Critical Essays on Lord Dunsany 9780810892347, 9780810892354, 2013017781

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Studies in Supernatural Literature Series Editor: S. T. Joshi Lovecraft and Influence: His Predecessors and Successors, edited by Robert H. Waugh, 2013. Lord Dunsany, H. P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury: Spectral Journeys, by William F. Touponce, 2013. Critical Essays on Lord Dunsany, edited by S. T. Joshi, 2013.

Critical Essays on Lord Dunsany Edited by S. T. Joshi

Studies in Supernatural Literature

THE SCARECROW PRESS, INC. Lanham • Toronto • Plymouth, UK 2013

Published by Scarecrow Press, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom Copyright © 2013 by Scarecrow Press, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Critical Essays on Lord Dunsany / edited by S. T. Joshi. pages cm. — (Studies in Supernatural Literature) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8108-9234-7 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8108-9235-4 (ebook) 1. Dunsany, Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, 1878–1957—Criticism and interpretation. I. Joshi, S. T., 1958–. PR6007.U6Z63 2013 823'.912—dc23 2013017781 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Acknowledgments “Lord Dunsany: Personal Impressions” by Clayton Hamilton, first published in the Bookman (New York) 50, No. 6 (February 1920): 537–42; reprinted in Hamilton’s Seen on the Stage (New York: Henry Holt, 1920), 237–48. “Lord Dunsany,” by Oliver St. John Gogarty, first published in the Atlantic Monthly 195, No. 3 (March 1955): 67–72, copyright © 1959 by Oliver St. John Gogarty. Reprinted by permission of Colin Smythe, Ltd., representing the Estate of Oliver St. John Gogarty. Lord Dunsany: King of Dreams: A Personal Portrait (New York: Exposition Press, 1959), by Hazel Littlefield, 99–103, 119–22, copyright © 1959 by Hazel Littlefield. “Introduction,” by W. B. Yeats, first published in Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsany (Churchtown, Ireland: Cuala Press, 1912), [xix–xxvii]. “Lord Dunsany’s Peculiar Genius,” by Montrose J. Moses, first published in the Bellman No. 561 (14 April 1917): 405–9. “Lord Dunsany and His Work,” by H. P. Lovecraft (written in 1922), first published in Marginalia (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1944), copyright © 1944 by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei. “Lord Dunsany,” by Benjamin De Casseres, from De Casseres’s Forty Immortals (New York: Seven Arts Publishing Co., 1926), 212–15, copyright © 1926 by Benjamin De Casseres. “Dreams of Empire, Empire of Dreams: Lord Dunsany Plays the Game,” by Patrick Maume, first published in New Hibernia Review 13, No. 4 (Winter 2009): 14–33, copyright © 2009 by New Hibernia Review. Reprinted by permission of the author. “‘The Laughter of the Gods’: Contextualizing Lord Dunsany,” by Max Duperray, copyright © 2013 by Max Duperray. Printed by permission of the author. “Introduction,” by Padraic Colum, first published in A Dreamer’s Tales and Other Stories (New York: Modern Library, 1918), xiii–xviii. “Dunsany Lord of Fantasy,” by Arthur C. Clarke, first published in Rhodomagnetic Digest 3, No. 4 (November–December 1951): 15–18. “A Dreamer’s Tales: The Stories of Lord Dunsany,” by John Wilson Foster, first published in Foster’s Fictions of the Irish Literary Revival: A Changeling Art (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press; Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1987), 291–98, copyright © 1987 by John Wilson Foster. Reprinted by permission of Syracuse University Press. “Lord Dunsany: The Potency of Words and the Wonder of Things,” by Angelee Sailer Anderson, first published in Mythlore No. 55 (Autumn 1988): 10– 12, copyright © 1988 by Mythlore. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Jorkens,” by Megan Mitchell, copyright © 2013 by Megan Mitchell. Printed by permission of the author. “Mencken on Dunsany,” by H. L. Mencken, first printed as “Thirty-five Printed Plays,” Smart Set 44, No. 1 (September 1914): 157–59, and “The Cult of Dunsany,” Smart Set 52, No. 3 (July 1917): 138–39. “If,” by Rebecca West, first published in Time and Tide 2, No. 23 (10 June 1921): 309. “Dunsany,” by Ludwig Lewisohn, first published in the Nation No. 3029 (25 July 1923): 95. “Beyond the Fields: The Theatre of Lord Dunsany,” by Ben P. Indick, first published in Studies in Weird Fiction No. 22 (Winter 1998): 1–13, copyright © 1998 by Necronomicon Press. Reprinted by permission of Janet Indick. “A Tory Young Hopeful,” by Edward Thomas, first published in the Daily Chronicle (London) (9 November 1905). “Sleep’s Painted Scene,” by William Rose Benét, first published in Literary Review (New York Evening Post) (9 December 1922): 286. “The Archetypes of Romance and The King of Elfland’s Daughter,” by Faye Ringel, copyright © 2013 by Faye Ringel. Printed by permission of the author. “The Influence of Don Quixote on Lord Dunsany’s Don Rodriguez,” by Iris Fernández Muñiz, copyright © 2013 by Iris Fernández Muñiz. Printed by permission of the author. “Christianity and Paganism in Two Dunsany Novels,” by S. T. Joshi, copyright © 2013 by S. T. Joshi. Printed by permission of the author. “Dunsany’s Retreat from the Fantastic,” by Darrell Schweitzer, copyright © 2013 by Darrell Schweitzer. Printed by permission of the author. “From Gods to Giants: Theatrical Parallels Between Edward Dunsany and Luigi Pirandello,” by Susan Bassnett, first published in Yearbook of the British Pirandello Society No. 6 (1982): 40–49, copyright © 1982 by the Yearbook of the British Pirandello Society. Reprinted by permission of the author. “‘The Strength of Imaginative Idiom’: From Lord Dunsany’s to Faulkner’s ‘Carcassonne,’” by Beatriz Vegh, first published in the Faulkner Journal 13, Nos. 1–2 (Fall 1997–Spring 1998): 163–69, copyright © 1998 by the Faulkner Journal. Reprinted by permission of the Faulkner Journal. “Lovecraft’s ‘Dunsanian Studies,’” by S. T. Joshi, from Joshi’s I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2010), 1.332–54, copyright © 2010 by S. T. Joshi. Reprinted by permission of the author. “Recovering the Effects of Lord Dunsany on J. R. R. Tolkien,” by Skye Cervone, copyright © 2013 by Skye Cervone. Printed by permission of the author.

Introduction In 1923, Shaw Desmond wrote an article for the New York Bookman titled “Dunsany, Yeats and Shaw: Trinity of Magic.” Dunsany’s placement at the head of this “trinity” signals the high regard in which he and his work were held at the time—a regard that continued for at least two more decades. But today, Lord Dunsany is little more than a hallowed name in the realms of fantasy and supernatural literature, and his work—hundreds of short stories, more than a dozen novels, and dozens of plays long and short—remains largely the preserve of book collectors and a small number of devotees. However, the past decade or so has seen a resurgence of interest in Dunsany’s life and work—whether it be because of its influence on such titans of fantasy and horror literature as H. P. Lovecraft or J. R. R. Tolkien, or because his ambiguous status as an Anglo-Irish writer in the time of Irish independence is finally attracting interest from a historical perspective, or because the undoubted merits of his multifarious work are being perceived by those who were formerly heedless of them. Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th baron Dunsany (1878–1957) seems an unlikely figure to become the premier writer of fantasy literature in the first half of the twentieth century; and the fact that his first volume, The Gods of Pegāna (1905), was financed by the author would appear to confirm the view of many in his day that he was nothing but an aristocratic dilettante. But that book—scarcely twenty thousand words in length but a complex fusion of stately biblical language, Nietzschean philosophy, and pure imagination—caught the public’s attention against all odds. The poet Edward Thomas’s glowing review in the London Daily Chronicle materially helped Dunsany to establish a reputation, at least among the literati, and he would never again have to pay for the publication of any of his works. Over the next decade and a half he produced the story collections Time and the Gods (1906), The Sword of Welleran (1908), A Dreamer’s Tales (1910), The Book of Wonder (1912), Fifty-one Tales (1915), The Last Book of Wonder (1916), and Tales of Three Hemispheres (1919)—one of the most brilliant and concentrated bodies of work in the history of fantasy literature. And yet, Dunsany’s broader recognition in his day came more through his plays than through his prose fiction. He exhibited a remarkable intuitive grasp of dramaturgy in his early plays, some of them staged at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, and his early volumes of plays—Five Plays (1914), Plays of Gods and Men (1917), and Plays of Near and Far (1922), along with the full-length play If (1921)—brought Dunsany an adulation that today’s rock stars would envy. In the United States, he became “America’s favorite lord,” and each of the plays in Five Plays was staged at a different little theater in New York. It was at this time that Edward Hale Bierstadt wrote the first book about Dunsany, Dunsany the Dramatist (1917)—a mediocre work at best, but one that was sufficiently popular that a second edition appeared in

1919, to coincide with a successful lecture tour of the United States that Dunsany began that fall and continued into the next year. It was in October 1919 that H. P. Lovecraft sat enraptured in the audience at Copley Plaza in Boston, listening to the author whom he had only recently discovered. Many articles about Dunsany appeared in the 1910s and 1920s in England, America, and Europe, and his work was continually reprinted. But Dunsany himself felt that his work needed to move in a new direction, and he began writing novels— first The Chronicles of Rodriguez (1922), then The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1926), followed by others at regular intervals. These novels were, over the years, reviewed by the most prestigious authors and critics—William Rose Benét, Joseph Wood Krutch, J. B. Priestley, L. P. Hartley, Edwin Muir, Basil Davenport, Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen, Robert Penn Warren, and many others. Dunsany’s first autobiography, Patches of Sunlight (1938), was particularly well received as a poignant account of the emergence of a fantasist. Dunsany also continued to capture popular interest. In the 1910s, his work was regularly printed in such venues as the London Saturday Review and the Smart Set, whose coeditor, H. L. Mencken, admired Dunsany’s tales in spite of his predominant interest in the literature of social realism. By the 1920s, Dunsany had shifted gears and begun writing his tongue-in-cheek tales of the clubman Joseph Jorkens; these appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Saturday Evening Post, and elsewhere. The five collections of Jorkens tales that appeared in his lifetime were recognized as light reading, but they kept Dunsany continually in the public eye. But little sound or penetrating critical work on Dunsany appeared after Bierstadt’s book; indeed, no book-length work on him was published until shortly after his death, when his friend Hazel Littlefield wrote a charming memoir, Lord Dunsany: King of Dreams (1959). But the fact that this book was issued by a vanity publisher is a stark indication of the decline of Dunsany’s standing. He had always been looked at askance by the partisans of the Irish Republic for not writing about Ireland in his earlier work and by staunchly opposing the partition of Ireland. W. B. Yeats, although speaking admiringly of Dunsany’s work in the introduction to Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsany (1912), later refused to induct him as a full member of the Irish Academy of Letters, leading to Dunsany’s writing what is regarded as his best novel, The Curse of the Wise Woman (1933). But Dunsany’s antirepublican stance was long held against him. The resurgence of interest in fantasy literature in the 1970s led to the republication of The King of Elfland’s Daughter and The Charwoman’s Shadow (1926) in Ballantine’s Adult Fantasy series, edited by Lin Carter, whose regard for Dunsany was always high. This led to the writing of Mark Amory’s biography of 1972, along with a reissue of The Curse of the Wise Woman and the slight but amusing My Talks with Dean Spanley (1936). These books, in turn, were reviewed by Seamus Heaney and others, leading to Dunsany’s momentary return to the limelight. But it would be several more years before Darrell Schweitzer would write the first monograph on Dunsany, Pathways to Elfland: The Writings of Lord Dunsany (1989).

Some years later, S. T. Joshi wrote a more exhaustive academic treatise, Lord Dunsany: Master of the Anglo-Irish Imagination (1995), and Joshi and Schweitzer compiled the first comprehensive Dunsany bibliography (1993). From that time forward, Dunsany’s work has continued to be reprinted, as his influence on Tolkien, Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, and other fantasy writers continued to be felt. Joshi edited not only The Collected Jorkens (2004–2005), but a selection of tales, In the Land of Time and Other Fantasy Tales (2004), for Penguin Classics. The recent emergence of print-on-demand publishers who have feasted on work now regarded as being in the public domain has led to the reissuing of many of Dunsany’s early books, many of them in shoddy editions; but they have kept Dunsany’s work circulating briskly. One of the most heartening developments is the renewed interest in Dunsany by scholars of Irish literature and history—and this time without any prejudice against his non-Irish–oriented work or his political views. Patrick Maume’s comprehensive article in the New Hibernia Review is one of the most penetrating analyses of Dunsany ever written. Scholars of fantasy literature have also continued examining Dunsany’s work with care, and the journal Mythlore has been particularly open to studies of his writing and influence. This volume seeks to print a representative sampling of previously published work on Dunsany, reaching all the way back to Edward Thomas’s review of 1905 and progressing through reviews by Rebecca West and Ludwig Lewisohn; articles by H. P. Lovecraft, Arthur C. Clarke, and others; and memoirs by Clayton Hamilton, Hazel Littlefield, and Oliver St. John Gogarty. In addition, seven original articles by leading Dunsany scholars, covering a wide range of topics, have been included. The book concludes with essays discussing Dunsany’s influence—on Pirandello, Faulkner, Lovecraft, and Tolkien. The literary world appears to be primed for a revaluation of Lord Dunsany’s contributions to literature. The virtues of his work are readily visible—one of the most mellifluous prose styles in the English language; a powerfully fantastic imagination that can create gods and monsters with seemingly effortless ease; an enviable skill in literary and dramatic construction; and a prolificity in more than a half century of writing in which even the slightest of his writings presents points of interest. Dunsany’s place in literary and cultural history—as a writer of fantasy, as an AngloIrishman, even as an early environmentalist and “back-to-nature” devotee—is worth much deeper study. Once that study is done, the uniqueness and brilliance of his bountiful output will be exhibited for all to see.

