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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 incantation in
that it is a bit of unfinished magic for which the proper words have not
yet been found: but between now and a while they will be stumbled on, and
then this rune will live perpetually." And thus the poet, speaking through
the mouth-piece of Freydis, discourses on the power of words and, in one of
Cabell's most eloquent chapters, crystallizes that high mood, presenting
the case for poetry as it has been pleaded by few of her most fervid
advocates.

Here the thesis will stop quoting and argue its main contention from
another angle. It will consider the author in a larger and less technical
sense: disclosing his characters, his settings, his plots, even the entire
genealogical plan of his works, to be the design of a poet rather than a
novelist. The persons of Cabell's imagination move to no haphazard strains;
they create their own music. And, like a set of modulated _motifs_, they
combine to form a richer and more sonorous pattern. With its interrelation
of figures and interweaving of themes, the Cabellian "Biography" assumes
the solidity and shapeliness of a fugue, a composition in which all the
voices speak with equal precision and recurring clarity.

And what, the diagnostician may inquire, of the characters themselves? They
are, it will be answered, motivated by pity and irony; the tolerant humor,
the sympathetic and not too distant regard of their Olympian designer
agitate them so sensitively that we seldom see what strings are twitched.
These puppets seem to act of their own conviction--possibly because their
director is careful not to have too many convictions of his own. It may
have been pointed out before this that there are no undeviating villains
in his masques and, as many an indignant reviewer has expostulated, few
untarnished heroes. Cabell's, it will be perceived, is a frankly pagan
poetry. It has no texts with which to discipline beauty; it lacks moral
fervor; it pretends to no divinity of dogmatism. The image-maker is willing
to let his creatures ape their living models by fluctuating between
shifting conventions and contradictory ideals; he leaves to a more positive
Author the dubious pleasure of drawing a daily line between vice and
virtue. If Cabell pleads at all, he pleads with us not to repudiate a
Villon or a Marlowe while we are reviling the imperfect man in a perfect
poet. "What is man, that his welfare be considered?" questions Cabell,
paraphrasing Scripture, "an ape who chatters to himself of kinship with the
archangels while filthily he digs for groundnuts.... Yet do I perceive that
this same man is a maimed god.... He is under penalty condemned to compute
eternity with false weights and to estimate infinity with a yardstick--and
he very often does it."

This, the thesis will contend, is the only possible attitude to the mingled
apathy and abandon of existence--and it is, in fine, the poetic attitude.
Romantic it is, without question, and I imagine Cabell would be the last
to cavil at the implication. For, mocked by a contemptuous silence gnawing
beneath the howling energy of life, what else is there for the poet but the
search for some miracle of belief, some assurance in a world of illimitable
perplexities? It is the wish to attain this dream which is more real than
reality that guides the entire Cabell _epos_--"and it is this will that
stirs in us to have the creatures of earth and the affairs of earth, not as
they are, but as 'they ought to be.'"

Such a romantic vision, which concludes that glowing testament, _Beyond
Life_, is the shining thread that binds the latest of Cabell's novels
with the earliest of his short stories. It is, in effect, one tale he is
telling, a tale in which Poictesme and the more local Lichfield are, for
all their topographical dissimilarities, the same place, and all his people
interchangeable symbols of the changeless desires of men. Whether the
allegory is told in the terms of _Gallantry_ with its perfumed lights, its
deliberate artifice and its technique of badinage, or presented in the
more high-flying mood of _Chivalry_ with its ready passions and readier
rhetoric, it prefigures the subsequent pageant in which the victories 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-a-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 grace_, 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 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 Personae_ 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 _denouement_, 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 have not travestied, unless it
were through some too prudent item of excision.

Remains but to subscribe myself--in the approved formula of dedicators--as,

MADAM,

Your ladyship's most humble and most obedient servant,

THE AUTHOR.




THE PROLOGUE

SPOKEN BY LADY ALLONBY, WHO ENTERS IN A FLURRY


_The author bade we come_--Lud, I protest!--
_He bade me come_--and I forget the rest.
But 'tis no matter; he's an arrant fool
That ever bade a woman speak by rule.

Besides, his Prologue was, at best, dull stuff,
And of dull writing we have, sure, enough.
A book will do when you've a vacant minute,
But, la! who cares what is, and isn't, in it?

And since I'm but the Prologue of a book,
What I've omitted all will overlook,
And owe me for it, too, some gratitude,
Seeing in reason it cannot be good
Whose author has as much but now confessed,--
For, _Who'd excel when few can make a test
Betwixt indifferent writing and the best?_
He said but now.

And I:--_La, why excel,
When mediocrity does quite as well?
'Tis women buy the books,--and read 'em, say,
What time a person nods, en negligee,
And in default of gossip, cards, or dance,
Resolves t' incite a nap with some romance._

The fool replied in verse,--I think he said
'Twas verses the ingenious Dryden made,
And trust 'twill save me from entire disgrace
To cite 'em in his foolish Prologue's place.
_Yet, scattered here and there, I some behold,
Who can discern the tinsel from the gold;
To these he writes; and if by them allowed,
'Tis their prerogative to rule the crowd,
For he more fears, like, a presuming man,
Their votes who cannot judge, than theirs can._




I

SIMON'S HOUR


_As Played at Stornoway Crag, March 25, 1750_

"_You're a woman--one to whom Heaven gave beauty, when it grafted roses on
a briar. You are the reflection of Heaven in a pond, and he that leaps at
you is sunk. You were all white, a sheet of lovely spotless paper, when you
first were born; but you are to be scrawled and blotted by every goose's
quill._"


DRAMATIS PERSONAE.

