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.
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.