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.
LOUIS UNTERMEYER.
New York City, April, 1922.