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Dizain des Fêtes Galantes
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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 theaccidents of which they group themselves with fittingness, a certain lightthat we should seek for in vain upon anything real."
"A brutish man knoweth not, neither doth a fool understand this…. Shallthe throne of iniquity have fellowship with Thee, which frameth mischief bya law?"
These paragraphs, dignified by the revised edition of Gallantry andspuriously designated An Introduction, are nothing more than a series ofnotes and haphazard discoveries in preparation of a thesis. That thesis,if it is ever written, will bear a title something academically like ThePsychogenesis of a Poet; or Cabell the Masquerader. For it is in thisguise—sometimes self-declared, sometimes self-concealed, but always as thepersistent visionary—that the author of some of the finest prose of ourday has given us the key with which (to lapse into the jargon of verse) hehas unlocked his heart.
On the technical side alone, it is easy to establish Cabell's poeticstanding. There are, first of all, the quantity of original rhymes thatare scattered through the dozen volumes which Cabell has latterly (andsignificantly) classified as Biography. Besides these interjections whichdo duty as mottoes, chapter-headings, tailpieces, dedications, interludesand sometimes relevant songs, there is the volume of seventy-five"adaptations" in verse, From the Hidden Way, published in 1916. HereCabell, even in his most natural rôle, declines to show his face and amuseshimself with a new set of masks labelled Alessandro de Medici, AntoineRiczi, Nicolas de Caen, Theodore Passerat and other fabulous minnesingerswhose verses were created only in the mind of Cabell. It has pleased him toconfuse others besides the erudite reviewer of the Boston Transcript byquoting the first lines of the non-existent originals in Latin, Italian,Provençal—thus making his skilful ballades, sestinas and the less mediævalnarratives 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 subtlemakeshifts to hide the poet. The unwritten thesis, plunging abruptly intothe realm of analytical psychology, will detail the steps Cabell has taken,as a result of early associative disappointments, to repress or at leastto 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-buriedexperiments in rhyme, assonance and polyphony. This part of the paper willexamine Jurgen and call attention to the distorted sonnet printed as aprose soliloquy on page 97 of that exquisite and ironic volume. It willpass to the subsequent Figures of Earth and, after showing how thegreater gravity of this volume is accompanied by a greater profusion ofpoetry per se i