I

Biographies and Memoirs

Chapter 1

Lord Dunsany Clayton Hamilton Personal Impressions On a gusty night in October, an Irish peer—the eighteenth baron of his line— stood in the rain in front of a little theatre at 466 Grand Street, in the heart of the Russian Jewish quarter of the great East Side. He was easily distinguishable, because of his extraordinary height and the hulking army overcoat which housed him from the drizzle. Two or three hundred strangers—for the most part, Jewish people of the neighborhood—grasped him by the hand, patted him on the back, and asked him to scrawl his name on the flyleaves of many books which they produced from pockets and presented proudly. The tall man was treated both as the host and as the guest of an unusual occasion. Suddenly there came a flash of lightning and a crash of thunder. “That must be Klesh,” said Lord Dunsany; “he has come a long way from India.” The Irish peer himself had come a long way from Dunsany Castle and Messines Ridge, for the specific purpose of seeing a couple of plays which he had never seen before—“The Queen’s Enemies” and “A Night at an Inn”—and finding out why so many commentators had made so large a noise about them. I could not be present at the Neighborhood Playhouse on this particular occasion; but I asked the author afterward to tell me how it felt to see a full-fledged performance—with an audience and all—of a couple of plays which he had sent overseas in manuscript. All the other playwrights I have ever known have worried and worked over their manuscripts, day after day, throughout the initial weeks of rehearsals and the secondary weeks of “tryouts,” and have been heartily sick of hearing their own lines repeated, long before the date of a metropolitan first night. Dunsany answered that this unusual experience of his had proved once more that you can’t tell much about a play until you see it on the stage. “A Night at an Inn” exceeded his own expectations, and he was surprised to note the thrill which it communicated to the audience. “It’s a very simple thing,” he said, “merely a story of some sailors who have stolen something and know that they are followed. Possibly it is effective because nearly everybody, at some time or other, has done something he was sorry for, has been afraid of retribution, and has felt the hot breath of a pursuing vengeance on the back of his neck.” With “The Queen’s Enemies,” on the other hand, the author was a little disappointed. “When I wrote these two pieces,” he told me, “I thought that ‘The Queen’ was a better play than ‘The Inn’! Now I know that ‘A Night at an Inn’ is the more dramatic of the two.” “But don’t mistake me,” he continued. “‘The Inn’ is a more effective play than ‘The Queen’; but it isn’t so fine an undertaking. Suppose that I should give a block of wood to a sculptor and ask him to carve it, and suppose that he should cut it very well; that is ‘A Night at an Inn.’ Suppose, next, that I should give a tusk of ivory to the same

sculptor and he should carve it not so well: that is ‘The Queen’s Enemies.’ It isn’t so dramatic a play as ‘The Inn’; but it is intrinsically finer.” “Why do you think that?,” I inquired. “Because of the idea,” the author answered. “The idea of ‘A Night at an Inn’ is rather ordinary: that, I suppose, is the reason why it hits the audience so hard; and, as several critics, like yourself, have pointed out, it is an idea of the same sort that I had used before in ‘The Gods of the Mountain.’ But I like the idea of ‘The Queen’s Enemies.’ I heard about an ancient queen of Egypt who invited all her enemies to a feast of reconciliation and suddenly drowned them. This meant nothing until I could imagine the motive for this extraordinary deed. Several months later, the motive occurred to me. The dear little queen had done this for the very simple reason that she didn’t like to have any enemies: she wanted to be loved, not to be hated. The rest was easy; for the play was made when the motive was discovered.” “Do you always begin with a motive?,” I asked. “Not always,” said Dunsany; “I begin with anything, or with next to nothing. Then, suddenly, I get started, and go through in a hurry. The main point is not to interrupt a mood. Writing is an easy thing when one is going strong and going fast; it becomes a hard thing only when the onward rush is impeded. Most of my short plays have been written in a sitting or two. The other day”—he said in December—“I got an idea for a short play in St. Louis. I began the composition on the train and finished it before we arrived in Chicago. It’s a little piece about a monk who grew a halo. I hope that you will like it.” “How about ‘The Gods of the Mountain’?,” I asked. “I wrote that in three sessions,” Lord Dunsany answered, “two afternoons between tea and dinner and another hour on the third afternoon. ‘A Night at an Inn’ was written between tea and dinner in a single sitting. That was very easy.” . . . “No trouble about the dialogue?,” I suggested. “Dialogue isn’t difficult if you have been around with men a lot, and listened to them. Somebody says something; the next man doesn’t quite agree, and unobtrusively suggests a reservation; the third man says, ‘No, not at all, the truth is . . .’ And that is dialogue.” “But the writing?” “Well, of course, there is such a thing as rhythm,” Lord Dunsany answered. “You agree with me, though, that the dramatic value of a play stands quite apart from any literary merit it may or may not show in the writing of its dialogue?” “I do, indeed. Don’t damn me as a ‘literary’ playwright. You have read ten of my plays; but I have already written more than twenty. The best of them are still unpublished. I am holding them back, in the hope that people may be forced to see them before they have a chance of reading them.” “That reminds me of Pinero,” I replied. “Ten years ago, Sir Arthur started a friendly habit of sending me prompt-copies of each of his new plays; but he made me promise never to read these printed texts till after I had seen the plays in the theatre —particularly if I should be called upon to write critical reviews of them.”

“I can understand that,” said Lord Dunsany. “I misjudged ‘The Queen’ and ‘The Inn’ until I saw them acted.” “If you write a play so quickly,” I suggested, “I infer that the whole thing must be planned out in your mind before you start to write it. Among magazine men, I am known as a quick writer. I publish more than half a hundred articles a year; and most of them are turned out in a single night. But, before I sit down to write the first sentence, I have been thinking for three or four days, in the subway, between the acts, or when other people were talking to me. In the real sense, the task has more nearly consumed a week than a day. An impromptu speech takes only three or four minutes; but sometimes, with me—if the occasion is important—it spoils a day or two beforehand. I can’t imagine anybody writing ‘The Gods of the Mountain’ in a few hours, confined within three days, unless a long period of preparation—much of it subconscious, to be sure—had gone before.” “Sometimes,” Lord Dunsany said, “I have thought the matter out, and know exactly what I am going to do; that was the case with ‘The Gods’; but at other times, I just get started and follow a mood as a hunter follows the hounds. I will give you an example—‘King Argimenes.’ I saw a king in rags, digging up a bone, gnawing at it hungrily, and saying, ‘This is a good bone.’ I started the play with no idea whatever of its subsequent development. I merely wrote along, to find out what would happen.” “I have always thought so,” I replied ungraciously. “You know, of course, that this is one of the few plays of yours that I don’t especially admire. It seems to me inconsequential, and not built up to a climax.” “That must be because I didn’t know the end when I started the beginning. . . . Of course, it is better to have things planned,” the author added, “and not to trust entirely to the impulsion of a mood.” In recording this conversation, I have anteceded the chronological order of these haphazard personal impressions. As a matter of fact the first time that I met Lord Dunsany was at a public dinner in his honor, at which I endeavored to do my duty as one of the speakers. It was a good occasion, of the customary sort. When we were coming away, I asked him if he were growing tired of publicity. “Publicity?,” he countered quickly. “You don’t call this public! You ought to have seen our trenches under Messines Ridge. That’s the most public place I have ever been in. We were in a valley. The Germans were on a hill. They could see down to our boot-tops.” He looked at me and asked, “How tall are you?” “Six feet one, or thereabouts.” “I am six feet four. Our trenches were only six feet deep. I shall never fear ‘publicity’ again.” On a subsequent occasion, I asked Lord Dunsany to tell me something of his life in the army. “I was brought up to be a soldier,” he replied. “I wasn’t sent to Oxford or to Cambridge, but to Sandhurst. I went through the South African affair and the whole of the recent war. I have this to say about military preparation: it doesn’t educate a man, it merely trains him. A trained man can do one single thing with almost mechanical perfection; but an educated man can do almost anything that he is called upon to do. I was merely trained. It is better to be educated. The college is a better place for this than the army.”

At another time, I touched upon the point that Lord Dunsany had not yet enjoyed the dubious experience—so common to the rest of us—of peddling his plays from manager to manager. I told him that most of the American playwrights to whom I had presented him were required, by the nature of the game, to devote much more of their time to the practical task of “placing” their plays than to the more attractive task of writing them. Lord Dunsany answered: “That may be the reason why ten or a dozen of my best plays have not yet been acted. I have never had the time to peddle them. Ninety-seven percent—or thereabouts—of my actual life has been spent out of doors in the pursuit of various athletic activities—such as following the hounds, playing cricket, hunting big game, or serving as a professional soldier. The remaining three percent has been spent in the writing of my tales and plays—the records of my dreams. What time is left for peddling my literary wares? . . . I have recently written two or three plays, of full length, which treat of contemporary life in London. How does one sell these things in London or New York?” . . . This question surprised me, until I made the astonishing discovery that I had actually earned more money from a single “failure” in our commercial theatre than Lord Dunsany has earned from all of the “successes” in our little theatres that have made him famous. When “The Gods of the Mountain” was put into rehearsal at the Haymarket Theatre in London, he was offered ten pounds for the world rights in perpetuity. This contract struck him as inequitable; and he requested that the world rights should be limited to five years. This period has long ago elapsed; but the author received less than fifty dollars for the first five years of the actual existence of what is probably the greatest short play in the world. It is gratifying to record that he has since developed, by experience, a business sense that is more practical. “Writing plays,” he told me, “is the one thing I most dearly love; but I cannot talk of it at home, in County Meath. My aunt would be scandalized if she should hear that I have written plays; my neighbors would dismiss me as insane; everybody else would think me a fool; I had to come to your country to find a sympathetic audience.” I told him that Sir Arthur Pinero, after the comparative failure of “Mid-Channel” in London and the comparative success of the same piece in New York, had said to me jocosely: “If it were not for America, we couldn’t keep alive.” Lord Dunsany said, “Your public is surprisingly alert.” Having been a lecturer myself, I answered adversely: “When people seem to like our speeches, and swarm around us to request us to sign books, we naturally think that they have brains.” To this he answered, “That is not the point. In your country, I have met many people who are not ashamed to talk of art. In England, nowadays, the subject is laughed away from the carpet. “When ‘The Gods of the Mountain’ was first produced at the Haymarket Theatre, one rather snobbish critic said that the play was bad, for the mere reason that it had been written by a nobleman. He ordered me back to my ancestral castle, just as Keats was ordered back, a century ago, to his apothecary pots. Why should Keats have been despised, in a period of aristocracy? And why should I be despised, in a period of democracy? It isn’t my fault that I try to write beautiful tales and effective plays.

“It is only in your country that my attempts have been appreciated. I have no fame in England. I have scarcely any ranking among the authors of my own country; you know many more of them than I do; but I am grateful to your nation for the incentive to carry on. Poets thrive upon appreciation; and I need the sort of encouragement that has been granted to me by your hospitable people.” “How about that division of your life,” I asked, “three percent of which, according to your smiling statement, has been devoted to your writing, and the overwhelming remainder to athletics?” “I have found this out,” said Lord Dunsany, “that you must not talk of art to the majority of men who follow active lives in the open air—like cricketers, or huntsmen, or soldiers. On the other hand, I have found out that, among artists, you may extol without embarrassment the virtues of the athletes of the world. Why is it that the men of action are always afraid of the men of dreams, whereas the men of dreams are never afraid of the men of action? It must be because the dream is always stronger than the act. Jeanne D’Arc is evermore more potent to win a battle than a regiment of British soldiers. That is because this peasant girl of long ago has been made real by the imagination of millions of people. Nothing can, at any time, be realized but what has been imagined. “I like the active life in the open; and, after four or five years in the war, I actually feel uncomfortable in a room with the windows closed; but the active life is very lonely. I can talk to a man of letters like yourself about cricketing or lion hunting or soldiering, and you will be interested, because artists are interested in everything. But I cannot talk about my dreams to cricketers or soldiers or lion hunters; they would think that something had gone wrong with me. I was very lonely in the trenches; and it has been a great pleasure for me to meet so many writers in America and to find that most of them are sportsmen as well.” “What do you think of the effect of the war upon the drama?,” I inquired. “Four years of hell and heroism have trampled down the immediate actual, and reminded us of the insistence of the perennial real. We have learned that idealism is the only absolute reality. The stricken world must reawaken; and the theatre should be resurrected with it. The time has passed away for such faithful but depressing records of the drabbest aspects of our current life as the ‘Night Lodging’ of Maxim Gorki, an act of which I saw the other day. A moment has arrived for reminding the theatregoing public that such a thing as splendor is still to be discerned in the records of experience. Let us set before the public splendid images of beauty; for beauty is truth, despite the critic who tried to send Keats back to his apothecary pots.” “Keats died without knowing whether he would be famous or not,” said I. “You are famous at forty. You have been luckier than Keats.” “Yes, I have been lucky,” he replied, “thanks mainly to your country; but that is as it should be. I am not speaking personally; but, after all, I am a poet, and poets ought to be appreciated in their lifetime. In England, a poet has to die to be appreciated. Look at Rupert Brooke; they wouldn’t read him while he lived. In England, I am merely a lord.” “Aren’t you at all bored by being lionized in this country?”

