes. The tide turns with them, and the sun sets, and the flower fades. Perhaps he early learned to glory in his disillusionment; at least he has never relaxed into credulity. Consequently he does not tell his stories with an abandoned rush of narrative. They move on deliberate feet, their episodes rounded out with a steady-handed art. Always Mr. Cabell interprets the action in the terms of a spectator who knows that though ecstasy is supreme it is also vain. At the same time, there is that in his constitution which will not let him merely strip and dissect. He must adorn while he analyzes.

To this element is due his other essential quality as a story-teller, his silken texture. There are no angles in his surfaces. His style purrs to a degree that now and then begets monotony; his phrases, ordinarily so felicitous, now and then have a mannered look; he so often avoids the simple way of saying simple things that he overloads his language. It is hard to remember his plots, less hard to remember his characters, because they have been hidden under his suave tapestry. At his best, however, and he is very frequently at his best in his short stories, he is crystal in his meanings and delicately varied in his rhythms, as in this speech credited to Shakspere: “Lord, what a deal of ruined life it takes to make a little art! Yes, yes, I know. Under old oaks lovers will mouth my verses, and the acorns are not yet shaped from which those oaks will spring. My adoration and your perfidy, all that I have suffered, all that I have failed in even, has gone toward the building of an enduring monument. All these will be immortal, because youth is immortal, and youth delights in demanding explanations of infinity. And only to this end I have suffered and have catalogued the ravings of a perverse disease which has robbed my life of all the normal privileges of life as flame shrivels hair from the arm--that young fools such as I was once might be pleased to murder my rhetoric, and scribblers parody me in their fictions, and schoolboys guess at the date of my death!” Had Mr. Cabell no other gift than to make wisdom thus descant upon the vanity of life, his most persistent and successful theme, he would still deserve a praise as worthy as he is likely to receive in a world which his Shakspere all too accurately describes.

With the short stories which are as chapels to the Cabellian cathedral must be ranked the four novels which have their scenes in or near Lichfield and Fairhaven, those romantic cities which the world thinks of as Virginian, though Mr. Cabell softly points out that he has never asserted as much. They are pleasant cities, contentedly provincial, where the codes of Chivalry and Gallantry persist with something of the old colors under no matter how changed conditions. If these cities embrace within their habits such necessities as labor or such luxuries as prayer, little mention is made of them. Their business, so far as the novels are concerned, is love--love made with eloquent words and with delicate codes of honor. A few men do most of the love-making: Felix Kennaston, Robert Etheridge Townsend, Rudolph Musgrave, John Charteris. Their careers run through _The Eagle’s Shadow_, _The Cords of Vanity_, _The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck_, _The Cream of the Jest_ like the cheerful warp of many varied textures. This or that man of them may have some tender loyalty to his first love, and may often brood over it with edifying sentiments, but for the most part they move among the exquisite, glimmering girls of Lichfield and Fairhaven like the heroes of Restoration comedy, touching a hand here, taking a kiss there, breaking hearts and themselves becoming heart-broken, recovering, as do their ladies, with the long sighs of the sentimental and with the light hearts of the heroic. It is the women who make the texture varied. There are, indeed, not as many of them as might be expected in four novels, for they, no less than the men, may reappear in this or that new plot when they have finished their courses in another. But they have such diversity in themselves that the stories are rich with their changing moods. To love one of these women is a kind of polygamy. Neither Mr. Cabell nor the lover of any of them studies her deeply enough to strike into the regions where biology holds the lantern, and where all women, it is argued, are alike. The ladies of Lichfield and Fairhaven are the ladies of high comedy. Not shallow, they are gay; not solemn, they are intelligent. They are the decorative elements which give a charming surface to records of love conceived cynically yet tenderly.

