Author the dubious pleasure of drawing a daily line between vice and
virtue. If Cabell pleads at all, he pleads with us not to repudiate a
Villon or a Marlowe while we are reviling the imperfect man in a perfect
poet. "What is man, that his welfare be considered?" questions Cabell,
paraphrasing Scripture, "an ape who chatters to himself of kinship with the
archangels while filthily he digs for groundnuts.... Yet do I perceive that
this same man is a maimed god.... He is under penalty condemned to compute
eternity with false weights and to estimate infinity with a yardstick--and
he very often does it."

This, the thesis will contend, is the only possible attitude to the mingled
apathy and abandon of existence--and it is, in fine, the poetic attitude.
Romantic it is, without question, and I imagine Cabell would be the last
to cavil at the implication. For, mocked by a contemptuous silence gnawing
beneath the howling energy of life, what else is there for the poet but the
search for some miracle of belief, some assurance in a world of illimitable
perplexities? It is the wish to attain this dream which is more real than
reality that guides the entire Cabell _epos_--"and it is this will that
stirs in us to have the creatures of earth and the affairs of earth, not as
they are, but as 'they ought to be.'"

Such a romantic vision, which concludes that glowing testament, _Beyond
Life_, is the shining thread that binds the latest of Cabell's novels
with the earliest of his short stories. It is, in effect, one tale he is
telling, a tale in which Poictesme and the more local Lichfield are, for
all their topographical dissimilarities, the same place, and all his people
interchangeable symbols of the changeless desires of men. Whether the
allegory is told in the terms of _Gallantry_ with its perfumed lights, its
deliberate artifice and its technique of badinage, or presented in the
more high-flying mood of _Chivalry_ with its ready passions and readier