gilt-edged ribbon, vice Sylvanus Cobb, deceased. And all because a few
pornographic old fellows thrust their ever-hopeful snouts into the man's
tenth (or was it eleventh or twelfth?) book!

Certainly, the farce must appeal to Cabell himself--a sardonic mocker,
not incapable of making himself a character in his own _revues_. But I
doubt that he enjoys the actual pawing that he has been getting--any more
than he resented the neglect that he got for so long. Very lately, in the
midst of the carnival, he announced his own literary death and burial,
and even preached a burlesque funeral sermon upon his life and times.
Such an artist, by the very nature of his endeavors, must needs stand
above all public-clapper-clawing, pro or con. He writes, not to please
his customers in general, nor even to please his partisans in particular,
but to please himself. He is his own criterion, his own audience, his own
judge and hangman. When he does bad work, he suffers for it as no holy
clerk ever suffered from a gnawing conscience or Freudian suppressions;
when he does good work he gets his pay in a form of joy that only artists
know. One could no more think of him exposing himself to the stealthy,
uneasy admiration of a women's club--he is a man of agreeable exterior,
with handsome manners and an eye for this and that--than one could
imagine him taking to the stump for some political mountebank or getting
converted at a camp-meeting. What moves such a man to write is the
obscure, inner necessity that Joseph Conrad has told us of, and what
rewards him when he has done is his own searching and accurate judgment,
his own pride and delight in a beautiful piece of work.

At once, I suppose, you visualize a somewhat smug fellow, loftily
complacent and superior--in brief, the bogus artist of Greenwich Village,
posturing in a pot-hat before a cellar full of visiting schoolmarms, all
dreaming of being betrayed. If so, you see a ghost. It is the curse of