ster 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
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 ou