He considers fiction as a semi-divine impulse, or what he calls a _demi-urge_. In the invention of fiction he sees the starting point of all human activities. According to him, civilization proceeded from this impulse which makes us wish to dream and to create a world more beautiful, more just, than, or at least different from, the one in which we are living. In the name of this romantic instinct, he hit simultaneously the Puritans and the realists, the former because they fear and try to suppress fiction and imagination, the latter because they limit them and their rights. This is an interesting reaction and a timely one. It should be remembered by all those among us who feel that realism has almost overdone itself and that a revival of imagination would best serve the aims of art. Is not the coupling of the words _realism_ and _fiction_ a contradiction in terms? Cabell suggests that we take the novel back to its heroic and adventurous origins. He refuses to believe in realism, in the first place because the romantic instinct causes men to dislike life as it is, and to dream of it as being different in an effort to escape from it. Furthermore, according to him, the essential process of realistic fiction is in obvious contradiction with facts. “You assume,” says Cabell to the veritists, “that any literature worthy of the name must be faithful to reality and reproduce it without any further increment. Yet you refuse to life one of its most outstanding characteristics, the taste, the deep need of conceiving itself different from what it is. Are you being _real_ and scientific in grasping and reproducing only physical facts, in a world where everything, even the reception of a letter or the arrangement of a dinner, is subjective? There are no facts without an emotion around them, no circumstances without a personal preference expressed on their account. What is true of life is still truer of literature. Realism in writing cannot exist and never existed. Take the most hardened and the most convinced of all realists, Gustave Flaubert. His Emma Bovary is minutely observed and that is just why she is unreal, as unreal as was Flaubert’s perception of the outside world. The realists assume the task of presenting to us, in a so-called objective and detached manner the incidents of life as seen from the intellectual angle, but there are no such incidents. Realism as a literary method is unreal. Whilst trying to present our contemporaries as they are, it is far from resembling real life. Life is more charitable than the realists. It presents things and people to us as we wish that they might be. Fiction is faithful to life because it does not accept it as it is. It looks upon it with grave misgivings, as an extremely commonplace and worthless event. Beauty can only be attained by an elimination of the trivial. Life is such a bore! Imagination alone can give a value to the world. The solution of the problem of life is not understanding, but