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 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 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 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,