Gallantry | Page 4

after sunset. He will dare to acknowledge the shapeliness of a
thief's leg, to contend that the commission of murder does not
necessarily impair the agreeableness of the assassin's conversation; and
to insist that at bottom God is kindlier than the genteel would regard as
rational. He will, in fine, sin on sufficient provocation, and repent
within the moment, quite sincerely, and be not unconscionably
surprised when he repeats the progression: and he will consider the
world with a smile of toleration, and his own doings with a smile of
honest amusement, and Heaven with a smile that is not distrustful.
This particular attitude toward life may have its merits, but it is not
conducive to meticulous morality; therefore, in advance, I warn you
that my Dramatis Personæ will in their display of the cardinal virtues
evince a certain parsimony. Theirs were, in effect, not virtuous days.
And the great man who knew these times au fond, and loved them, and
wrote of them as no other man may ever hope to do, has said of these
same times, with perfect truth:
"Fiddles sing all through them; wax-lights, fine dresses, fine jokes, fine
plate, fine equipages, glitter and sparkle: never was there such a
brilliant, jigging, smirking Vanity Fair. But wandering through that city
of the dead, that dreadfully selfish time, through those godless intrigues
and feasts, through those crowds, pushing, and eager, and

struggling,--rouged, and lying, and fawning,--I have wanted some one
to be friends with. I have said, Show me some good person about that
Court; find me, among those selfish courtiers, those dissolute gay
people, some one being that I can love and regard." And Thackeray
confesses that, for all his research, he could not find anybody living
irreproachably, at this especial period....
Where a giant fails one may in reason hesitate to essay. I present, then,
people who, as people normally do, accepted their times and made the
best of them, since the most estimable needs conform a little to the
custom of his day, whether it be Caractacus painting himself sky-blue
or Galileo on his knees at Santa Maria. And accordingly, many of my
comedians will lie when it seems advisable, and will not haggle over a
misdemeanor when there is anything to be gained by it; at times their
virtues will get them what they want, and at times their vices, and at
other times they will be neither punished nor rewarded; in fine, Madam,
they will be just human beings stumbling through illogical lives with
precisely that lack of common-sense which so pre-eminently
distinguishes all our neighbors from ourselves.
For the life that moved in old Manuel of Poictesme finds hereinafter in
his descendants, in these later Allonbys and Bulmers and Heleighs and
Floyers, a new milieu to conform and curb that life in externes rather
than in essentials. What this life made of chivalrous conditions has
elsewhere been recorded: with its renewal in gallant circumstances, the
stage is differently furnished and lighted, the costumes are dissimilar;
but the comedy, I think, works toward the same dénouement, and
certainly the protagonist remains unchanged. My protagonist is still the
life of Manuel, as this life was perpetuated in his descendants; and my
endeavor is (still) to show you what this life made (and omitted to
make) of its tenancy of earth. 'Tis a drama enactable in any setting.
Yet the comedy of gallantry has its conventions. There must be quite
invaluable papers to be stolen and juggled with; an involuntary
marriage either threatened or consummated; elopements, highwaymen,
and despatch-boxes; and a continual indulgence in soliloquy and
eavesdropping. Everybody must pretend to be somebody else, and

young girls, in particular, must go disguised as boys, amid much
cut-and-thrust work, both ferric and verbal. For upon the whole, the
comedy of gallantry tends to unfold itself in dialogue, and yet more
dialogue, with just the notice of a change of scene or a brief stage
direction inserted here and there. All these conventions, Madam, I
observe.
A word more: the progress of an author who alternates, in turn,
between fact and his private fancies (like unequal crutches) cannot in
reason be undisfigured by false steps. Therefore it is judicious to
confess, Madam, that more than once I have pieced the opulence of my
subject with the poverty of my inventions. Indisputably, to thrust words
into a dead man's mouth is in the ultimate as unpardonable as the
axiomatic offence of stealing the pennies from his eyes; yet if I have
sometimes erred in my surmise at what Ormskirk or de Puysange or
Louis de Soyecourt really said at certain moments of their lives, the
misstep was due, Madam, less to malevolence than to inability to
replevin their superior utterance; and the accomplished shade of
Garendon, at least, I