Pyle and allowed his pen to move at the languid gait then characteristic
of a dozen inferior romancers. Only gradually did his texture grow
firmer, his tapestry richer; only gradually did his gaiety strengthen
into irony. Although that irony was the progenitor of the comic spirit
which now in his maturity dominates him, it has never shaken off the
romantic elements which originally nourished it. Rather, romance and
irony have grown up in his work side by side. His Poictesme is no less
beautiful for having come to be a country of disillusion; nor has his
increasing sense of the futility of desire robbed him of his old sense
that desire is a glory while it lasts.

He allows John Charteris in _Beyond Life_--for the most part Mr.
Cabell's mouthpiece--to set forth the doctrine that romance is the real
demiurge, "the first and loveliest daughter of human vanity," whereby
mankind is duped--and exalted. "No one on the preferable side of Bedlam
wishes to be reminded of what we are in actuality, even were it
possible, by any disastrous miracle, ever to dispel the mist which
romance has evoked about all human doings." Therefore romance has
created the "dynamic illusions" of chivalry and love and common sense
and religion and art and patriotism and optimism, and therein "the ape
reft of his tail 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?