Gallantry: Dizain des Fetes Galantes Part 1

Gallantry.

by James Branch Cabell.

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 t.i.tle 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 quant.i.ty of original rhymes that are scattered through the dozen volumes which Cabell has latterly (and significantly) cla.s.sified 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 Pa.s.serat 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 Parna.s.sians betrayed its creator, Cabell--impelled by some fantastic reticence--sought for more subtle makes.h.i.+fts to hide the poet. The unwritten thesis, plunging abruptly into the realm of a.n.a.lytical psychology, will detail the steps Cabell has taken, as a result of early a.s.sociative 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, a.s.sonance 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sage 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" a.s.sumes 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 s.h.i.+fting 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 kins.h.i.+p with the archangels while filthily he digs for groundnuts.... Yet do I perceive that this same man is a maimed G.o.d.... 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 att.i.tude to the mingled apathy and abandon of existence--and it is, in fine, the poetic att.i.tude.

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 a.s.surance 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 pa.s.sions 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 fort.i.tude, to an unrealized end. Here, stumbling through the mazes of a code, in the habiliments of Ormskirk or de Soyecourt, he pa.s.ses 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 t.i.tle-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._

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 pa.s.sion 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 a.s.sa.s.sin's conversation; and to insist that at bottom G.o.d 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 amus.e.m.e.nt, and Heaven with a smile that is not distrustful.

This particular att.i.tude 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 G.o.dless intrigues and feasts, through those crowds, pus.h.i.+ng, 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 ladys.h.i.+p'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 grat.i.tude, 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._