They were molding a myth. "They were creating ... in the same instant that they lamented the Old South's extinction, an Old South which had died proudly at Appomattox without ever having been smirched by the wear and tear of existence."
Cabell's early Richmond years helped to fix his subsequent course as a writer. He never outgrew his love of the chivalric past. Though some of his stories would be set in contemporary Virginia, most of them would hark back to Europe of the medieval and eighteenth-century periods. Cabell was never able to embrace realism--which he defined in a collection of essays entitled Beyond Life (1919) as "the art of being superficial seriously"--or naturalism--which he described in the novel Smirt (1934) as "a very lusty bastard begotten upon realism with the phallus of agony." Yet his preference for romantic subject matter was conditioned by marked cynicism and by darker ironies.
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