“Not at all: I like it,” he replied. Lord Dunsany is a man who—whether you agree with him or not on any given point—is undeniably alive. He is excessively tall, loose-jointed, raw-boned, rather awkward, and encumbered with a large head and enormous hands and feet. He admits jocosely that, at home, he is generally regarded as the worst-dressed man in County Meath. He shambles along with a drooping posture, accentuated doubtless by his long and cramping experience in the trenches under Messines Ridge; but his mind is neither awkward nor drooping. He talks fluently and well; and his nature is so frank and simple that he is a very easy man to get acquainted with. I have been with him at moments when he was not merely tired but also physically ill; and, at these moments, he has shown a persistent eagerness to converse with many new acquaintances with the utmost cordiality. Coincident with the recent visit of Lord Dunsany to America has come the publication, by his American publishers, of a new and revised edition of the only extant biography of the Irish dramatist, by Edward Hale Bierstadt.[1] There is a new preface, in which the biographer sets forth several interesting comments on the earlier edition made by Lord Dunsany himself; six lengthy letters from Lord Dunsany to various correspondents have been added to those previously published; the appendix now contains a speech called “Nowadays,” which Lord Dunsany delivered at the Poet’s Club in London in July 1912; and a very interesting schedule is published for the first time of the dates and places of all the writing done by Lord Dunsany in a typical year, 1912. Critical comments on “The Murderers” and “Fame and the Poet” have been added to the previous text. Mr. Bierstadt’s book is readable and valuable; and it has been improved by the augmentations made in this new and revised edition.

NOTE 1. Edward Hale Bierstadt, Dunsany, the Dramatist (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1917).

Chapter 2

Lord Dunsany Oliver St. John Gogarty

1 How Lord Dunsany came to be a poet is a problem that may be somewhat baffling. He was brought up to be a soldier and therefore he went to Sandhurst instead of to a university. It is not necessary to go to a university to be a poet; but it is necessary to have a poetic gift, something innately strong within you, if poetry is to survive Sandhurst. Poetry in a military college is a thought satiric. But to Sandhurst Dunsany had to go: noblesse oblige. He could not do otherwise. There have been many poets who were soldiers but few soldier poets. Not the least remarkable of his gifts is this ability of his to have survived the mental discipline that regiments a soldier’s soul. He also survived the prose of the fox hunter with its contempt for the definite article: for example, “Hounds found.” Many of his plays were written before the First World War, between 1909 and April 1913. They reveal a high distinction and one quite unusual in modern drama. There is an unearthly liturgic quality about them, a language measured appropriately to the inexorable utterance of outlandish gods in far inaccessible fastnesses, strong places high above the lowly world of men. His first play was The Glittering Gate. It was produced in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, April 29, 1909. It was such a success that Lady Gregory, who controlled the Abbey Theatre, took it off the program with the excuse that it was not sufficiently long. In spite of this rebuff (perhaps it was so disguised that it did not seem a rebuff) he offered his next play to the same management two years later. Its title was King Argimēnēs and the Unknown Warrior. This time the characters were dressed in the dregs of the Abbey greenroom, so no longer was the discouragement disguised. For a while I thought that Dunsany’s resentment was not altogether justified, until I saw to what extent the management of the Abbey would go to make one of Yeats’s plays or the plays of Lady Gregory a success. Dunsany’s dislike of Yeats grew from this. The Abbey Theatre saw Dunsany no more. Since he tried his prentice hand in the Abbey, he has written some of the greatest plays in the English language: Alexander, The Queen’s Enemies, and A Night at an Inn, to name but three. It is not quite fair to attribute a trend to a dramatist; but sometimes unfair things are quite allowable; so I can see that Dunsany judges men by the gods they worship. It may not be so; that is why I have taken the unfairness to myself. To prosecute the thought further, there is in the Irish defiance in the midst of destruction and desolation, in Irish bravery in the face of ruin, that which is akin to the dramatic attitude toward life: regarding it from a detached point of view. The judgment on men by the gods they choose!

The Abbey Theatre, being a one man and woman show, could not hold such an independent and self-contained spirit as Dunsany long. So the world became his stage, and on it he was a success second to none—certainly not to those who deal with passing and ephemeral things. I shall content myself to present one of his notable sayings and sentiments. Here is an echo which they who love to air their acumen in tracing ideas to their source would attribute to his ancestral history: It is built of rock and our palace is all of marble. Time has not scratched it with six centuries. Six centuries tearing with all their claws. We are throned on gold and founded upon marble. Death will some day find me indeed, but I am young. Sire after sire of mine has died in Barbul-El-Sharnak or in Thek, but has left our dynasty laughing sheer in the face of time from over these age-old walls. The aristocracy of the language is a fitting vehicle for the poetry that becomes lyrical in these lyrical dramas, for they are not dramas of the folk or of humanity in the coil of life, but chants of those who are confronted more immediately with Destiny than are ordinary mundane beings.

2 Dunsany’s spirit survived the routine and discipline of an army school, it endured because of influences earlier still—the breath of the woods and skies about Dunsany Castle and the aloofness, rather than the loneliness, they provided. These were part of his heredity. In his childhood he was protected from slipshod and ignoble reading. He had access to nothing but language of the Bible and of romances such as those that had set Don Quixote’s spear in rest. These, acting on a mind of extraordinary sensitiveness and discrimination, have given us some of the purest and most distinguished English of today. Where did he get those names of thrones and dominations and principalities from some astral hierarchy all his own which he uses so effectively: Perdóndaris, Erl, Ziroonderel, Thek, Yann, Lirazel, Alveric, Tharrabas? Names that never were on sea or land, astronomic and skyey names, yet with an echo of the Gospel in the last. I cannot tell; but I remember one afternoon, while walking in the woods of Dunsany, I spoke of Coleridge and his name for the Sacred River in his “Kubla Khan.” “Where did he get it?” I asked. “From the first word in the Greek alphabet obviously,” Dunsany answered, and that came as a revelation to me. When I mention beautiful prose, I think of a comparison: Dunsany’s prose is as pure, fabulous, and as rare as the unicorn of which he writes so familiarly. Again and again the unicorn aimed fair at Orion’s heart; the huge white beast stepped forward pressing Orion back. That graceful bowing neck, with its white arch of hard muscle driving the deadly horn, was wearying Orion’s arm.

There were other causes at work to keep his lips more eloquent than words of army command required—causes that have been the making of many a poet; and these were the sounds of the wind in the trees and the light on the fields and bogs around his Irish home. This love of nature is seen clearly and simply, because it is not, as idealized as in The King of Elfland’s Daughter, when he writes of the Ireland that he knows as no one else knows it who can transmit it so well. My Ireland is the best book about the Irish countryside that has been written. His sympathy with wild nature glows through it, and that wry humor of his enlightens its every page. The quest he sets for himself which is never achieved is an example. He pretends that he is writing about the one thing that anyone will want to hear (as if all were not sick of it), Irish politics. In this book I am planning to write about Ireland, there is only one thing that anyone will want to hear, a thing without which the book will be totally uninstructive, and that is—What the people of Ireland actually think of the new form of government. As if anyone in a country preeminent for its moral cowardice would dare to speak his mind! Here is an example of his sarcastic humor from another book. How tolerant and detached it is! The house is a windowless ruin, burnt for political reasons, upon which I will not enlarge, for they are well enough known in Ireland, while my English readers are not likely to have that inner knowledge of politics which it is necessary to have before all the advantages of burning the house of a man with whose politics you are in disagreement are clearly understood. All through My Ireland he is put off by strange excuses. He never meets an outspoken man. Some were interrupted as they were about to expound. One had a lapse of memory. None spoke his thought. Here is another example of Dunsany’s cryptic humor: A wind was still raging. We found some snipe that had not been flooded out, and I shot four. But in the opinion of my gamekeeper, who has considerable experience, they were wild as the Devil’s father. Again when he stalks plover from the shelter of an ambling cow: “In spite of the name on the cover of this book [My Ireland], it was not my cow.” Dunsany’s feeling for the hills and fields he knows, set in the days dim in history when the Milesians warred and ruled, appears in this beautiful extract from My Ireland: For the hills of Slieve-na-Calliagh seem very blue from Tara, and unlike the fields

of this world; and the long row of them going over the utmost rim of the view might upon many an evening have hinted to the people gazing from Tara that amongst that gathering of dim blue mountains there was the magic for which their hearts were yearning, and of which their druids spoke. And so, when the end came to the days of their kings, they carried them there to the hills that seemed so mysterious, trusting those far blue slopes to hold the mystery of death. There the Milesians buried Ollamh Fodhla, one of the chief of their kings, at the top of the hill, with counties spread out all round him. I do not know what hopes they had of heaven, but they must have had a great love of earth who chose this view. It is a great love of earth that inspires such writing. While you are reading you ask yourself repeatedly as you come across passages of great poetry and charm, “Why is Dunsany not more popular? Why is he not better known?” We must differentiate between popularity and vulgarity. Burns was a popular and vulgar poet. Dunsany is neither the one nor the other. He is not popular because he stood outside the parochial procession of the times. When Yeats was reviving the old sagas and with them patriotic sentiment, he established a claim upon the public as interpreter of the national myth, and thereby got the public in a quandary because they dare not repudiate nationality. They had to accept its exponent and they did so grudgingly. So Yeats became popular by that only. His songs never were in the common mouth, nor are they ever likely to be. Neither to Yeats nor to Dunsany was the vernacular known. Dunsany had none of these myths or sagas to help him. He invented his own. He “dwelt apart.” More than that, he was repudiated by the vigilant Lady Gregory in her desire to fend off any competition from her Abbey internees. While it is not strange that Dunsany should scent a conspiracy to keep him out of the Irish Literary Renaissance, it is odd that he should feel aggrieved at the absence of a wider recognition of his poetry in Ireland. In My Ireland Dunsany fails to get an opinion on government from any of the cottagers within miles of his home. He should have taken thought about the significance of this. In it lies the clue to what at first was rivalry, and later enmity, between himself and Yeats, his great contemporary. Radically it is the distrust of the cottage for the castle, of the folk for the aristocrat, of the peasant for the peer. There is no bridging this quagmire into which all that is lofty must sink in the end. “One does not fully understand Ireland if one overlooks the pace with which ruin floats on the gentle wind, and the grudge that the Irish soil seems to bear to civilization.” So Dunsany writes that Yeats came to realize this when he wrote over the door of his tower of Ballylee: And may these characters remain When all is ruin once again.

The only things that can remain are the characters, the written word. Let the word then ring over the ruin. For all that can remain when the bog has sucked in

castle and cottage is unassailable song. It would be a mistake to think that the rivalry between Dunsany and Yeats was a literary one. Far from it. Yeats had no rival to fear among contemporary poets. It was not so much rivalry on Yeats’s part as it was envy. Yeats, through his descent from parsons, innately loved a lord. He was at heart an aristocrat, and it must always have been a disappointment to him that he was not born one. Not by taking thought could he trace his descent from the year 1181. Yeats loved high and worthy things. They “invited” his soul. He treasured a silver bowl said to have belonged to the Butlers of Ormonde. According to his historian J. M. Hone, to a friend he confided, “If I had my rights, I would be Marquis of Ormonde.” “What about your father?” asked Æ—George Russell. I am no genealogist, and it would take such a one to clear up the claim of William Butler Yeats. For a while, until George Moore’s mockery made him relinquish it, Yeats displayed the Butler crest on his signet ring. Moore, who loved to harass one whom he knew he could never equal, warned Yeats that he would be required to pay a tax for a crest in England. Eventually Yeats changed his signet ring for a large gold ring with blue enamel representing zodiacal signs which Dulac made for him. Thus appropriately he traced his pedigree from the stars. Dunsany displayed nothing. It was not necessary to his own self-esteem. He was born to the purple and he saw life through oriels of gules. This, then, was at bottom the cause of the failure of friendship between Dunsany and Yeats. Dunsany sensed some sort of opposition real and imaginary, for some of the forms it was reputed to have taken were probably part of an oversensitive suspicion. Yeats paraded nothing more ancestrian than the Abbey Theatre.