The records themselves range from such a less than characteristic story as that in _The Eagle’s Shadow_, with its sillibub dialogues and its theatrical solution, to such a more than characteristic story as that in _The Cream of the Jest_, with its two universes always suspended in the hand of the narrator and turned, now the one, now the other, uppermost. Perhaps none of the plots, except that of _The Eagle’s Shadow_, is less than characteristic of its author in his maturity. What stretches out through _The Cords of Vanity_ is merely another line of love, with a single personage serving as the lover in all cases. Robert Etheridge Townsend, poet and romancer, ascends to peak after peak of rapture, rejoices there with the enchanting mistress of the hour, and then slips down again to the ironical valley of his daily life, which knows that the magic of love is only a brief madness. He is a sorry fellow, deft with words and fickle with emotions. So are Charteris and Kennaston, only one of them permitted a novel to himself in this series, but neither of them ever far from any chapter. By their recurrence they make clear that the method of the Lichfield-Fairhaven novels is not essentially different from that of the books of short stories. Whether short or long, the narratives are all episodes, in sequence or distinct, little dramas given over to exposing the vanity of human pretensions and human desires. A few situations, adroitly varied, Mr. Cabell finds enough for his purposes; and he would rather bring an old, successful character back upon the stage than go to the trouble of shaping a new, untried one. Moreover, he wants his heroes to comprehend as well as to endure their fates. Not for him the blind tragedy and the dumb victim. His lovers burn as other lovers do, but his lovers even at the summit of felicity are aware of what is passing, and after due sufferings they heal themselves with the unembittered smile which is the light of comedy. So exigent with regard to his characters and their attitudes toward their adventures, Mr. Cabell is bound to be confined to a few settings, a few actions, a few personages. His variety lies in the by-paths by which so many of his plots are conducted to virtually the same end and in the luster of the language which with so many surprising graces fits itself to nearly the same theme.

The theme, nevertheless, now and then reaches out to touch aspects of existence which do not properly belong within its narrower bounds. _The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck_, for example, has for its chief personage the gallant genealogist Rudolph Musgrave, of the Musgraves of Matocton, who, through all the wonder of his love for the girl who marries him, cherishes the memory of the girl who married Charteris instead and whom Musgrave has protected from a disillusioning knowledge of her husband by one more heroic gesture. Yet the _Rivet_ is also an edged and beguiling satire. Musgrave, that quaint figure whittled out of chivalry and dressed up in amiable heroics, is a Southern gentleman comically perceived and rendered; the narrative glances obliquely at all the follies and affectations and absurdities of the traditional South. And _The Cream of the Jest_ is at once a highly original Cabell story and the virtual epitome of all the Cabell stories. Felix Kennaston lives in comfortable Lichfield much as its more representative citizens live there, but in the excursions of his imagination he visits that world which, by never having existed, partly atones to men for the world that does exist. These two universes are not separated in _The Cream of the Jest_ by any tight wall which it is a strain to jump over; they flow with witching caprice one into another, affording endless opportunities to compare the universe in which Kennaston lives as Kennaston with the universe in which he lives as Horvendile. In a sense, his career is an allegory with the human race for its larger hero. Does not the race, unable to endure the pain or boredom of its earth, turn perennially to the clouds and skies and create better regions to dream in? Is the experience actually more real than the vision? Clearly it may be argued, as indeed it is argued by Felix Kennaston, that men and women are nothing more than characters in the mystifying plot which some great Romancer is weaving over their heads. They travel ordinarily at the pedestrian gait which among them is called realism when they imitate it in their own works of art; but now and then they are lifted and driven by incalculable urges which are perhaps the lyric or dramatic moments in the life of the Romancer who has created them.

Some such idea lies back of all that Mr. Cabell has written. It is, of course, the basis of his argument for romance, and it serves to furnish his narratives, short or long, with their rich color and high, ironic language. The idea in him is so persistent that it might make him, in his unconcern with the surface activities of men, a languid story-teller if he did not have an amount of comic vigor which is sometimes overlooked in the delight his language and color give. It might make him, also, more monotonous in his disillusion than he is, thanks to the gusto with which he savors the phantasmagoric spectacle of human life. But thus at once detached and avid, he has been able to practise his art with the disinterested scruples which set the general level of his excellence above that of any other contemporary American novelist. Nevertheless, there is a major and there is a minor Cabell. To the second must be ascribed the short stories, though some of them are masterpieces within their limits, for the sole reason that they are, as episodes, unable to display their author’s larger qualities at the full. To the minor Cabell, not much less surely, belong the Lichfield-Fairhaven chronicles, by reason of a certain slightness in their substance and a certain remoteness from that Poictesme which Mr. Cabell has come, like Felix Kennaston, to inhabit more naturally, and perhaps more really, than any tangible province.