then this rune will live perpetually." And thus the poet, speaking through
the mouth-piece of Freydis, discourses on the power of words and, in one of
Cabell's most eloquent chapters, crystallizes that high mood, presenting
the case for poetry as it has been pleaded by few of her most fervid
advocates.

Here the thesis will stop quoting and argue its main contention from
another angle. It will consider the author in a larger and less technical
sense: disclosing his characters, his settings, his plots, even the entire
genealogical plan of his works, to be the design of a poet rather than a
novelist. The persons of Cabell's imagination move to no haphazard strains;
they create their own music. And, like a set of modulated _motifs_, they
combine to form a richer and more sonorous pattern. With its interrelation
of figures and interweaving of themes, the Cabellian "Biography" assumes
the solidity and shapeliness of a fugue, a composition in which all the
voices speak with equal precision and recurring clarity.

And what, the diagnostician may inquire, of the characters themselves? They
are, it will be answered, motivated by pity and irony; the tolerant humor,
the sympathetic and not too distant regard of their Olympian designer
agitate them so sensitively that we seldom see what strings are twitched.
These puppets seem to act of their own conviction--possibly because their
director is careful not to have too many convictions of his own. It may
have been pointed out before this that there are no undeviating villains
in his masques and, as many an indignant reviewer has expostulated, few
untarnished heroes. Cabell's, it will be perceived, is a frankly pagan
poetry. It has no texts with which to discipline beauty; it lacks moral
fervor; it pretends to no divinity of dogmatism. The image-maker is willing
to let his creatures ape their living models by fluctuating between
shifting conventions and contradictory ideals; he leaves to a more positive