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?

The difference between Mr. Cabell and the popular romancers who in all ages clutter the scene and for whom he has nothing but amused contempt is that they are unconscious dupes of the demiurge whereas he, aware of its ways and its devices, employs it almost as if it were some hippogriff bridled by him in Elysian pastures and respectfully entertained in a snug Virginian stable.  His attitude toward romance suggests a cheerful despair:  he despairs of ever finding anything truer than romance and so contents himself with Poictesme and its tributaries.  The favorite themes of romance being relatively few, he has not troubled greatly to increase them; war and love in the main he finds enough.

Besides these, however, he has always been deeply occupied with one other theme—­the plight of the poet in the world.  That sturdy bruiser Dom Manuel, for instance, is at heart a poet who molds figures out of clay as his strongest passion, although the world, according to its custom, conspires against his instinct by interrupting him with love and war and business, and in the end hustles him away before he has had time to make anything more lovely or lasting than a reputation as a hero.  In the amazing fantasy The Cream of the Jest Mr. Cabell has embodied the visions of the romancer Felix Kennaston so substantially that Kennaston’s diurnal walks in Lichfield seem hardly as real as those nightly ventures which under the guise of Horvendile he makes into the glowing land he has created.  Nor are the two universes separated by any tight wall which the fancy must leap over:  they flow with exquisite caprice one into another, as indeed they always do in the consciousness of a poet who, like Kennaston or Mr. Cabell, broods continually over the problem how best to perform his function:  “to write perfectly of beautiful happenings.”