3 I happened to be at Dunsany Castle when a letter with some specimens of poetry was delivered. Dunsany read them aloud. They were the first poems of Francis Ledwidge. I remember how unsophisticated they were, crude and ungrammatical, but fresh with the freshness of morning mist. Dunsany was full of understanding and sympathy. He said that he would point out the lapses when he saw Ledwidge and that it would be all right. How long the tuition then begun lasted, I do not know. I do know that Dunsany’s teaching was effective. How effective it was may be seen in the improvement from Ledwidge’s faltering to assured writing. This was a feat of instruction which proves that Dunsany could transmit learning by sympathy; there was no time to teach in the schoolmasters’ way. Somebody encouraged a poet in Francis Ledwidge, and filled him with the joy of elevated thought. That man was Dunsany. And, seeing that poetry in a way is courage, Dunsany’s encouragement of Ledwidge was a vitalizing and indispensable force. Not only did he teach Ledwidge English, but he settled a sum of money on him

(frequently augmented many times over) which made him independent of earning his living as an overseer of roadwork. Ledwidge went with his master to the war and served through many campaigns, to fall, after a return home on sick leave, behind the lines in Flanders where he was building a road. Now for a contrast which is by no means a digression. Compare Dunsany’s attitude to a struggling poet with that of Yeats in like circumstances. When George Russell approached Yeats, who had called Russell’s circle of poetically minded people “Russell’s canaries,” to request him to help, not financially, but with a word of encouragement, a certain poet whose work was already influenced by Yeats, the elder poet asked with scorn, “Where is the wild dog ever praised his fleas?” Was this benevolence? Was this concern for Irish literature? The effect on the victim was to make him bitter. It altered his character, for he depended on his poetry for his self-esteem. To him the riposte is attributed, “Where is the wild dog ever knew his father?” Lord Dunsany’s earlier poems told of the wonders he had seen when the hills of Africa looked like crumpled roses in the setting sun. They told of his thoughts by campfires and on the many journeys he had made. They told of the passing of glamour and the unspoiled wild places in his Mirage Water. Here he is Virgilian in his regret that civilization is an enemy of old simplicity. The last wolf in England Was lean and very old; The last wolf in England Was shivering with cold. He could not read the ages, And he made no prophecy Of a weary waste of pavement Where he had come to die. And a moonrise robbed of terror, And the golden downs gone tame, And a glamour lost to woodlands Which were old when Caesar came. But he knew that ancient wonders That were since woods began Were weeping at his going As they would not weep for man.

“Which were old when Caesar came”! With such things he is familiar. Here is another of his poems which goes to show that a dramatist can also be a lyrical poet of the first order. Such a one was Shakespeare. Notice Fate takes the place of one of the gods. FATE AND CHANCE We can’t do more than that, said Fate, Than put her there and put him here

In the same age with scarce a year Between their births, and separate By but five miles from gate to gate. Some free will must be left to steer Their courses that are now so near. They must meet surely soon or late. And later in the empty vast Where Fate was sitting all alone I saw their spirits drifting past By their two ways through the Unknown. And Fate looked up and smiled, and yet They travelled on and never met.

Horseman, soldier, sportsman, poet, and playwright, Dunsany is the most representative man I know. His is the life I would choose if I were not contented with my own. It does me good to visit him, and the effect of those visits I have tried to record in the sonnet’s narrow room of fourteen lines. Here is a sonnet addressed to the man and his house: DUNSANY CASTLE The twin dunes rise before it, and beneath Their tree-dark summits the Skene River flows, And old, divine, earth exhalation glows About it, though no longer battles breathe; For Time puts all men’s swords in his red sheath; And softlier now the air from Tara blows; Thus in the royalest ground that Ireland knows Stands your sheer house in immemorial Meath. It stands for actions done and days endured; Old causes God, in guiding Time, espoused Who never brooks the undeserving long. I found there pleasant chambers filled with song, (And never were the Muses better housed) Repose and dignity and fame assured.

Chapter 3

Lord Dunsany Hazel Littlefield King of Dreams: A Personal Portrait With all his devotion to England and his deep love for Dunstall Priory, Lord Dunsany had firm roots in Ireland. He was a Meath man and proud of it. In the twelfth century the Norse-Irish Plunketts had established themselves near Tara, the most fabled and richest region of all Ireland. Succeeding generations fiercely defended and held their patrimony. An Irish historian wrote long ago: “There be two great robber barons on the road to Drogheda: Dunsany and Fingall; if the traveller save himself from Fingall, he will assuredly fall into the hands of Dunsany.” The castle is a majestic mass of masonry. The deep walls and tall towers stand today as firmly as when they were built nearly eight hundred years ago, and keep watch over the lush meadows of Meath. Here Edward came as the young master when, at twenty years of age, he succeeded as the Eighteenth Baron. He was just out of Sandhurst when his father died, and a few days after the funeral he joined the First Battalion of Coldstream Guards and set off for Gibraltar, and then the Boer War. Only after his marriage, when the Lady Beatrice came with him, her presence brought the felicity of home to the great rooms. Then the heavy oaken door stood open to sportsmen and poets, cricketers and playwrights, neighbors and travellers. Here hunt balls were held and on winter mornings in sun or wind and rain the wide lawns were trampled by the feet of horses and hounds and hunting men who gathered for the Meet. Here his son was born; and here he returned from many a long journey. But more and more he had lived in England and management of the estate had been left to the steward. It was with satisfaction and relief that he gave over the ownership to his son in 1947. Colonel the Honourable Randal Plunkett had returned to Ireland in 1946 after serving for nineteen years with the Guides Cavalry on the Northwest Frontier in India, and in various eastern theatres of World War II, including the Eighth Army in Libya and the Indian Armored Corps. Upon his return he immediately took an interest in the farming operations, and as soon as the ownership was in his hands he introduced new machinery, improved the herds, seeded new fields, developed plantations and installed a sawmill. His personal supervision and efficient business methods saved the estate from the fate of many fine old Anglo-Irish places that could not survive the new government regulations and taxation. Randal and Sheila, his lovely and accomplished wife, have made the castle a home, no small achievement in the twentieth century, when ordinary living demands comforts and conveniences never dreamed of in the age when it was built, not only as

a stronghold, but to express the grandeur befitting a feudal baron. One enters the stone-flagged hall by the same deep doorway through which the first Baron entered, but ancient armor and trophies of the chase have been removed and a gentler atmosphere now pervades the place. In a seventeenth-century portrait the calm face of Blessed Oliver, Archbishop of Armagh, gives no hint that he was a martyr, the last man to be hung, drawn and quartered at Tyburn, in 1681: a Plunkett who may one day be canonized. From the hall beyond, originally the open courtyard, one comes into the dining room and meets the gaze of seven generations of Barons of Dunsany, all of whom are portrayed in robes of state or in the uniforms of soldiers—all except the Eighteenth Baron. In a soft white shirt, without insignia of any kind to denote rank or calling, he seems set apart. Among all the faces, grave and proud and soldierly, his face is the most sensitive: proud, yet gentle with dreams. His son, a stern and distinguished figure in the uniform of a colonel of the Guides Cavalry, is a worthy scion of the house and at home in the company of his grandsires. But the Baron in the white shirt alone bears the mark of the poet and of a native humility unsuspected, except in rare moments by the few who knew him best. In the game room one may see enough fine heads to fill the heart of any hunter with pride: among them many rare edni and the graceful Dorcas gazelles. Below the heads, all around the room, are hung S. H. Sime’s original drawings for the illustrations in Dunsany’s first seven books. In a cabinet are a dozen of his little sculptured figures: caricatures modeled in clay and painted. The room is filled with trophies of the Eighteenth Baron’s many achievements. The broad central stairway is a masterpiece of craftsmanship, winding up and up, with cabinets of priceless china on the landings, and paintings by masters on the walls. Near the top a door leads into a narrow corridor connected with the servants’ quarters, and at the end of the corridor is a room, small and dimly lighted. In this room, on January 17, 1912, between teatime and dinner, by the light of an oil lamp, Dunsany wrote at one sitting his best-known play, A Night at an Inn. The elegance of an age that is over still lingers in the stately drawing room of Dunsany Castle. Among the priceless treasures is a gift from the first Queen Elizabeth to a loyal subject. But it is in the library that the family gathers around the fire. The walls are rich with books and panels of crimson brocade. A magnificent desk stands in the great east window, and beautiful pieces of furniture, brought from the continent in an earlier century, lend dignity. Warm with life and comfort, it is a room where the children gather with their elders, and friends take tea, and family councils are held. Beyond the house walled gardens shelter abundant fruit and flowers. In the stables, which once housed thoroughbreds and hunters—favorites named Biscay and Twilight and Festina Lente, the great grey hunter that led the Tara Harriers, and Leixlip, the excellent fencer—now there is only the children’s pony. In spite of the reduced staff made necessary by high wages and heavy taxation, Randal and Sheila offer hospitality which, if less formal than that of earlier

generations, certainly lacks nothing of warmth and generosity to which they add their own personal charm. Here friends from England and abroad come for enchanting weekends; here Eddie comes home for holidays; here fair-haired little Beatrice is like a gleam of sunlight in the stately rooms. And here Dunsany often returned for brief visits, but especially for the shooting season. His letters to me from Ireland made frequent reference to snipe: the number he had shot in a day, the kind of bog to which he had gone and the weather, which to a wild-fowler is of paramount interest. One walks downwind on snipe because the bird likes to fly against the wind, so that, instead of flying away from the hunter as other birds do, he turns to left or right to get into the wind, and the flash of white as he turns is easily seen against dark rushes. But the speed of the bird in flight is sixty miles an hour and the utmost skill is required to bring him down. The wonder was that Dunsany, at seventy-seven years of age, got anything at all. [. . .] Hawthorn blossom was white on the hedges and the gold of buttercups still glittering among the meadow grasses when I came to Shoreham at the end of May. Bluebells and anemones had long withered in the woods at the top of the Down, but in the gardens at Dunstall Priory laburnum was bright against the old beeches and the air was sweet with rain-scented eglantine and fading violets. In the yew trees, just outside the window of my tower room, wood-pigeons drowsed and blackbirds made symphonies at dawn. In the soft darkness of late evening, when mist was over the moon, the nightingale poured out a throatful of heartache. But when rain fell he was silent because the rain drips down his throat when he lifts his head to sing. Shoreham is protected from the invasion of industry by its location in the Green Belt that surrounds London, and rural life there has continued very little changed in Lord Dunsany’s lifetime. Around Dunstall badgers burrow in the chalk within a stone’s throw of the house and foxes pass in the night, walking stealthily over twigs and leaves. It was the wildness of the wood beyond the house that kept enchantment for him and he walked there every day, but not as far as he had been used to walk. He sat more often in his deep chair by the fire with a dog at his knee, or in noon sunshine on the veranda. He wrote a good deal in the mornings, but after luncheon he was outof-doors with the dogs, or waiting impatiently for guests. Teatime often brought someone down from London. One day six members of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals arrived by limousine. Then the house buzzed with lively talk. Dunsany launched forth on any topic that came in view and so eloquently that his listeners forgot the lateness of the hour and the long drive back to town. In the dining room, after tea, he opened a cabinet and took out a collection of figures, four to five inches high, which he had modelled from clay, baked in the kitchen oven and then painted. They were unique and original caricatures, portraits rather, of types: politicians and potentates, bishops and officials. Each bore a descriptive label. An admiral in a green uniform was described thus: “Even at fifty he could throw a knife that seldom missed the heart.” When these figures were shown at an art exhibition in London some years ago, Queen Mary had seen them and been so

amused that she was heard actually chuckling with delight. And the gentlemen who had come to Dunstall that afternoon prepared to be awed, went away enchanted. On another day a clergyman, whose hobby was painting orchids, bicycled ten miles to look at the tiger orchid growing on the hillside at Dunstall. He arrived at teatime but we had already finished tea and there was not a scone left. It was the maid’s afternoon off and there was only tea to offer the hungry man. But so beguiling was Dunsany’s talk of orchids and the art of painting flowers that all thought of food was forgotten. Dunstall Farm, at the top of the Down, was let to a farmer who had a fine herd of Frisians. A farm owner myself and naturally interested in livestock, I asked to visit the farm. Dunsany was pleased to show me. Ronney, the chauffeur, drove us there by a road going up from Shoreham, for no road can go straight up the steep side of the hills of northern Kent which are like waves of an ocean gigantically modelled in chalk. We found the farmer engaged in inoculating half a hundred milch cows penned in the yards. The mooing and lowing made the place a bedlam, so we went to look at the herd in the meadows. Then an idea came to Dunsany that seemed to please him very much. He directed Ronney to drive by a bumpy cart track right around the edge of an oat field until we came to a thicket of hazels and briars among the oaks and birch. From there he sent the car away and proposed that we should walk home. He climbed over broken branches and plunged through a tangle of briars. I hoped he knew the way. But why on earth start here? I wondered. There was no sign of a path or any track to follow. We were caught by briars and stumbled over humps and hollows and almost into badgers’ burrows. And in good clothes, too. I made no protest, being used to walking in wild places. He certainly had something on his mind and had not yet found what he was looking for. Then, a little farther on, he found it: among tall grasses, a very narrow trail, not wide enough to walk freely but clear enough to follow. The satisfaction in his triumphant “Ah!” was gratifying to hear. Then it dawned on me: this was the path; the one in his poem and in his autobiography; the path of mystery. He had brought me here to share an unforgotten secret delight of his boyhood. This was the wood of the anemones of which he used to think in the bitterest hours of homesickness when in exile at school. “The punishment of exile,” he once wrote, “cannot fall on the spirit of any full-grown man with such bitterness as that with which his first departure from home can affect a sensitive schoolboy.” He had thought it a curious thing that there was always a path through the wood here though it was nobody’s business to go there and it led nowhere. There is not even a way out at the far end unless you climb over tangled branches. It is a track kept in existence and beaten smooth by feet and it had been there all his life. He was leading me through the enchanted wood with never a spoken word; even the wind in the trees held its breath and no bird sang. We stepped lightly where fairy feet had gone and a little boy so long ago had followed Pan. Coming out of the wood, at last, onto the open sward where the tiger orchid grew, he knelt beside the flower to place some protective stakes so that careless feet should not crush it. The heroic

figure kneeling there before a flower was eloquent: a knight before a shrine of beauty. Here was revealed a personality rich and rare.

