The Cabell case belongs to comedy in the grand manner. For fifteen years
or more the man wrote and wrote--good stuff, sound stuff, extremely
original stuff, often superbly fine stuff--and yet no one in the whole of
this vast and incomparable Republic arose to his merit--no one, that is,
save a few encapsulated enthusiasts, chiefly somewhat dubious. It would
be difficult to imagine a first-rate artist cloaked in greater obscurity,
even in the remotest lands of Ghengis Khan. The newspapers, reviewing
him, dismissed him with a sort of inspired ill-nature; the critics of a
more austere kidney--the Paul Elmer Mores, Brander Matthewses, Hamilton
Wright Mabies, and other such brummagem dons--were utterly unaware of
him. Then, of a sudden, the imbeciles who operate the Comstock Society
raided and suppressed his "Jurgen," and at once he was a made man. Old
book-shops began to be ransacked for his romances and extravaganzas--many
of them stored, I daresay, as "picture-books," and under the name of the
artist who illustrated them, Howard Pyle. And simultaneously, a great
gabble about him set up in the newspapers, and then in the literary
weeklies, and finally even in the learned reviews. An Englishman, Hugh
Walpole, magnified the excitement with some startling _hochs_; a single
_hoch_ from the Motherland brings down the professors like firemen
sliding down a pole. To-day every literate American has heard of Cabell,
including even those presidents of women's clubs who lately confessed
that they had never heard of Lizette Woodworth Reese. More of his books
are sold in a week than used to be sold in a year. Every flapper in the
land has read "Jurgen" behind the door; two-thirds of the grandmothers
east of the Mississippi have tried to borrow it from me. Solemn _Privat
Dozenten_ lecture upon the author; he is invited to take to the
chautauqua himself; if the donkeys who manage the National Institute of
Arts and Letters were not afraid of his reply he would be offered its