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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
significantly) classified as Biography. Besides these interjections which
do duty as mottoes, chapter-headings, tailpieces, dedications, interludes
and sometimes relevant songs, there is the volume of seventy-five
"adaptations" in verse, _From the Hidden Way_, published in 1916. Here
Cabell, even in his most natural role, declines to show his face and amuses
himself with a new set of masks labelled Alessandro de Medici, Antoine
Riczi, Nicolas de Caen, Theodore Passerat and other fabulous minnesingers
whose verses were created only in the mind of Cabell. It has pleased him to
confuse others besides the erudite reviewer of the _Boston Transcript_ by
quoting the first lines of the non-existent originals in Latin, Italian,
Provencal--thus making his skilful ballades, sestinas and the less mediaeval
narratives part of a remarkably elaborate and altogether successful hoax.

And, as this masquerade of obscure Parnassians betrayed its creator,
Cabell--impelled by some fantastic reticence--sought for more subtle
makeshifts to hide the poet. The unwritten thesis, plunging abruptly into
the realm of analytical psychology, will detail the steps Cabell has taken,
as a result of early associative disappointments, to repress or at least
to disguise, the poet in himself--and it will disclose how he has failed.
It will burrow through the latest of his works and exhume his half-buried
experiments in rhyme, assonance and polyphony. This part of the paper will
examine _Jurgen_ and call attention to the distorted sonnet printed as a
prose soliloquy on page 97 of that exquisite and ironic volume. It will
pass to the subsequent _Figures of Earth_ and, after showing how the
greater gravity of this volume is accompanied by a greater profusion of
poetry _per se_ it will unravel the scheme of Cabell's fifteen essays in
what might be called contrapuntal prose. It will unscramble all the rhymes
screened in Manuel's monologue beginning on page 294, quote the metrical
innovations with rhymed vowels on page 60, tabulate the hexameters that
leap from the solidly set paragraphs and rearrange the brilliant fooling
that opens the chapter "Magic of the Image Makers." This last is in itself
so felicitous a composite of verse and criticism--a passage incredibly
overlooked by the most meticulous of Cabell's glossarians--that it deserves
a paper for itself. For here, set down prosaically as "the unfinished Rune
of the Blackbirds" are four distinct parodies--including two insidious
burlesques of Browning and Swinburne--on a theme which is familiar to us
to-day in _les mots justes_ of Mother Goose. "It is," explains Freydis,
after the thaumaturgists have finished, "an experimental incant