II

General Studies

Chapter 4

Introduction to Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsany W. B. Yeats

I Lady Wilde once told me that when she was a young girl she was stopped in some Dublin street by a great crowd and turned into a shop to escape from it. She stayed there some time and the crowd still passed. She asked the shopman what it was, and he said, “the funeral of Thomas Davis, a poet.” She had never heard of Davis; but because she thought a country that so honoured a poet must be worth something, she became interested in Ireland and was soon a famous patriotic poet herself, being, as she once said to me half in mockery, an eagle in her youth. That age will be an age of romance for a hundred years to come. Its poetry slid into men’s ears so smoothly that a man still living, though a very old man now, heard men singing at the railway stations he passed upon a journey into the country the verses he had published but that morning in a Dublin newspaper; and yet we should not regret too often that it has vanished, and left us poets even more unpopular than are our kind elsewhere in Europe; for now that we are unpopular we escape from crowds, from noises in the street, from voices that sing out of tune, from bad paper made one knows not from what refuse, from evil-smelling gum, from covers of emerald green, from that ideal of reliable, invariable men and women, which would forbid saint and connoisseur who always, the one in his simple, the other in his elaborate way, do what is unaccountable, and forbid life itself which, being, as the definition says, the only thing that moves itself, is always without precedent. When our age too has passed, when its moments also, that are so common and many, seem scarce and precious, students will perhaps open these books, printed by village girls at Dundrum, as curiously as at twenty years I opened the books of history and ballad verse of the old “Library of Ireland.” They will notice that this new “Library,” where I have gathered so much that seems to me representative or beautiful, unlike the old, is intended for few people, and written by men and women with that ideal condemned by “Mary of the Nation,” who wished, as she said, to make no elaborate beauty and to write nothing but what a peasant could understand. If they are philosophic or phantastic, it may even amuse them to find some analogy of the old with O’Connell’s hearty eloquence, his winged dart shot always into the midst of the people, his mood of comedy; and of the new, with that lonely and haughty person below whose tragic shadow we of modern Ireland began to write.

II The melancholy, the philosophic irony, the elaborate music of a play by John Synge,

the simplicity, the sense of splendor of living in Lady Gregory’s lamentation of Emer, Mr James Stephens when he makes the sea waves “Tramp with banners on the shore” are as much typical of our thoughts and day, as was “She dwelt beside the Anner with mild eyes like the dawn,” or any stanza of “The Pretty Girl of Loch Dan,” or any novel of Charles Lever’s of a time that sought to bring Irish men and women into one nation by means of simple patriotism and a genial taste for oratory and anecdotes. A like change passed over Ferrara’s brick and stone when its great Duke, where there had been but narrow medieval streets, made many palaces and threw out one straight and wide street, as Carducci said, to meet the Muses. Doubtless the men of “Perdóndaris that famous city” have such antiquity of manners and of culture that it is of small moment should they please themselves with some tavern humour; but we must needs cling to “our foolish Irish pride” and form an etiquette, if we would not have our people crunch their chicken bones with too convenient teeth, and make our intellect architectural that we may not see them turn domestic and effusive nor nag at one another in narrow streets.

III Some of the writers of our school have intended, so far as any creative art can have deliberate intention, to make this change, a change having more meaning and implications than a few sentences can define. When I was first moved by Lord Dunsany’s work I thought that he would more help this change if he could bring his imagination into the old Irish legendary world instead of those magic lands of his with their vague Eastern air; but even as I urged him I knew that he could not, without losing his rich beauty of careless suggestion, and the persons and images that for ancestry have all those romantic ideas that are somewhere in the background of all our minds. He could not have made Slieve-na-Mon nor Slieve Fua incredible and phantastic enough, because that prolonged study of a past age, necessary before he could separate them from modern association, would have changed the spontaneity of his mood to something learned, premeditated, and scientific. When we approach subtle elaborate emotions we can but give our minds up to play or become as superstitious as an old woman, for we cannot hope to understand. It is one of my superstitions that we became entangled in a dream some twenty years ago; but I do not know whether this dream was born in Ireland from the beliefs of the country men and women, or whether we but gave ourselves up to a foreign habit as our spirited Georgian fathers did to gambling, sometimes lying, as their history has it, on the roadside naked, but for the heap of straw they had pulled over them, till they could wager a lock of hair or the paring of a nail against what might set them up in clothes again. Whether it came from Slieve-na-Mon or Mount Abora, AE found it with his gods and I in my Land of Heart’s Desire, which no longer pleases me much. And then it seemed far enough till Mr Edward Martyn discovered his ragged Peg Inerney, who for all that was a queen in faery; but soon John Synge was to see all the world as a withered and witless place in comparison with the dazzle of that

dream; and now Lord Dunsany has seen it once more and as simply as if he were a child imagining adventures for the knights and ladies that rode out over the drawbridges in the piece of old tapestry in its mother’s room. But to persuade others that it is all but one dream, or to persuade them that Lord Dunsany has his part in that change I have described I have but my superstition and this series of little books where I have set his tender, pathetic, haughty fancies among books by Lady Gregory, by AE, by Dr Douglas Hyde, by John Synge, and by myself. His work which seems today so much on the outside, as it were, of life and daily interest, may yet seem to those students I have imagined rooted in both. Did not the Maeterlinck of Pelleas and Melisande seem to be outside life? and now he has so influenced other writers, he has been so much written about, he has been associated with so much celebrated music, he has been talked about by so many charming ladies, that he is less a vapour than that Dumas fils who wrote of such a living Paris. And has not Edgar Allan Poe, having entered the imagination of Baudelaire, touched that of Europe? for there are seeds still carried upon a tree, and seeds so light they drift upon the wind and yet can prove that they, give them but time, carry a big tree. Had I read “The Fall of Babbulkund” or “Idle Days on the Yann” when a boy I had perhaps been changed for better or worse, and looked to that first reading as the creation of my world; for when we are young the less circumstantial, the further from common life a book is, the more does it touch our hearts and make us dream. We are idle, unhappy and exorbitant, and like the young Blake admit no city beautiful that is not paved with gold and silver.

IV These plays and stories have for their continual theme the passing away of gods and men and cities before the mysterious power which is sometimes called by some great god’s name but more often “Time.” His travelers, who travel by so many rivers and deserts and listen to sounding names none heard before, come back with no tale that does not tell of vague rebellion against that power, and all the beautiful things they have seen get something of their charm from the pathos of fragility. This poet who has imagined colours, ceremonies and incredible processions that never passed before the eyes of Edgar Allan Poe or of De Quincey, and remembered as much fabulous beauty as Sir John Mandeville, has yet never wearied of the most universal of emotions and the one most constantly associated with the sense of beauty; and when we come to examine those astonishments that seemed so alien we find that he has but transfigured with beauty the common sights of the world. He describes the dance in the air of large butterflies as we have seen it in the sun-steeped air of noon. “And they danced but danced idly, on the wings of the air, as some haughty queen of distant conquered lands might in her poverty and exile dance in some encampment of the gipsies for the mere bread to live by, but beyond this would never abate her pride to dance for one fragment more.” He can show us the movement of sand, as we have seen it where the sea shore meets the grass, but so changed that it becomes the

deserts of the world: “and all that night the desert said many things softly and in a whisper but I knew not what he said. Only the sand knew and arose and was troubled and lay down again and the wind knew. Then, as the hours of the night went by, these two discovered the foot-tracks wherewith we had disturbed the holy desert and they troubled over them and covered them up; and then the wind lay down and the sand rested.” Or he will invent some incredible sound that will yet call before us the strange sounds of the night, as when he says, “sometimes some monster of the river coughed.” And how he can play upon our fears with that great gate of his carved from a single ivory tusk dropped by some terrible beast; or with his tribe of wanderers that pass about the city telling one another tales that we know to be terrible from the blanched faces of the listeners though they tell them in an unknown tongue; or with his stone gods of the mountain, for “when we see rock walking it is terrible” “rock should not walk in the evening.” Yet say what I will, so strange is the pleasure that they give, so hard to analyse and describe, I do not know why these stories and plays delight me. Now they set me thinking of some old Irish jewel work, now of a sword covered with Indian Arabesques that hangs in a friend’s hall, now of St Mark’s at Venice, now of cloud palaces at the sundown; but more often still of a strange country or state of the soul that once for a few weeks I entered in deep sleep and after lost and have ever mourned and desired.

V Not all Lord Dunsany’s moods delight me, for he writes out of a careless abundance; and from the moment I first read him I have wished to have between two covers something of all the moods that do. I believe that I have it in this book, which I have just been reading aloud to an imaginative young girl more French than English, whose understanding, that of a child and of a woman, and expressed not in words but in her face, has doubled my own. Some of my selections, those that I have called “A Miracle” and “The Castle of Time” are passages from stories of some length, and I give but the first act of Argimēnēs, a play in the repertory of the Abbey Theatre, but each selection can be read I think with no thoughts but of itself. If “Idle Days on the Yann” is a fragment it was left so by its author and if I am moved to complain I shall remember that perhaps not even his imagination could have found adventures worthy of a traveller who had passed “memorable, holy Golnuz, and heard the pilgrims praying,” and smelt burned poppies in Mandaroon.

Chapter 5

Lord Dunsany’s Peculiar Genius Montrose J. Moses Those who are steeped in present-day drama are thoroughly aware of the true import of Lord Dunsany’s work. His appeal is the natural consequence of an era of realism, of a problematical approach toward the facts of life, instituted by Henrik Ibsen, self-consciously preached by Bernard Shaw, and carried to the extreme of a scientific mania by Eugène Brieux. In the stifling atmosphere of clinical examination, where the fact is lauded as against the spirit, a refreshing zephyr, carrying with it an aroma which is neither of the land nor of the sea, has brought Lord Dunsany into his own. Many times before have we had poets and dramatists representative of moods; but we have, after heralding these peculiar geniuses, seen their moods either drag them down, or be forsaken by them for something more permanent. Therefore, instead of talking with finality about the peculiar genius of Lord Dunsany, let us take him at his face value, and say that in this first period of his, which has been untouched by the spiritual tumult of war, he represents an oasis in the desert of what has now become stagnant realism. Lord Dunsany has not come upon us without an inheritance back of him. Apart from the fact that he is the eighteenth baron of his line, which in itself shows him well founded in Irish heraldry, after one has read his little plays it becomes clearly evident that his literary significance owes something to the Irish Renaissance. We are told that he never would have thought of writing plays had it not been for the encouragement of W. B. Yeats, who will be remembered in the future quite as much for his services in giving us Synge as for his own poetic genius displayed in the writing of “Cathleen Ni Houlihan.” A reviewer, in the London Bookman, confesses that she approached the “Fiftyone Tales” with a prejudice because Dunsany was a “Lord”; but she, who had come to scoff, wrote a review sounding his praises. The facts of Lord Dunsany’s life have little to do with his genius or his point of view. His social position may have served to give him the ironical slant which is one of his most refreshing veins, and which often comes to the rescue in relieving him of a certain artificial gloom; his love of hunting, his outdoor freedom—all of these may be mingled in some way with his artistic expression. But Dunsany is a contradiction: aristocrat though he be, his sympathies are on the side of the peasant class in Ireland; fighter though he is in the cause of England, his political faith is one which cannot entirely be sympathetic with the political attitude of England. Had he not a spirit naturally concerned with art and beauty; had he not a mind pricked to a keen discernment of the follies of civilization, his is a temperament which very readily could have grown blasé. But there is something invigorating about Lord Dunsany, despite his detachment in all the things he writes. Were he not Irish, with that inborn genius which the Irishman has for living in the

atmosphere of unreality, once he has forsaken the real, we might declare that Dunsany had taken the keynote of his work from Shelley’s incomparable sonnet, “Ozymandias.” We might further assure ourselves that, spurred by the critical impulse of Matthew Arnold in such of his poems as “The Buried Life” and “The Future,” he was seeking, in all he wrote, for the real source of life, not to be found in any located history, but in those pristine times which are characteristic of the imagination. Even as Arnold sang— What girl Now reads in her bosom as clear As Rebekah read, when she sate At eve by the palm-shaded well? Who guards in her breast As deep, as pellucid, a spring Of feeling, as tranquil, as sure?

