For the creative artist must remember that his book is structurally different from life, in that, were there nothing else, his book begins and ends at a definite point, whereas the canons of heredity and religion forbid us to believe that life can ever do anything of the sort. He must remember that his art traces in ancestry from the tribal huntsman telling tales about the cave-fire; and so, strives to emulate not human life, but human speech, with its natural elisions and falsifications. He must remember, too, that his one concern with the one all-prevalent truth in normal existence is jealously to exclude it from his book.... For "living" is to be conscious of an incessant series of less than momentary sensations, of about equal poignancy, for the most part, and of nearly equal unimportance. Art attempts to marshal the shambling procession into trimness, to usurp the role of memory and convention in assigning to some of these sensations an especial prominence, and, in the old phrase, to lend perspective to the forest we cannot see because of the trees. Art, as long ago observed my friend Mrs. Kennaston, is an expurgated edition of nature: at art's touch, too, "the drossy particles fall off and mingle with the dust" (_Beyond Life_, p. 249). In summing up Mr. Cabell's work, consider the following: (1) Has he a definite philosophy? (2) Has he a genuine sense of character or do his characters repeat the same personality? (3) Is he a sincere artist or "a self-conscious attitudinizer?" (4) Is he likely ever to hold the high place in American literature which by some critics is denied him today? If so, on what basis? BIBLIOGRAPHY The Eagle's Shadow. 1904. The Line of Love. 1905. Gallantry. 1907. Chivalry. 1909. The Cords of Vanity. 1909. The Soul of Melicent. 1913. The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck. 1915. The Certain Hour. 1916. From the Hidden Way. 1916. (Verse.) The Cream of the Jest. 1917. Jurgen. 1919. Beyond Life. 1919. (Essays.) The Cords of Vanity. 1920. (Revised.) Domnei. 1920. (New version of _The Soul of Melicent_.) The Judging of Jurgen. 1920. Figures of Earth. 1921. Taboo. 1921. STUDIES AND REVIEWS Walpole, Hugh. The Art of James Branch Cabell. 1920. Ath. 1919, 2: 1339. (Conrad Aiken.) Bookm. 52 ('20): 200. Cur. Op. 66 ('19): 254; 70 ('21): 537. (Portraits.) Dial, 64 ('18): 392; 66 ('19): 225. Harp. W. 49 ('05): 1598 (portrait). Lond. Times, Nov. 24, 1921: 767. Nation, 111 ('20): 343; 112 ('21): 914. (Carl Van Doren.) New Repub. 26 ('21): 187. Yale R. n.s. 9 ('20): 684. (Walpole.) +George Washington Cable+--novelist.