Here is at last an American novelist with a culture and a style of his own, a conscious artist and a man of letters. Most of the new American fiction writers are indifferent to style. They write badly. They are often incorrect, trivial and obscure. Their last worry is the attainment of the beautiful in writing.[51] Cabell, on the contrary, is an adept at artistic writing, the only prose writer in American fiction who cultivates style for its own sake. That alone would be enough to make him original and interesting for the reader who has just plodded drearily through the desert of “An American Tragedy,” for instance. He was fed on the English classics, especially those of the Renaissance. At times he is a deft imitator and parodist of Spenser, to whom he owes much of his flowery and savory style, and a great admirer of the English writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He likes to call himself a classic, classic in style, though romantic in inspiration. But, above all, his chief gift is imagination. At last we are given a holiday from Theodore Dreiser’s triviality, Sinclair Lewis’ truculence and Anderson’s mystic stammering. Cabell’s ideal is harmony, clearness and grace. He moves within fiction as if it were a natural element and not as in a quarry where he is painfully hewing out stones. In an epoch when American writers hitched their wagons more and more to matter-of-fact subjects, he cut the moorings and gave free play to his fancy. Everything in his books is fictitious, the subject, the style, the characters, the costumes and the settings. He has invented a new folklore, a new mythology. He has discovered unknown countries, the land of Poictesme, a fabulous kingdom well devised to puzzle us as it is located, on a map of Cabell’s making, halfway between reality and dream. As fictitious as Spenser’s, Shakespeare’s or Honoré d’Urfé’s cosmography, the land of Poictesme, where Dom Manuel and Jurgen deport themselves in sadness or glee, is none the less presented to us as a real country somewhere in Southern France. Its half fictitious, half real boundaries are, on the north, England of Arthurian times, on the south, the vague Asia Minor of Guy de Lusignan and Melissinda, princess of Tripoli. The novelist has been kind enough to design for the ignorant a map of Dom Manuel’s domains. According to the map, the land of Poictesme stretches along the Mediterranean, between Aigues-Mortes and Cette. Its physical frontiers are, to the west, the city of Nîmes, and to the east, the town of Castres in Languedoc. Let the professional geographer challenge James Branch Cabell’s topography if he wants. Poictesme includes under fictitious names the foot-hills of the Cévennes, where we may recognize the haunts and “high places” of Florian de Puysange. The author was not content with inventing a new land. He crowned a dynasty, which until then was little known to historians. He made up a genealogy which I shall not follow in all of