—so does Dunsany turn away from the dull, sluggish current of life in which he finds himself, and create not only a theogony of his own invention, but a geography of the world as well. It is a comparatively easy matter to fall into a mood, and to give one’s self up entirely to it. But Lord Dunsany’s invention measures genius because of the fact that, even though his plays are lacking in the essential humanity which marks our greatest dramas, even though his gods are more irrevocable and more ironically revengeful than the Hebrew God in their dealings with men, whatever he writes is fraught with the philosophic fervor which, though it be not original, nevertheless indicates his constant concern regarding the morals of existence. Lord Dunsany has reigned supreme in American theatrical attention for the past year. He may be said to have come into his own during this period. But a few people have been reading him since 1905, and some of his plays have graced the repertory of the Abbey Theatre since 1909. He has been a journalist, a theatre reviewer, and has published an essay on “Romance and the Modern Stage.” The literary world has, therefore, had opportunity in the past twelve years to judge Dunsany. Yet, not until now has popularity fallen upon him. Wherever a small group of enthusiastic lovers of the play are to be found today, one may be certain of witnessing some amateur performance of one of Dunsany’s very actable little pieces. It is easy to sum up the general attitude of Lord Dunsany toward life. He is thoroughly convinced that machinery and the complications of modern life have kept us from the immediate discovery of our more important life; that, to quote him, “too much information about the fads and fashions of empty lives is stealing, year by year, the traditions and simplicity even of rural people.” Yet he, too, creates a machinery of drama equally as complicated. In his mythology, “The Gods of Pegāna,” he declares that wisdom is not in cities, nor is happiness to be found in wisdom; he insists that the gods, thousands of years ago, being in mirthful mood, cried out, “Let Us call up a man before Us that We may laugh in Pegāna.” That is the philosophical stream permeating the dramas he has written. He is forever showing the smallness of man before the inevitable greatness of

the gods of his own creation. You find this attitude in “The Queen’s Enemies,” “The Gods of the Mountain,” and “The Glittering Gate.” Not only is this peculiar to him, but Lord Dunsany is one who does not recognize any good to man coming from life in cities. His stories and his plays ring the persistent note of wanting to escape, as Keats would say, being “in city pent.” He chants this belief in “The Tents of the Arabs”; it is the attitude which brings him much humor in that little tale he calls “The Hen.” One very quickly reaches the insistent note in Dunsany even as one feels, after having read two or more of his plays, his insistent mood. It is dominant whether he is reviewing a play or whether he is estimating the poetical work of others. In 1910 he witnessed Synge’s “Deirdre of the Sorrows,” which was played in London, and he came away with the impression that it was not a drama native of cities; that it was too full of wonder. And to live is to wonder, according to Dunsany. “Dreams are true while they last,” sang Tennyson, “and do we not live in dreams?” This is, likewise, Dunsany’s question to us all. He is against the factory, and against the half-penny newspaper life. But though he himself travels continually in an unknown land, he is not blind to man’s attachment to earth. “Synge is never far away from the fields of men,” he writes—“his is not the inspiration of the skylark remote from earth; our wonder at his fancy is as our wonder at the flight of the white owl low down near beautiful fields. And what things he has found there: new things even about death. There is in this play the old Greek defiance of death.” When Dunsany’s enthusiasms are called into play, he is one who is willing to rate high where his affections have fallen. His critical designation is generous, and he is as eager to credit Synge with characteristics applicable to Homer, as he is to measure his peasant poet friend, Francis Ledwidge, by the same standard. After reading Ledwidge’s “Lyrics,” we see, not the greatness of Homer but the simple beauty of Wordsworth. Nevertheless, there is a boyish warmth to Lord Dunsany’s appreciation. “Poets are all incomparable,” he confesses, and then, with his usual suggestive irony, he adds, “It is only the versifiers who resemble the great ones.” In writing his tribute to his peasant-poet, who is now fighting with him in the Fifth Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, he adds this hope, which must indeed measure his own hope, that “not too many will be attracted to this book on account of the author being a peasant, lest he come to be praised by the ‘how-interesting’ school; for know that neither in any class, nor in any country, nor in any age, shall you predict the footfall of Pegasus, who touches the earth where he pleaseth and is bridled by whom he will.” It is said that when Dunsany was a boy his reading was watched carefully. He was confined mostly to the Bible, to Grimm and Hans Andersen, and to the literature and mythology of Greece. These were his models, and there are some enthusiastic adherents who see in Dunsany’s prose the influence of the King James version; who measure his poetic imagination by the direct influence he had from Greek legend. They claim for him that he has invented a Fate out of Pegāna as inevitable and as binding as the Fate which permeates the dramas of Sophocles and Euripides. Lord Dunsany does not credit himself with such greatness. He is more modest

than his adherents picture him. It is easy to see that he writes in his particular mood because, untaxed by cloying fact, his imagination is free to wander where it will. We give his genius credit for this ability to wander, and we take at its face value what he has to say regarding his workmanship. Facility moves his pen; this confession is found in a letter claiming that “The Queen’s Enemies” is the one of his plays possessing a borrowed theme; he thus forestalls that critic who found the counterpart to this play in Professor Jerram’s “Anglice Reddenda,” under the title of “A Woman’s Revenge.” “It was not only easier, but more amusing, to imagine her character [the Queen’s] and all the names of her enemies than to be bothered with reading about her. And since she was a live woman, whenever the Sixth Dynasty was thriving in Egypt, I think she came a little more alive out of my fancy than she might have done out of some dusty book.” In other words, Dunsany is forever pointing the way for one to escape facts, which are dull and belong by rights, as he confesses, to “journalists, politicians, owners of encyclopedias, and manufacturers of ugly things.” People are forever reading into Dunsany what he does not wish them to read. In his correspondence, he declares: “When I write of Babylon there are people who cannot see that I write of it for love of Babylon’s ways, and they think I’m thinking of London still and our beastly Parliament.” I quite agree with Dunsany that he needs no explanation; that whatever beauty there is in his little plays of mood must be taken unanalyzed and on their total effect. A close scrutiny would be justified only were they fraught, as Synge’s “Riders to the Sea” and “The Shadow of the Glen” are fraught, with human valuation. He declares that he wants “to write about men and women and the great forces that have been with them from their cradle up—forces that the centuries have neither aged nor weakened. Not about people who are so interested about the latest mascot or motor that not enough remains when the trivial is sifted from them.” But even at that, his people escape him in an ether which leaves us unmoved, yet curious. With that object in mind, however, he has selected for his themes very simple stories—“so simple,” he writes, “that sometimes people of this complex age, being brought up in intricacies, even fail to understand them.” He will not have read into “The Gods of the Mountain” anything more than that irony which comes when one finally gets what he wants. Here are some beggars who wish to be gods, and pretend to be; the real gods come along, and make them gods, and in the granting of their desire lies the punishment. Writing to Stuart Walker, of the Portmanteau Theatre, who was about to put on “The Golden Doom,” Lord Dunsany referred to the time-element in his plays. He said: “The ‘public’ must needs know exactly ‘when it all happened,’ so I never neglect to inform them of the time. Since raw man does not alter, it does not in the least matter what time I put, unless I am writing a play about his clothes or his motor-car, so I put ‘about the time of the fall of Babylon.’ It seemed a nice breezy time, but ‘about the time of the invention of Carter’s Pills’ would of course do equally well. Well, the result was that they went to the British Museum and got the exact costumes of the period in Babylon, and it did very nicely. There are sure to have been people who said, ‘Now,

my children, you shall come to the theatre and enjoy yourselves, but at the same time you shall learn exactly what it was really like in Babylon.’ The fact is the schoolmaster has got loose and he must be caged, so that people can enjoy themselves without being pounced on and made to lead better lives, like African natives being carried away by lions while they danced.” I have quoted this because so little has been written about Lord Dunsany that we have to rely entirely on his self-revealed spirit to judge wherein the manner of the man and the mood of his plays are one. Not only must the gods be laughing a little at our overestimate of Lord Dunsany, but he himself must be chuckling at the apparent ease with which he has “put it over” on his admirers. I will accept all his parables in the “Fifty-one Tales,” and find in them agreeableness of style, beauty of thought, striking poetic expression, and the kind of irony one falls into after reading La Fontaine for some time, though La Fontaine beats him at the human game! I will not deny him one bit of the inherent genius which such imaginative work requires—such a style is easy to imitate, but not so easy to originate. Nor is storytelling acquired through imitation. Lord Dunsany’s creative sense has literally come from himself. However much a reader of fairy tales he may have been in his youth, however much people may say that they could easily learn the “trick” by saturating themselves in the “Arabian Nights,” the fact remains that Lord Dunsany correlates imaginative facility with marked skill in storytelling. To the historian of the drama a chronological arrangement of Dunsany’s plays may be suggestive. But in fairness to him, we must take in bulk the seven little dramas we have seen and read, determining therefrom whether he has yet mastered the one-act form; whether, from the act divisions of “The Gods of the Mountain,” or “King Argimenes,” he would be capable in the future of mastering the longer form of playwriting. It is our opinion that the Dunsany mood, as he now has stated it, would not spread effectively over a wide surface without the introduction of a more human element; without dealing with more passion even than one finds in such a beautiful little piece as “The Tents of the Arabs,” which is Dunsany’s irony regarding cities coupled with some of his most feeling poetry. There is an historical play, “Alexander,” yet to be published. It was started in collaboration with Padraic Colum; but all that remains to mark that association is Colum’s dedication affixed to his latest published drama, “Mogu the Wanderer.” Is this Dunsany piece “located history”? Relieved of the same machinery which in his earlier period bound Maeterlinck to certain formal expression and which forever cast a peculiar shadow over the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe, we do not realize as yet what Lord Dunsany would be. Certainly, such a quaint, frivolous conceit as “The Lost Silk Hat” could never foreshadow that he would be happy in the atmosphere of society drama. There is not one of his plays which, as yet, has hinted at a national consciousness, like Yeats’s “Cathleen Ni Houlihan.” He does not seem to be wedded to the cause of the Irish Theatre. Nor has he, from the Irish standpoint, made use of the folklore of Ireland. Interested though he may be in preserving the peasant beauties of his own country, he has not himself come under that immediate influence, even though he is able to

appreciate it when it appears. What does he say further regarding the poetry of Synge? Speaking of his style, he writes: “New words like these of some great thing are needed in this age, when thought is becoming molded in old phrases. . . . The simple homeliness of the words in this play [“Deirdre”] reveals both for Synge and for the peasants whom he knew a near familiarity with the world’s great impulses such as war and spring. Great words are often wrapped round nothingness, as echoes are loudest in the emptiest cave. Tawdriness dresses herself gorgeously. But when household words are used about the gods, we know that the gods are very near to the household.” It has been claimed for Lord Dunsany that even as his “Fifty-one Tales” may be taken as a dramatist’s notebook, containing jottings which he may, or may not, use later in his work, so his little dramas are themselves the quintessence of reticence, wherein only essential dialogue is used. In proof of this, some enthusiasts are prone to compare his method with that of Maeterlinck in the early “marionette” plays, like “The Princess Maleine,” where repetition of dialogue is seemingly trivial in its value. There are passages in Dunsany which are likewise ineffective in their repetition. But, in the last analysis, Maeterlinck’s repetition is not unconscious; from it he wrings a psychological effect which Lord Dunsany does not completely obtain. However compelling “The Gods of the Mountain” and “A Night at an Inn” may be, and these are Lord Dunsany at his high-water mark, we cannot, in any way, find a play of his whose greatness is comparable with Maeterlinck’s “The Intruder.” Yet Dunsany has been compared with the Greeks! He has the weakness, which always comes in the wake of romanticism, especially when romanticism will not compromise with realism, and use its redeeming observation of life. Dunsany is weighted with trappings which dull his psychology and its effect. We may ask whether this dramatist has the power of individualizing his characters. On close examination, we arrive at the conclusion that he can, although his characterization is of the slightest stroke. There is an individuality to Agmar, the beggar, in “The Gods of the Mountain,” but his associates are a dead-level group as character goes, more so than Maeterlinck’s blind in “The Blind,” who at least show psychological variation. One perceives differences of bearing in the two burglars who stand before “The Glittering Gate,” but not those human peculiarities which would make us interested rather than curious in regard to what they are doing there. Even Dunsany’s children, in “The Golden Doom,” about whom he has written, do not strike us with that simplicity, with that nearness to heaven about them that characterizes little Yniold, for instance, in Maeterlinck’s “Pelleas and Melisande.” Enthusiastic though I am about Dunsany’s plays, I cannot place his accomplishment too high in the rank of genius, though I can recognize in him a most hopeful sign in our drama year. Were he to do nothing more, we might say that his “Gods of the Mountain” would establish him definitely in the history of modern drama, but would not place him above Synge, nor even above Yeats, who, were he to fail in drama, would live in Irish poetry. Dunsany would, however, even on the merits of this

one play, be unique, and abundantly dramatic in an external way. That Dunsany is sincerely interested in art may be seen from his financial contributions to the Irish Theatre as recorded by George Moore, and his contributions to the Theatre of Art in Florence, as recorded by Gordon Craig. His correspondence with Stuart Walker, of the Portmanteau Theatre, shows that, though his dramas are conceived with ease, there is a definiteness in his mind as to their interpretation. They are dramas that lend themselves very readily to the new scenery, even as his tales called forth all that was creative in the illustrator, Sime. And in the same way that the new scenery has its limitations, so have the Dunsany dramas. Dunsany has established a mannerism which is interesting, and all the more so, coming at a time when people are growing impatient of realism. There is none of big, poetic quality, of that universal appeal which characterizes Hazelton and Benrimo’s “The Yellow Jacket.” They are both exotics, but I think “The Yellow Jacket,” imitative though the work may be of Chinese convention, has more claim to greatness, if not to depth. When one witnesses Dunsany’s plays in succession, their mood begins to pall slightly, even as one sometimes tires of the thickness of Poe’s morbid aroma. At the Neighborhood Playhouse, this year, “The Queen’s Enemies” was given with scenery which encompassed the very large imaginative scene of the piece. I have likewise witnessed “A Night at an Inn” done in that same mysterious manner; breathless pauses, sepulchral tones, and shadowy action punctuate all of Dunsany’s dramas. Mr. Walker, in his Portmanteau Theatre, has given three of the little plays with dignity of bearing and richness of color. They have proved effective because they have appealed to the wonder element which realistic drama has heretofore discounted. That is why Dunsany is so potent a factor at present. We do not wish to rate him too highly; we wish to see a further development. He is only thirty-nine. But he is inclined to take a fatalistic attitude toward the part he is playing in the war. He escaped death in his campaign through the Transvaal during the Boer War, traces of an experience which critics joyously announce may be seen in “King Argimenes.” He has recovered from a wound received during the recent Dublin riots. Thus far, he has moved safely through battle in France. He writes: “Sometimes I think that no man is taken hence until he has done the work he is here to do, and, looking back on five battles and other escapes from death, this theory seems plausible; but how can one hold it when one thinks of the deaths of Shelley and Keats? “But in case I shall not be able to explain my work, I think the first thing to tell them [the public] is that it does not need explanation. One does not explain a sunset, nor does one need to explain a work of art. One may analyze, of course; that is profitable and interesting, but the growing demand to be told What It’s All About before one can even enjoy becomes absurd.” Yes, the more we consider Lord Dunsany, the more we are reminded of Shelley’s sonnet on “Ozymandias.” He too is a traveller from an antique land, who has witnessed the crumbling city of Ozymandias, King of Kings. As he wrote in barracks, so lately as January 4, 1917, to a friend: “Well, I

