the true artist that his work never stands before him in all its imagined
completeness--that he can never look at it without feeling an impulse to
add to it here or take away from it there--that the beautiful, to him, is
not a state of being, but an eternal becoming. Satisfaction, like the
praise of dolts, is the compensation of the aesthetic cheese-monger--the
popular novelist, the Broadway dramatist, the Massenet and Kipling, the
Maeterlinck and Augustus Thomas. Cabell, in fact, is forever fussing over
his books, trying to make them one degree better. He rewrites almost as
pertinaciously as Joseph Conrad, Henry James, or Brahms. Compare "Domnei"
in its present state to "The Soul of Melicent," its first state, circa
1913. The obvious change is the change in title, but of far more
importance are a multitude of little changes--a phrase made more musical,
a word moved from one place to another, some small banality tracked down
and excised, a brilliant adjective inserted, the plan altered in small
ways, the rhythm of it made more delicate and agreeable. Here, in "The
Line of Love," there is another curious example of his high capacity for
revision. It is not only that the book, once standing isolated, has been
brought into the Cabellian canon, and so related to "Jurgen" and "Figures
of Earth" at one end, and to the tales of latter-day Virginia at the
other; it is that the whole texture has been worked over, and the colors
made more harmonious, and the inner life of the thing given a fresh
energy. Once a flavor of the rococo hung about it; now it breathes and
moves. For Cabell knows a good deal more than he knew in 1905. He is an
artist whose work shows constant progress toward the goals he aims
at--principally the goal of a perfect style. Content, with him, is always
secondary. He has ideas, and they are often of much charm and
plausibility, but his main concern is with the manner of stating them. It
is surely not ideas that make "Jurgen" stand out so saliently from the
dreadful prairie of modern American literature; it is the magnificent
writing that is visible on every page of it--writing apparently simple