Gallantry

Gallantry, by James Branch
Cabell

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Title: Gallantry Dizain des Fetes Galantes
Author: James Branch Cabell

Release Date: August, 2005 [EBook #8715] [Yes, we are more than
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GALLANTRY ***

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GALLANTRY
Dizain des Fêtes 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 rôle, 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, Provençal--thus making his skilful ballades, sestinas
and the less mediæval 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