suppose I am a great traveller; of any country that I have ever been to I have scarcely ever written—though all we see probably influences us—but it is of the countries that I have not travelled in that I have written, the longing for travel perhaps moving my pen, the spirit telling of lands where it had gone and the body had not followed. For instance, I have travelled a thousand miles up the Nile, and lived a while in the Sahara; and I have written a tale of a journey down a vast river called ‘Idle Days on the Yann,’ and a tale of the Sahara called ‘A Story of Land and Sea.’ But those tales were written before I made the journeys that might be supposed to have influenced them. ‘How inaccurate such tales must be,’ I can imagine some dull soul exclaiming; but to such a person I would say, ‘There are other things in the world than facts, my friend.’ And I would leave him to go away and read Bradshaw, his railway guide, which is the quintessence of fact, unspoiled by style, fancy, philosophy, enthusiasm, mirth, or anything at all to stand in the way of a dull soul in silent commune with unromantic fact.” Let us be thankful that the theatre has such a man as this working for it. But let us in our sincere estimate of him, save him from his ecstatic friends.

Chapter 6

Lord Dunsany and His Work H. P. Lovecraft The relatively slight recognition hitherto accorded Lord Dunsany, who is perhaps the most unique, original, and richly imaginative of living authors, forms an amusing commentary on the natural stupidity of mankind. Conservatives view him with patronage because he does not concern himself with the hoary fallacies and artificialities which constitute their supreme values. Radicals slight him because his work does not display that chaotic defiance of taste which to them is the sole identifying mark of authentic modern disillusion. And yet one might hardly err in claiming that he should have the homage of both rather than of neither; for surely if any man has extracted and combined the residue of true art in older and newer schools alike, it is this singular giant in whom the classic, the Hebraic, and Nordic, and the Irish aesthetic traditions are so curiously and admirably combined. General knowledge of Dunsany seems to be limited to a vague impression that he is a member of the Celtic revival group who writes odd plays. Like most general knowledge, this is sadly fractional and incomplete, and in many ways somewhat misleading. Dunsany belongs, properly speaking, to no group whatsoever; while the mere authorship of dramatic phantasies is a small enough item in the personality of one whose poetic stories and plays reflect the sheer genius of a distinctive philosophy and aesthetic outlook. Dunsany is not a national but a universal artist; and his paramount quality is not simply weirdness, but a certain godlike and impersonal vision of cosmic scope and perspective, which comprehends the insignificance, cloudiness, futility, and tragic absurdity of all life and reality. His main work belongs to what modern critics have called the “literature of escape”; the literature of conscious unreality created out of an intelligent and sophisticated conviction that analysed reality has no heritage save of chaos, pain, and disappointment. He is in this way both a conservative and a modern; a conservative because he still believes that beauty is a thing of golden rememberings and simple patterns, and a modern because he perceives that only in arbitrarily selected fancy can we find fixed any of the patterns which fit our golden rememberings. He is the supreme poet of wonder, but of the intelligently assumed wonder to which one turns after experiencing the fullest disillusion of realism. Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Eighteenth Baron Dunsany, was born in 1878 at Dunsany Castle, County Meath, Ireland; and is a representative of the oldest and greatest blood in the British Empire. His race stock is predominantly Teutonic and Scandinavian—Norman and Danish—circumstance which gives to him the frosty heritage of Northern lore rather than the wilder and more mystical Celtic tradition. His family, however, is closely woven into the life of Ireland; and it is his uncle, the statesman Sir Horace Plunkett, who first proposed the Dominion idea now applied in the creation of the Irish Free State. Lord Dunsany himself is a loyalist Imperialist in sympathies, a valiant officer in the British army, and veteran of both Boer and World

wars. Dunsany’s earliest youth was spent at the ancestral estate of his mother, Dunstall Priory, Shoreham, Kent, England. He had a room whose windows faced the hills and the sunset, and to these vistas of golden earth and sky he attributes much of his poetic tendency. His unique manner of expression was promoted by his mother’s careful choice of his reading; newspapers were wholly excluded, and the King James Bible made the principal article of literary diet. The effect of this reading on his style was permanent and marvellously beneficial. The simplicity and purity of archaic English, and the artistic repetitions of the Hebrew psalmists, all became his without conscious effort; so that to this day he has escaped the vitiation common to most modern prose writers. At his first public school, Cheam School, Dunsany received still more of the biblical influence, and obtained his first touch of an influence still more valuable: that of the Greek classics. In Homer he found a spirit of wonder akin to his own, and throughout his work one may trace the inspiration of the Odyssey—an epic, by the way, which is probably of much vaster genius than its more martial antecedent, the Iliad. The Odyssey teems with just that glamour of strange, far lands which is Dunsany’s prime attribute. After Cheam School came Eton, and after that Sandhurst, where the youthful Edward Plunkett was trained to that profession of arms which becomes a scion of nobility. In 1899 the Boer War broke out, and the youth fought with the Coldstream Guards through all its hardships. Also in 1899 he succeeded to his ancient title and his majority; the boy Edward Plunkett had become Lord Dunsany, man and soldier. Dunsany first appears in literature shortly after the dawn of the new century, as a patron of the work of the Irish literary group. In 1905 he published his first book, “The Gods of Pegāna,” in which his original genius shines through the fantastic creation of a new and artificial Aryan mythology; a perfectly developed cycle of nature-allegories with all the infinite charm and shrewd philosophy of natural legendry. After that other books appeared in swift succession, all illustrated by the weird artist Sidney H. Sime. In “Time and the Gods” (1906), the mythic idea was extended with increasing vividness. “The Sword of Welleran” (1908) sings of a world of men and heroes ruled by Pegāna’s gods, as does “A Dreamer’s Tales” (1910). We here find the best Dunsanian forms fully developed; the Hellenic sense of conflict and fatality, the magnificently cosmic point of view, the superbly lyrical flow of language, the Oriental splendour of colouring and imagery, the titanic fertility and ingenuity of imagination, the mystical glamour of fabulous lands “beyond the East” or “at the edge of the world,” and the amazing facility for devising musical, alluring, and wonder-making proper names, personal and geographical, on classical and Oriental models. Some of Dunsany’s tales deal with the objective world we know, and of strange wonders therein; but the best of them are about lands conceivable only in purple dream. These are fashioned in that purely decorative spirit which means the highest art, having no visible moral or didactic element save such quaint allegory as may inhere in the type of legendary lore to which they belong. Dunsany’s only didactic idea is an artist’s

hatred of the ugly, the stupid, and the commonplace. We see it occasionally in touches of satire on social institutions, and bits of lamentation over the pollution of Nature by grimy cities and hideous advertising signs. Of all human institutions, the billboard is most abhorrent to Lord Dunsany. In 1909 Dunsany wrote his first play, “The Glittering Gate,” at the request of W. B. Yeats, who desired something of his for the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Despite the author’s absolute previous inexperience, the result was highly successful; and turned Dunsany toward a steady career of dramatic composition. Though the present writer continues to prefer the stories, most critics unite in giving higher praise to the plays; and certainly the latter possess a brilliancy of dialogue and sureness of technique which place Dunsany among the greatest of dramatists. What simplicity! What fancy! What exalted speech! Like the stories, the best of the plays are of fantastic plot and setting. Most are very short, though at least two, “If” and “Alexander,” are of full length. The most esteemed is perhaps “The Gods of the Mountain,” which tells of the fate of seven beggars in the city of Kongros, who impersonated the seven green jade gods who sit on the mountain Marma. Green, by the way, is a favourite colour in Dunsany’s work; and green jade its most frequent embodiment. In this play the Nietzschean figure of the chief beggar Agmar is drawn with a master’s stroke, and is likely to live permanently among the vivid characters of the world’s drama. Other marvellously powerful plays are “A Night at an Inn”—a bit worthy of the Parisian Grand Guignol—and “The Queen’s Enemies,” an elaborated Egyptian incident from Herodotus. It is impossible to exaggerate the pure genius for dramatic utterance and situation which Dunsany shews in his best plays. They are thoroughly classical in every sense. Dunsany’s attitude of wonder is, as we have noted, a consciously cultivated one, overlying a keenly philosophical and sophisticated intelligence. It is therefore not remarkable that with the years an element of visible satire and acute humour began to appear in his work. There is, indeed, an interesting parallelism between him and that other great Irishman Oscar Wilde, whose fantastic and wittily worldly sides were so delightfully blended, and who had the same divine gift of gorgeous prose and exotic imagery. In 1912 appeared “The Book of Wonder,” whose brief fantastic tales all hold a certain humorous doubt of their own solemnity and truth. Soon afterward came “The Lost Silk Hat,” a one-act comedy of manners equalling in sheer sparkle and cleverness anything even Sheridan could devise; and since then the serious side of Dunsany has been steadily on the wane, despite occasional plays and tales which shew a survival of the absolute beauty worshipper. “Fifty-One Tales,” published in 1915, having something of the urbane prose-poetic spirit of a philosophical Baudelaire, whilst “The Last Book of Wonder” (1916) is like the first volume of kindred title. Only in the scattered fragments forming “Tales of Three Hemispheres” (1919) do we find strong reminders of the older, simpler Dunsany. “If” (1922), the new long play, is mainly satirical comedy with one brief touch of exotic eloquence. “Don Rodriguez,” just announced by the publishers, has not been read by the present writer; but may have more of the old Dunsany. It is his first novel, and is highly

regarded by those reviewers who have seen it. “Alexander,” a full-length play based on Plutarch, was written in 1912 and is considered by the author as his best work. It is to be regretted that this drama has been neither published nor acted. Dunsany’s shorter plays are grouped in two volumes. “Five Plays,” containing “The Gods of the Mountain,” “The Golden Doom,” “King Argimēnēs and the Unknown Warrior,” “The Glittering Gate,” and “The Lost Silk Hat,” was published in 1914. In 1917 appeared “Plays of Gods and Men,” with “The Tents of the Arabs,” “The Laughter of the Gods,” “The Queen’s Enemies,” and “A Night at an Inn.” Dunsany has never forsaken his position as a patron of letters, and was the literary sponsor of the Irish peasant poet Ledwidge—that immortaliser of the blackbird, who fell in the Great War while serving in the Fifth Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers with Dunsany as his captain. The war engrossed much of Dunsany’s imagination, since he saw active service in France and in the Dublin revolt of 1916, when he was badly wounded. This engrossment is shewn by a volume of charming and sometimes pathetic stories, “Tales of War” (1918), and a collection of reminiscent essays, “Unhappy Far-Off Things” (1920). His general view of war is the sane one: that conflict is a disaster as inevitable as the tides and the seasons. America is highly regarded by Dunsany, since it has been readier than the mother country to give him what little appreciation he has. Most of his plays have been acted here by “Little Theatre” companies, especially that of Stuart Walker, and at times considerable enthusiasm has been developed. All such productions have been made with the careful supervision of the author, whose letters of directions are eminently interesting. Dunsany plays are favourites with many collegiate dramatic societies, and justly so. In 1919–20 Dunsany made a lecture tour of the United States, where he was generally well received. The personality of Lord Dunsany is exceedingly attractive, as can be attested by the present writer, who sat in a front seat directly opposite him when he spoke in the Copley-Plaza ballroom in Boston in October 1919. On that occasion he outlined his literary theories with much charm, and read in full his playlet, “The Queen’s Enemies.” He is a very tall man—six feet four—of medium breadth, with fair complexion, blue eyes, high forehead, abundant light brown hair, and a small moustache of the same colour. His face is wholesomely and delicately handsome, and his expression is one of charming and whimsical kindliness with a certain boyish quality which no amount of worldly experience or his single eyeglass can efface. There is boyishness also in his walk and bearing, a trace of the stoop and the engaging awkwardness which one associates with adolescence. His voice is pleasant and mellow, and his accent the apex of British cultivation. His whole bearing is easy and familiar, so much so that the Boston Transcript’s reporter complained of his lack of unctuous platform presence. As a dramatic reader he undoubtedly lacks vividness and animation; obviously, he would be as poor as an actor as he is great as an author. He dresses with marked carelessness, and has been called the worst-dressed man in Ireland. Certainly, there was nothing impressive in the loosely draped evening attire which nebulously surrounded him during his American lecturers. To Boston autograph seekers he

