Gallantry | Page 3

might so easily be mistaken for defeats. In this procession, amid a
singularly ordered riot of color, the figure of man moves, none too
confidently but with stirring fortitude, to an unrealized end. Here,
stumbling through the mazes of a code, in the habiliments of Ormskirk
or de Soyecourt, he passes from the adventures of the mind (Kennaston
in The Cream of the Jest, Charteris in Beyond Life) through the
adventures of the flesh (Jurgen) to the darker adventures of the spirit
(Manuel in Figures of Earth). Even this Gallantry, the most candidly
superficial of Cabell's works, is alive with a vigor of imagination and
irony. It is not without significance that the motto on the new title-page
is: "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, a certain light
that we should seek for in vain upon anything real."
The genealogically inclined will be happy to discover that Gallantry,
for all its revulsion from reality, deals with the perpetuated life of
Manuel in a strangely altered milieu. The rest of us will be quicker to
comprehend how subtly this volume takes its peculiar place in its
author's record of struggling dreams, how, beneath, a surface covered

with political finery and sentimental bric-à-brac, the quest goes on,
stubbornly and often stupidly, in a forgotten world made suddenly
animate and as real as our own.
And this, the thesis will conclude, is because Cabell is not as much a
masquerader as he imagines himself to be. None but a visionary could
wear so constantly upon his sleeve the desire "to write perfectly of
beautiful happenings." None but the poet, shaken with the strength of
his vision, could cry to-day, "It is only by preserving faith in human
dreams that we may, after all, perhaps some day make them come
true." For poetry, to which all literature aspires, is not the shadow of
reality but the image of perfection, the light of disembodied beauty
toward which creation gropes. And that poetic consciousness is the key
to the complex and half-concealed art of James Branch Cabell.
LOUIS UNTERMEYER.
New York City, April, 1922.

CONTENTS
THE EPISTLE DEDICATORY
THE PROLOGUE
I SIMON'S HOUR
II LOVE AT MARTINMAS
III THE CASUAL HONEYMOON
IV THE RHYME TO PORRINGER
V ACTORS ALL
VI APRIL'S MESSAGE

VII IN THE SECOND APRIL
VIII HEART OF GOLD
IX THE SCAPEGOATS
X THE DUCAL AUDIENCE
LOVE'S ALUMNI: THE AFTERPIECE
THE EPILOGUE

THE EPISTLE DEDICATORY
TO MRS. GRUNDY
Madam,--It is surely fitting that a book which harks back to the
manners of the second George should have its dedication and its patron.
And these comedies claim naturally your protection, since it likewise
appears a custom of that era for the poet to dedicate his book to his
most influential acquaintance and the one least likely to value it.
Indeed, it is as proper that the plaudits of great persons be reserved for
great performances as it is undeniable these
tiny pictures of that tiny time Aim little at the lofty and sublime.
Yet cognoscenti still esteem it an error in the accomplished
Shakespeare that he introduced a game of billiards into his portrayal of
Queen Cleopatra's court; and the impropriety had been equal had I
linked the extreme of any passion with an age and circle wherein
abandonment to the emotions was adjudged bucolic, nay, Madam, the
Eumenides were very terrifying at Delphi, no doubt, but deck them
with paint, patch, and panniers, send them howling among the beau
monde on the Pantiles, and they are only figures of fun; nor may, in
reason, the high woes of a second Lear, or of a new Prometheus, be
adequately lighted by the flambeaux of Louis Quinze.

Conceive, then, the overture begun, and fear not, if the action of the
play demand a lion, but that he shall be a beast of Peter Quince's
picking. The ladies shall not be frighted, for our chief comedians will
enact modish people of a time when gallantry prevailed.
Now the essence of gallantry, I take it, was to accept the pleasures of
life leisurely and its inconveniences with a shrug. As requisites, a
gallant person will, of course, be "amorous, but not too constant, have a
pleasant voice, and possess a talent for love-letters." He will always
bear in mind that in love-affairs success is less the Ultima Thule of
desire than its coup de grâce, and he will be careful never to admit the
fact, especially to himself. He will value ceremony, but rather for its
comeliness than for its utility, as one esteeming the lily, say, to be a
more applaudable bulb than the onion. He will prink; and he will be at
his best