LORD ROKESLE, a loose-living, Impoverished nobleman, and loves Lady
Allonby.

SIMON ORTS, Vicar of Heriz Magna, a debauched fellow, and Rokesle's
creature.

PUNSHON, servant to Rokesle.

LADY ALLONBY, a pleasure-loving, luxurious woman, a widow, and rich.


SCENE

The Mancini Chamber at Stornoway Crag, on Usk.


SIMON'S HOUR


_PROEM:--The Age and a Product of It_

We begin at a time when George the Second was permitting Ormskirk and the
Pelhams to govern England, and the Jacobites had not yet ceased to hope
for another Stuart Restoration, and Mr. Washington was a promising young
surveyor in the most loyal colony of Virginia; when abroad the Marquise de
Pompadour ruled France and all its appurtenances, and the King of Prussia
and the Empress Maria Theresa had, between them, set entire Europe by
the ears; when at home the ladies, if rumor may be credited, were less
unapproachable than their hoop-petticoats caused them to appear,
[Footnote: "Oft have we known that sevenfold fence to fail,
Though stiff with hoops, and armed with ribs of whale."]
and gentlemen wore swords, and some of the more reckless bloods were
daringly beginning to discard the Ramillie-tie and the pigtail for their
own hair; when politeness was obligatory, and morality a matter of taste,
and when well-bred people went about the day's work with an ample leisure
and very few scruples. In fine, we begin toward the end of March, in
the year 1750, when Lady Allonby and her brother, Mr. Henry Heleigh, of
Trevor's Folly, were the guests of Lord Rokesle, at Stornoway Crag, on Usk.

As any person of _ton_ could have informed you, Anastasia Allonby was the
widow (by his second marriage) of Lord Stephen Allonby, the Marquis of
Falmouth's younger brother; and it was conceded by the most sedate that
Lord Stephen's widow, in consideration of her liberal jointure, possessed
inordinate comeliness.

She was tall for a woman. Her hair, to-night unpowdered, had the color of
amber and something, too, of its glow; her eyes, though not profound, were
large and in hue varied, as the light fell or her emotions shifted, through
a wide gamut of blue shades. But it was her mouth you remembered: the
fulness and brevity of it, the deep indentation of its upper lip, the
curves of it and its vivid crimson--these roused you to wildish speculation
as to its probable softness when Lady Allonby and Fate were beyond ordinary
lenient. Pink was the color most favorable to her complexion, and this
she wore to-night; the gown was voluminous, with a profusion of lace, and
afforded everybody an ample opportunity to appraise her neck and bosom.
Lady Allonby had no reason to be ashamed of either, and the last mode in
these matters was not prudish.

To such a person, enters Simon Orts, chaplain in ordinary to Lord Rokesle,
and Vicar of Heriz Magna, one of Lord Rokesle's livings.


I

"Now of a truth," said Simon Orts, "that is curious--undeniably that is
curious."

He stayed at the door for a moment staring back into the ill-lit corridor.
Presently he shut the door, and came forward toward the fireplace.

Lady Allonby, half-hidden in the depths of the big chair beside the
chimney-piece, a book in her lap, looked up inquiringly. "What is curious,
Mr. Orts?"

The clergyman stood upon the hearth, warming his hands, and diffusing an
odor of tobacco and stale alcohol. "Faith, that damned rascal--I beg your
pardon, Anastasia; our life upon Usk is not conducive to a mincing nicety
of speech. That rascal Punshon made some difficulty over admitting me; you
might have taken him for a sentinel, with Stornoway in a state of siege. He
ruffled me,--and I don't like it," Simon Orts said, reflectively, looking
down upon her. "No, I don't like it. Where's your brother?" he demanded on
a sudden.

"Harry and Lord Rokesle are at cards, I believe. And Mrs. Morfit has
retired to her apartments with one of her usual headaches, so that I have
been alone these two hours. You visit Stornoway somewhat late, Mr. Orts,"
Anastasia Allonby added, without any particular concealment of the fact
that she considered his doing so a nuisance.

He jerked his thumb ceilingward. "The cloth is at any rascal's beck and
call. Old Holles, my Lord's man, is dying up yonder, and the whim seized
him to have a clergyman in. God knows why, for it appears to me that one
knave might very easily make his way to hell without having another knave
to help him. And Holles?--eh, well, from what I myself know of him, the
rogue is triply damned." His mouth puckered as he set about unbuttoning his
long, rain-spattered cloak, which, with his big hat, he flung aside upon a
table. "Gad!" said Simon Orts, "we are most of us damned on Usk; and that
is why I don't like it--" He struck his hand against his thigh. "I don't
like it, Anastasia."

"You must pardon me," she languidly retorted, "but I was never good at
riddles."

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