Of all the fine places in the world where beautiful happenings come together, Mr. Cabell argues, incomparably the richest is in the consciousness of a poet who is also a scholar.  There are to be found the precious hoarded memories of some thousands of years:  high deeds and burning loves and eloquent words and surpassing tears and laughter.  There, consequently, the romancer may well take his stand, distilling bright new dreams out of ancient beauty.  And if he adds the heady tonic of an irony springing from a critical intelligence, so much the better.  When Mr. Cabell wishes to represent several different epochs in The Certain Hour he chooses to tell ten stories of poets—­real or imagined—­as the persons in whom, by reason of their superior susceptibility, the color of their epochs may be most truthfully discovered; and when he wishes to decant his own wit and wisdom most genuinely the vessel he normally employs is a poet.

If the poets and warriors who make up the list of Mr. Cabell’s heroes devote their lives almost wholly to love, it is for the reason that no other emotion interests him so much or seems to him to furnish so many beautiful happenings about which to write perfectly.  Love, like art, is a species of creation, and the moods which attend it, though illusions, are miracles none the less.  Of the two aspects of love which especially attract Mr. Cabell he has given the larger share of his attention to the extravagant worship of women ("domnei”) developed out of chivalry—­the worship which began by ascribing to the beloved the qualities of purity and perfection, of beauty and holiness, and ended by practically identifying her with the divine.  This supernal folly reaches its apogee in Domnei, in the careers of Perion and Melicent who are so uplifted by ineffable desire that their souls ceaselessly reach out to each other though obstacles large as continents intervene.  For Perion the most deadly battles are but thornpricks in the quest of Melicent; and such is Melicent’s loyalty during the years of her longing that the possession of her most white body by Demetrios of Anatolia leaves her soul immaculate and almost unperturbed.  In this tale love is canonized:  throned on alabaster above all the vulgar gods it diffuses among its worshipers a crystal radiance in which mortal imperfections perish—­or are at least forgotten during certain rapturous hours.

Ordinarily one cynical touch will break such pretty bubbles; but Mr. Cabell, himself a master of cynical touches and shrewdly anticipant of them, protects his invention with the competent armor of irony, and now and then—­particularly in the felicitous tenson spoken by Perion and Demetrios concerning the charms of Melicent—­brings mirth and beauty to an amalgam which bids fair to prove classic metal.  A much larger share of this mirth appears in Jurgen, which narrates with phallic candor the exploits of a middle-aged pawnbroker of Poictesme in pursuit of