It is necessary to have had a long contact with Cabell to realize his true significance; at first, he seems to be rather fantastic, but, after some frequentation, one discovers the deeper meaning of his writings. His ambition was to sketch a sort of epic of human desire. His characters, under their various masks, are attempts to draw and depict men as conceived in utter liberty. Dom Manuel, Jurgen, and their succeeding reincarnations, are not Puritan inventions. This was not the first time that an inspired American had attempted to paint a “personality picture” of man as such. A great many novelists had essayed it and had wasted their efforts in the task. The Transcendentalists of New England ascribed to the typical man every attribute of moral perfection. Emerson, in his famous “Representative Men,” tried to delineate the ideal man. He conceived him as a contemplative sort of person. Emerson had sallies of “gay science.” He did not accept the world as it is and tried many times to defeat reality. He knew man well and was wary of accepting him as he was. Long before Nietszche, he imagined the superman, whom he called the _homo novus_, or the _plus-man_. A prudent man, rather shy and inhibited, but capable of thinking daringly, Emerson had some of Dom Manuel’s and Jurgen’s characteristics. According to him, the ideal man was much less the active hero than the thinker climbing up the rarefied summits of thought and taking his risks with the self-reliance of a conquistador. Emerson, like Cabell, was a transcendental realist. He would have sympathized with Koshchei, the God of Things-as-They-Are. But Emerson’s sensibility was atrophied and suppressed. To a large extent he conceived the superman in his own image, with a large brain and a very small heart. On the other hand, he allowed a large place to dreams, to the subconscious elements, and to what he called demonology. Dreams played a large part in his philosophy; if there ever was a daydreamer besides Hawthorne or Alcott in the romantic twilight of Concord, he was the one. He was not unaware of the phenomena of dual personality, trances and ecstasies. His philosophy of history and of the heroes was decidedly “Bovaryistic.” Upon this point again the confidences of his journals are most curious. He confessed to having experienced trances of a mystic and orgiastic nature; at times he felt as though he were being turned into another person. That sort of experience was not infrequent in the Emerson family. His brother, Charles Emerson, was also under the influence of such spells and his aunt, Mary Moody, was a visionary and an authentic _clairvoyante_. The effects caused by inhibition seem to have been quite prevalent among the Puritan writers of New England. Take the life of Margaret Fuller, for instance. Was there ever an example of greater suppression--and more heroic attempt to evade it? Her desire for expatriation was paid for at the sacrifice of her life.