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"_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._"
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?_"
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 rôle, 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, Provençal--thus making his skilful ballades, sestinas and the less mediæval narratives part of a remarkably elaborate and altogether successful hoax.