others. So Robert Etheridge Townsend remains an example of that
special temperament which, being unable to endure the contact of
unhappiness, consistently shirks every responsibility that entails or
threatens discomfort; and the truth about him, taking him as an
example of just that temperament, is still inexorably told. But his
weakness as a man becomes much more tolerable in this second version,
because it is much more intimately and poignantly correlated with his
strength as an artist. One is made to feel that he, like Charteris,
may the better consummate in his art the auctorial virtues of
distinction and clarity, beauty and symmetry, tenderness and truth and
urbanity, precisely because his personal life is bereft of those
virtues. Less than before, the accent is on the wastrel in Townsend;
more than before, it is on the potential creator of beauty in him. The
earlier readers will hardly count it as a fault that Mr. Cabell has
contrived to make his novel, without detriment to any truth
whatsoever, a far less unpleasant book. Sardonic it still is, by a
necessary implication, but not wantonly, and with a mellowness. The
irony, which at its harshest was capable of rasping the nerves, has
become capable of wringing the heart.

Other reasons there are, too, for holding that THE CORDS OF VANITY is
certain to make its second appeal to a many times multiplied audience.
Since divers momentous transactions of the years just gone, the whole
world stands in a moral position extraordinarily well adapted to the
comprehension of just such a comedy of shirking; and especially the
world of thought has received a powerful impulsion toward the area
long occupied by Mr. Cabell's romantic pessimism. There is perhaps
somewhat more demand for satire, or at least a growing toleration of
it. Moreover, by sheer patience and reiteration Mr. Cabell has
procured no little currency for some of his most characteristic ideas.