ROMANCE, COMEDY, SATIRE

romancers would have treated these stories in a manner more
or less like Robert Louis Stevenson's. Cabell went back to
something nearer Congreve's intelligent, insolent grace. The
tales in Chivalry, and the longer tale published separately
as The Soul of Melicent (1913), were ascribed to a fifteenth-
century French romancer whom Cabell had invented, in
smiling, scholarly detail.

In Cabell's early novels—The Eagle's Shadow (1905), The
Cords of Vanity (1908), The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck
(1915)—he told stories of modem life in the towns of Lich-
field and Fairhaven, presumably in Virginia. Gallantry appears
in the Cords in the series of trifling love affairs of the hero, a
minor poet; and chivalry in the Rivet, in the character of a
Virginia colonel who is also a genealogist given to the heroics
of the chivalrous gentleman of the traditional South. But
Cabell's first fully characteristic book was The Cream of the
Jest (1917). Though Felix Kennaston lives in comfortable
Lichfield much as its more representative citizens live, in the
excursions of his imagination he continually visits the medieval
country of Poictesme, thinking of himself as a troubadour
named Horvendile. His two universes are not separated by any
tight wall, but flow one into another by easy transitions.
Horvendile may explain his conduct by saying he is a charac-
ter in a story being written by Kennaston. Kennaston as
Horvendile finds himself in a world which compensates and
reassures him in intervals between dull stretches of life in
Lichfield. He comes to feel most truly at home in Poictesme.
This double scheme gave Cabell an opportunity for many
comparisons of the realistic world with the logical, sym-
metrical, satisfying imagined one. He could be a poet and a
critic at the same time. The Cream of the Jest, though it did
not at first interest the public, quickly caught the attention
of influential young writers who greeted Cabell as a colleague
in the new literature.

Two years later he published not only Jurgen but also