



Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Tiffany Vergon and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team.










GALLANTRY

_Dizain des Fetes Galantes_

By

JAMES BRANCH CABELL


WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY LOUIS UNTERMEYER


"_Half in masquerade, playing the drawing-room or garden comedy of life,
these persons have upon them, not less than the landscape among the
accidents of which they group themselves with fittingness, a certain light
that we should seek for in vain upon anything real._"




TO

JAMES ROBINSON BRANCH

THIS VOLUME, SINCE IT TREATS OF GALLANTRY, IS DEDICATED, AS BOTH IN LIFE
AND DEATH AN EXPONENT OF THE WORD'S HIGHEST MEANING

"_A brutish man knoweth not, neither doth a fool understand this.... Shall
the throne of iniquity have fellowship with Thee, which frameth mischief by
a law?_"




INTRODUCTION


These paragraphs, dignified by the revised edition of _Gallantry_ and
spuriously designated An Introduction, are nothing more than a series of
notes and haphazard discoveries in preparation of a thesis. That thesis,
if it is ever written, will bear a title something academically like _The
Psychogenesis of a Poet; or Cabell the Masquerader_. For it is in this
guise--sometimes self-declared, sometimes self-concealed, but always as the
persistent visionary--that the author of some of the finest prose of our
day has given us the key with which (to lapse into the jargon of verse) he
has unlocked his heart.

On the technical side alone, it is easy to establish Cabell's poetic
standing. There are, first of all, the quantity of original rhymes that
are scattered through the dozen volumes which Cabell has latterly (and