This, the thesis will contend, is the only possible attitude to the mingled apathy and abandon of existence--and it is, in fine, the poetic attitude. Romantic it is, without question, and I imagine Cabell would be the last to cavil at the implication. For, mocked by a contemptuous silence gnawing beneath the howling energy of life, what else is there for the poet but the search for some miracle of belief, some assurance in a world of illimitable perplexities? It is the wish to attain this dream which is more real than reality that guides the entire Cabell _epos_--"and it is this will that stirs in us to have the creatures of earth and the affairs of earth, not as they are, but as 'they ought to be.'"
Such a romantic vision, which concludes that glowing testament, _Beyond Life_, is the shining thread that binds the latest of Cabell's novels with the earliest of his short stories. It is, in effect, one tale he is telling, a tale in which Poictesme and the more local Lichfield are, for all their topographical dissimilarities, the same place, and all his people interchangeable symbols of the changeless desires of men. Whether the allegory is told in the terms of _Gallantry_ with its perfumed lights, its deliberate artifice and its technique of badinage, or presented in the more high-flying mood of _Chivalry_ with its ready passions and readier rhetoric, it prefigures the subsequent pageant in which the victories might so easily be mistaken for defeats. In this procession, amid a singularly ordered riot of color, the figure of man moves, none too confidently but with stirring fortitude, to an unrealized end. Here, stumbling through the mazes of a code, in the habiliments of Ormskirk or de Soyecourt, he passes from the adventures of the mind (Kennaston in _The Cream of the Jest_, Charteris in _Beyond Life_) through the adventures of the flesh (_Jurgen_) to the darker adventures of the spirit (Manuel in _Figures of Earth_). Even this _Gallantry_, the most candidly superficial of Cabell's works, is alive with a vigor of imagination and irony. It is not without significance that the motto on the new title-page is: "Half in masquerade, playing the drawing-room or garden comedy of life, these persons have upon them, not less than the landscape among the accidents of which they group themselves, a certain light that we should seek for in vain upon anything real."