rhetoric, it prefigures the subsequent pageant in which the victories might
so easily be mistaken for defeats. In this procession, amid a singularly
ordered riot of color, the figure of man moves, none too confidently but
with stirring fortitude, to an unrealized end. Here, stumbling through the
mazes of a code, in the habiliments of Ormskirk or de Soyecourt, he passes
from the adventures of the mind (Kennaston in _The Cream of the Jest_,
Charteris in _Beyond Life_) through the adventures of the flesh (_Jurgen_)
to the darker adventures of the spirit (Manuel in _Figures of Earth_).
Even this _Gallantry_, the most candidly superficial of Cabell's works, is
alive with a vigor of imagination and irony. It is not without significance
that the motto on the new title-page is: "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,
a certain light that we should seek for in vain upon anything real."

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-a-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