Page:Peter Whiffle (1922).djvu/246

 of Maurice Hewlett and Anatole France on the work of Cabell. Bernard Shaw, said Peter, once lost all patience with those critics who insisted that he was a son of Ibsen and Nietzsche and asserted that it was their ignorance that prevented them from realizing the debt he owed to Samuel Butler. Cabell might, with justice, voice a similar complaint, for if he ever had a literary father it was Arthur Machen. In that author'z The Chronicle of Clemendy, issued in 1888, may be discovered the same confusion of irony and romance that is to be traced in the work of Cabell. Moreover, like The Soul of Melicent, the book purports to be a translation from an old chronicle. I might further speak of the relationship between Hieroglyphics and Beyond Life, The Hill of Dreams and The Cream of the Jest, although in each case the treatment and the style are entirely dissimilar. Machen even preceded Cabell in his use of unfavourable reviews (Vide the advertising pages of Beyond Life) in his preface to the 1916 edition of The Great God Pan. Perhaps, added Peter, Cabell has also read Herman Melville's Mardi to some advantage. But he is no plagiarist; I am speaking from the point of view of literary genealogy. Peter, at my instigation, read a novel or two of Joseph Hergesheimer's. Linda Condon, he reported, is as evanescent as the spirit of God. Only those who have encountered Lady Beauty among the juniper trees in the early dawn will feel this book, and only those who feel