ur banks but in his mind
habitually bridges the gap by imagined excursions into Poictesme and the
domains adjacent.

Nothing but remarkable erudition in the antiquities as Cockaigne and
Faery could possibly suffice for such adventures as Mr. Cabell's, and he
has very remarkable erudition in all that concerns the regions which
delight him. And where no authorities exist he merrily invents them, as
in the case of his Nicolas of Caen, poet of Normandy, whose tales
_Dizain des Reines_ are said to furnish the source for the ten stories
collected in _Chivalry_, and whose largely lost masterpiece _Le Roman
de Lusignan_ serves as the basis for _Domnei_. One British critic and
rival of Mr. Cabell has lately fretted over the unblushing anachronisms
and confused geography of this parti-colored world. For less dull-witted
scholars these are the very cream of the Cabellian jest.

The cream but not the substance, for Mr. Cabell has a profound creed of
comedy rooted in that romance which is his regular habit. Romance,
indeed, first exercised his imagination, in the early years of the
century when in many minds he was associated with the decorative Howard
Pyle and allowed his pen to move at the languid gait then characteristic
of a dozen inferior romancers. Only gradually did his texture grow
firmer, his tapestry richer; only gradually did his gaiety strengthen
into irony. Although that irony was the progenitor of the comic spirit
which now in his maturity dominates him, it has never shaken off the
romantic elements which originally nourished it. Rather, romance and
irony have grown up in his work side by side. His Poictesme is no less
beautiful for having come to be a country of disillusion; nor has his
increasing sense of the futility of desire robbed him of his old sense
that desire is a glory while it lasts.

He allows John Charteris in _Beyond Life_--for the most part Mr.
Cabell's mouthpiece--to set forth the doctrine that romance is the real
demiurge, "the first and loveliest daughter of human vanity," whereby
mankind is duped--and exalted. "No one on the preferable side of Bedlam
wishes to be reminded of what we are in actuality, even were it
possible, by any disastrous miracle, ever to dispel the mist which
romance has evoked about all human doings." Therefore romance has
created the "dynamic illusions" of chivalry and love and common sense
and religion and art and patriotism and optimism, and therein "the ape
reft of his ta