may
be moved to deprecate the enterprise when they recall, with discomfort,
the zealous vicarship of, say, the late Anthony J. Comstock.

But here I blunder into Mr. Cabell's province. For he has joined many
graceful words in delectable and poignant proof of just that lamentable
tendency of man to make a mess of even his most immaculate conceivings.
When he wrote _Chivalry_, Mr. Cabell was yet young enough to view the
code less with the appraising eye of a pawnbroker than with the ardent
eye of an amateur. He knew its value, but he did not know its price. So
he made of it the thesis for a dizain of beautiful happenings that are
almost flawless in their verbal beauty.

III

It is perhaps of historical interest here to record the esteem in which
Mark Twain held the genius of Mr. Cabell as it was manifested as early
as a dozen years ago. Mr. Cabell wrote _The Soul of Melicent_, or, as it
was rechristened on revision, _Domnei_, at the great humorist's request,
and during the long days and nights of his last illness it was Mr.
Cabell's books which gave Mark Twain his greatest joy. This knowledge
mitigates the pleasure, no doubt, of those who still, after his fifteen
years of writing, encounter him intermittently with a feeling of having
made a great literary discovery. The truth is that Mr. Cabell has been
discovered over and over with each succeeding book from that first fine
enthusiasm with which Percival Pollard reviewed _The Eagle's Shadow_ to
that generous acknowledgment by Hugh Walpole that no one in England,
save perhaps Conrad and Hardy, was so sure of literary permanence as
James Branch Cabell.

With _The Cream of the Jest, Beyond Life_, and _Figures of Earth_ before
him, it is not easy for the perceptive critic to doubt this permanence.
One might as sensibly deny a future to Ecclesiastes, _The Golden Ass,
Gulliver's Travels_, and the works of Rabelais as to predict oblivion
for such a thesaurus of ironic wit and fine fantasy, mellow wisdom and
strange beauty as _Jurgen_. But to appreciate the tales of _Chivalry_
is, it seems, a gift more frequently reserved for the general reader
than for the professional literary evaluator. Certainly years before
discussion of Cabell was artificially augmented by the suppression of
_Jurgen_ there were many genuine lovers of romance who had read these
tales with pure enjoyment. That they did not analyse and articulate
their enjoyment for the edification of others does not les