which, more or less, replaces the frontispiece. Similarly, the more
renowned critic and anthologist who so well knows the "originals" of
the verses in _From the Hidden Way_, can now render poetically perfect
justice to all who will care by perceiving that both the earlier
edition of this book and the author of this foreword are but figments
of Mr. Cabell's slightly puckish invention.

But these pages must not be, like those which follow, a comedy of
shirking. They will have flouted a plain duty unless they speak of the
sense and the degree in which this novel, during the process of
reclaiming it, has been actually recreated. Perhaps the matter can be
packed most succinctly into the statement that Mr. Cabell's hero has
been subjected to such a process of growth as has made him
commensurate in stature with the other two modern writers of Mr.
Cabell's invention. As _The Cream of the Jest_ is essentially the book
of Felix Kennaston and _Beyond Life_ that of John Charteris, so THE
CORDS OF VANITY is essentially the book of Robert Etheridge Townsend.
Now, this Townsend has accomplished a deal of growing since 1909. By
this I do not mean that he is taken at a later period of his own
imagined life, or that he fails to act consonantly with the extreme
youth imputed to him: I mean that he is the creation of a more mature
mind, a deeper philosophy, a more probing insight into the
implications of things. A given youth of twenty-five will be very
differently interpreted by an observer of thirty and by the same
observer at forty, very much as a given era of the past will be
understood differently by a single historian before and after certain
cycles of his own social and political experience. The past never
remains to us the same past; it grows up along with us; the physical
facts may remain admittedly the same, but our understanding accents
them differently, finds more in them at some points and less at