immortal desire.  Of course he does not find it, for the sufficient reason that, as Mr. Cabell understands such matters, the ultimate magic of desire lies in the inaccessibility of the desired; and Jurgen, to whom all women in his amorous Cockaigne are as accessible as bread and butter, after his sly interval of rejuvenation comes back in the end to his wife and his humdrum duty with a definite relief.  He may be no more in love with Dame Lisa than with his right hand, and yet both are considerably more necessary to his well-being, he discovers, than a number of more exciting things.

Love in Jurgen inclines toward another aspect of the passion which Mr. Cabell has studied somewhat less than the chivalrous—­the aspect of gallantry.  “I have read,” says John Charteris, “that the secret of gallantry is to accept the pleasures of life leisurely, and its inconveniences with a shrug; as well as that, among other requisites, the gallant person will always consider the world with a smile of toleration, and his own doings with a smile of honest amusement, and Heaven with a smile which is not distrustful—­being thoroughly persuaded that God is kindlier than the genteel would regard as rational.”  These are the accents, set to slightly different rhythms, of a Congreve; and if there is anything as remarkable about Mr. Cabell as the fact that he has represented the chivalrous and the gallant attitudes toward love with nearly equal sympathy, it is the fact that in an era of militant naturalism and of renascent moralism he has blithely adhered to an affection for unconcerned worldliness and has airily played Congreve in the midst of all the clamorous, serious, disquisitive bassoons of the national orchestra.

In The Cords of Vanity Robert Townsend goes gathering roses and tasting lips almost as if the second Charles were still the lawful ruler of his obedient province of Virginia; and in The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck Rudolph Musgrave, that quaint figure whittled out of chivalry and dressed up in amiable heroics, is plainly contrasted with the glib rogue of genius John Charteris, who, elsewhere in Mr. Cabell’s books generally the chorus, here enters the plot and exhibits a sorry gallantry in action.  Poictesme, these novels indicate, is not the only country Mr. Cabell knows; he knows also how to feel at home, when he cares to, in the mimic universe of Lichfield and Fairhaven, where gay ribbons perpetually flutter, and where eyes and hands perpetually invite, and where love runs a deft, dainty, fickle course in all weathers.

That Felix Kennaston inhabits Lichfield in the flesh and in the spirit elopes into Poictesme may be taken, after a fashion, as allegory with an autobiographical foundation:  The Cream of the Jest is, on the whole, the essence of Cabell.  The book suggests, moreover, a critical position—­which is, that gallantry and Virginia have so far been regrettably sacrificed to chivalry and Poictesme in the career