il and grown rusty at climbing" has clothed himself so
long that as he beholds himself in the delusive mirrors he has for
centuries held up to nature he believes he is somehow of cosmic
importance. Poor and naked as this aspiring ape must seem to the eye of
reason, asks Mr. Cabell, is there not something magnificent about his
imaginings? Does the course of human life not singularly resemble the
dance of puppets in the hands of a Supreme Romancer? How, then, may any
one declare that romance has become antiquated or can ever cease to be
indispensable to mortal character and mortal interest?

The difference between Mr. Cabell and the popular romancers who in all
ages clutter the scene and for whom he has nothing but amused contempt
is that they are unconscious dupes of the demiurge whereas he, aware of
its ways and its devices, employs it almost as if it were some
hippogriff bridled by him in Elysian pastures and respectfully
entertained in a snug Virginian stable. His attitude toward romance
suggests a cheerful despair: he despairs of ever finding anything truer
than romance and so contents himself with Poictesme and its tributaries.
The favorite themes of romance being relatively few, he has not troubled
greatly to increase them; war and love in the main he finds enough.

Besides these, however, he has always been deeply occupied with one
other theme--the plight of the poet in the world. That sturdy bruiser
Dom Manuel, for instance, is at heart a poet who molds figures out of
clay as his strongest passion, although the world, according to its
custom, conspires against his instinct by interrupting him with love and
war and business, and in the end hustles him away before he has had time
to make anything more lovely or lasting than a reputation as a hero. In
the amazing fantasy _The Cream of the Jest_ Mr. Cabell has embodied the
visions of the romancer Felix Kennaston so substantially that
Kennaston's diurnal walks in Lichfield seem hardly as real as those
nightly ventures which under the guise of Horvendile he makes into the
glowing land he has created. Nor are the two universes separated by any
tight wall which the fancy must leap over: they flow with exquisite
caprice one into another, as indeed they always do in the consciousness
of a poet who, like Kennaston or Mr. Cabell, broods continually over the
problem how best to perform his function: "to write perfectly of
beautiful happenings."

Of all the fine places in th