proved very accommodating, refusing none despite a severe headache which forced his hand many times to his forehead. When he entered a cab his top hat was knocked off—thus do the small remember the mishaps of the great! Lord Dunsany is married to a daughter of Lord Jersey, and has one son, the Hon. Randal Plunkett, born in 1906. His tastes, far from being the morbid predilections of the traditional cynic and fantaisiste, are distinctly outdoor and normal, savouring rather of his feudal and baronial side. He is the best pistol shot in Ireland, an ardent cricketer and horseman, a big-game hunter, and a confirmed devotee of rural scenes. He has travelled extensively, especially in Africa; and lives alternately at his own Meath castle, at his mother’s place in Kent, and at his London home at 55, Lowndes Square. That he has the truly romantic quality of modest heroism, is attested by an incident when he rescued a man from drowning, and refused to reveal his name to the admiring crowds. Dunsany’s writing is always very rapid, and is done mainly in the late afternoon and early evening, with tea as a mild stimulant. He almost invariably employs a quill pen, whose broad, brush-like strokes are unforgettable by those who have seen his letters and manuscripts. His individuality appears in every phase of his activity, and involves not only an utterly unique simplicity of style but an utterly unique scarcity of punctuation which readers occasionally regret. About his work Dunsany spreads a quaint atmosphere of cultivated naiveté and childlike ignorance, and likes to refer to historical and other data with a delightfully artless air of unfamiliarity. His consistent aim is to survey the world with the impressionable freshness of unspoiled youth—or with the closest approach to that quality which his experience will allow. This idea sometimes plays havoc with his critical judgment, as was keenly realised in 1920, when he most considerately acted as Laureate Judge of Poetry for the United Amateur Press Association. Dunsany has the true aristocrat’s attitude toward his work; and whilst he would welcome fame, he would never think of debasing his art either for the philistine rabble or for the reigning clique of literary chaoticists. He writes purely for self-expression, and is therefore the ideal amateur journalist type. The ultimate position of Dunsany in literature depends largely on the future course of literature itself. Our age is one of curious transition and divergence, with an increasing separation of art from the past and from all common life as well. Modern science has, in the end, proved an enemy to art and pleasure; for by revealing to us the whole sordid and prosaic basis of our thoughts, motives, and acts, it has stripped the world of glamour, wonder, and all those illusions of heroism, nobility, and sacrifice which used to sound so impressive when romantically treated. Indeed, it is not too much to say that psychological discovery, and chemical, physical, and physiological research have largely destroyed the element of emotion among informed and sophisticated people by resolving it into its component parts—intellectual idea and animal impulse. The so-called “soul” with all its hectic and mawkish attributes of sentimentality, veneration, earnestness, devotion, and the like, has perished on analysis. Nietzsche brought a transvaluation of values, but Remy de Gourmont has brought a wholesale destruction of all values. We know now what a futile, aimless,

and disconnected welter of mirages and hypocrisies life is; and from the first shock of that knowledge has sprung the bizarre, tasteless, defiant, and chaotic literature of that terrible newer generation which so shocks our grandmothers—the aesthetic generation of T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Ben Hecht, Aldous Huxley, James Branch Cabell, and all the rest. These writers, knowing that life has no real pattern, either rave, or mock, or join in the cosmic chaos by exploiting a frank and conscious unintelligibility and confusion of values. To them it savours of the vulgar to adopt a pattern—for today only servants, churchgoers, and tired businessmen read things which mean anything or acknowledge any values. What chance, then, has an author who is neither stupid or common enough for the clientele of the Cosmopolitan, Saturday Evening Post, Harold Bell Wright, Snappy Stories, Atlantic Monthly, and Home Brew; nor confused, obscene, or hydrophobic enough for the readers of the Dial, Freeman, Nation, or New Republic, and the would-be readers of “Ulysses”? At present one tribe rejects him as “too highbrow,” whilst the other ignores him as impossibly tame and childishly comprehensible. Dunsany’s hope of recognition lies with the literati and not with the crowd, for his charms are those of a supremely delicate art and a gentle disillusion and world weariness which only the discriminating can ever enjoy. The necessary step toward such recognition is a rebound which is quite likely to come with a maturer understanding of modern disillusion and all its implications. Art has been wrecked by a complete consciousness of the universe which shews that the world is to each man only a rubbish heap limned by his individual perception. It will be saved, if at all, by the next and last step of disillusion; the realisation that complete consciousness and truth are themselves valueless, and that to acquire any genuine artistic titillation we must artificially invent limitations of consciousness and feign a pattern of life common to all mankind—most naturally the simple old pattern which ancient and groping tradition first gave us. When we see that the source of all joy and enthusiasm is wonder and ignorance, we shall be ready to play the old game of blindman’s buff with the mocking atoms and electrons of a purposeless infinity. It is then that we shall worship afresh the music and colour of divine language, and take an Epicurean delight in those combinations of ideas and fancies which we know to be artificial. Not that we can resume a serious attitude toward emotion— there is too much intellect abroad for that—but that we can revel in the Dresden-china Arcadia of an author who will play with the old ideas, atmospheres, types, situations, and lighting effects in a deft pictorial way; a way tinged with affectionate reminiscence as for fallen gods, yet never departing from a cosmic and gently satirical realisation of the true microscopic insignificance of the man-puppets and their petty relations to one another. Such an author may well avoid flippancy or vulgarity, but he must keep the intellectual point of view paramount even when hidden, and beware of speaking seriously with the voice of passions proved by modern psychology to be either hypocritically hollow or absurdly animal. And is not this a virtual description of Dunsany, a liquid prose poet who writes classic hexameters by accident, with his stage set for relentless deities and their still

more relentless conqueror Time; for cosmic chess games of Fate and Chance; for the funerals of dead gods; for the birth and death of universes; and for the simple annals of that speck in space called the world, which with its poor denizens is but one of countless playthings of the little gods, who are in turn only the dreams of MĀNA YOOD SUSHĀĪ? The balance between conservatism and sophistication in Dunsany is perfect; he is whimsically traditional, but just as conscious of the chaotic nullity of values as any assertive modern. With the same voice that sings god-moving forces he mourns with a child’s broken rocking horse, and tells how a boy’s wish for a hoop made a king sacrifice his crown to the stars; nor does he fail to chant of quiet villages, and the smoke of idyllic hearths, and the lights in cottage windows at evening. He creates a world which has never existed and never will exist, but which we have always known and longed for in dreams. This world he makes vivid not by pretending that it is real, but by exalting the quality of unreality and suffusing his whole dream universe with a delicate pessimism drawn half from modern psychology and half from our ancestral Northern myths of Ragnarock, the Twilight of the Gods. He is at once modern and mythologist, viewing life correctly as a series of meaningless pictures, but investing it with all the ancient formulae and saws which like frozen metaphors in language have become an integral part of our cherished heritage of associations. Dunsany is like nobody else. Wilde is his nearest congener, and there are points of kinship to Poe, De Quincey, Maeterlinck, and Yeats; but all comparisons are futile. His peculiar combination of matter and manner is unique in its imperious genius. He is not perfect, or not always perfect, but who indeed is continually so? Critics complain that he sometimes mixes satire with the atmosphere of tragedy; but this objection is a conventional one, and argues an unfamiliarity with the Irish tradition which has produced such perversely immortal classics as James Stephens’s “Crock of Gold.” They cavil, too, at his introduction of walking stone gods and hideous Hindoo idols on the stage; but this cavilling is pitifully blind in its interpretation of apocalyptic visions in terms of theatrical mechanics. Any criticism by the present writer would be of the nature of a plea; urging a less complete metamorphosis of the old myth-making Dunsany into the newer and more sparklingly satirical Dunsany. A reincarnated Sheridan is precious indeed, but the Dunsany of “A Dreamer’s Tales” is a wonder twice as precious because it cannot be duplicated or even approached. It is a wonder which has restored to us our childhood’s dreams, as far as such things can ever be restored; and that is the most blessed happening which the earth may know. The future is dark and dubious, and amidst its devastating introspection and analysis there may be no place for art as we know it. But if any existing art does belong to that future, it is the art of Lord Dunsany.

NOTES

Chapter 7

Lord Dunsany Benjamin De Casseres Peel an Irishman and find a magician. He is the Old Sod of myth. He is an inversion, a reversion, an atavism. He brings fairies out of fireplugs. His blackthorn is an Aladdin’s lamp. His porridge bowl is a magic well. His black eye, received in no matter how stupid a tavern brawl, he wears as his Croix de Guerre. The Irishman is Baron Munchausen, d’Artagnan and François Villon. The plays and stories of Lord Dunsany are a perfect expression of the fantastic imagination. Not since William Blake’s “Prophetic Books”—the strangest creations in all literature—have we read of such curious creatures and cities, rivers and wars. The names of the creatures and cities would alone have inspired Edgar Allan Poe to write immortal poems. His brain is one of the garrets of heaven, a storeroom of worlds. His humor, his irony, that run through all he writes like muffled thunder on clear, starlit nights, are the humor and the irony of the implacable gods that fling the suns into space. His stage is set on the edge of the world, which is the borderland of his skull. The flashing temples of immemorial demons and galleons with purple sails that founder in ultraviolet sunsets and mountains that buttress gnomic moons and strange kings that are sent on secret errands by jade and jasper Vishnus—of such are the kingdoms of Dunsany. He is a tremendous reaction against civilization. “Anywhere, anywhere, out of the world,” he seems to say with Charles Baudelaire. The fate of man is bound up with his imagination. It is the imagination, and not Karl Marx or the Bolshevists, that shall set us free. Man cannot live by banks alone, and it is easier for a Zeppelin to go through the Pyramid of Cheops than it is for a sentimental soapbox reformer to enter the Kingdom of the Imagination. Lord Dunsany’s work leads literature back to its sources. For literature is the unveiling of the eternal, the immutable, the fugacious. It is, in its essence, the record of a myth done into words, words selected by a master brain, words that hold the vision in a vise of gold and glass. Was it Gautier or Flaubert who said that each thought had its one word in which it perpetually sought incarnation? Lord Dunsany always finds that exact word, that exact phrase. His style fits his dream as air fits the lungs. It is the prose poetry of the Bible—threads of magic utterance that weave his tale before our enchanted eyes. His plays are plays of Doom, as convincing as Maeterlinck’s, without the latter’s faults or sentimentality. He stands nearer to the sources of himself than does the Belgian playwright. He achieves his effects with less effort—apparently. In Maeterlinck there is always some human reality. In Dunsany’s work there is only sheer fiction, a purely fabulous irreality. Unlike Chesterton, he cares nothing about the rightness of right or the wrongness of wrong. He is a splendid literary immoralist— one who works beyond the trenches of Good and Evil in the No Man’s Land where

the Greeks placed the Furies and the Fates and where Blake housed Urizen and the Four Zoas. He has written “The Book of Wonder”—but all his books are books of wonder. Wonder! The sick soul of humanity needs but that! Lord Dunsany’s work is part of that renaissance of wonder to which the future points. For wonder is the very breath of life and imaginative amazement the proper fire of its cleansing. It is the primal prayer, the aboriginal creed of the soul. “Why is anything?,” asked Voltaire after the great earthquake at Lisbon. Yea, why is anything?—how is anything?—whither goeth anything in the hurricanes of matter and the inevitable blows of Time? He who shall make a myth of humanity and a legend of living and a song of fugacity is a king among us wraiths. He who shall make the familiar the unfamiliar and skin us to the quick of our mystery is a world magician, a sorcerer of chance and days. Another Irishman—Oscar Wilde—came to us some years ago dressed in knickerbockers with a sunflower in his coat; but Lord Dunsany came to us in khaki, his brain bulging with luminous immensities and Apocalyptic images, with a full-blown rose in his coat plucked from the grave of William Blake, who lies beautifully unburied on “the broad Disk of Urizen upheav’d across the Void many a mile.”

Chapter 8

Dreams of Empire, Empire of Dreams Patrick Maume Lord Dunsany Plays the Game Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett (1878–1957), eighteenth Baron Dunsany in the peerage of Ireland—usually known as Lord Dunsany—continues to be admired by devotees of fantasy fiction, but he receives little attention in Irish Studies. His Orientalist fantasies articulate a defiantly aristocratic aesthetic, based on game playing—including war and hunting—as well as on the privileging of the storytelling process over “truth” or meaning, and on a love of ornamentation for its own sake. As such, his aesthetic has, perhaps unexpectedly, something in common with postmodernism. And yet, for an author most renowned as a fantasist, the real world of the Ireland in which he lived and worked is consistently present in his oeuvre. Dunsany’s portrayal of Ireland, shot through with diehard Unionism, combines sardonic observations on the silences and hypocrisies of the new state with a wistful attraction to its peasant illusions; Dunsany’s version of imperialism in Ireland saw the system not as a pathway to modernity, but rather, as a means of preserving feudal values that were disappearing from Britain itself. As in his depictions of India and Africa, he clings to the dream of empire even as he discards the claims to social progress and religious superiority that originally underwrote the dream. In doing so, he highlights the tensions between “reactionary” and “progressivist” visions of imperialism. Dunsany was born in London on July 24, 1878, the elder son of John Plunkett, a Conservative MP. (Most Irish peers did not sit in the House of Lords; they could represent British—not Irish—seats in the Commons.) He spent his childhood at his mother’s home, Dunstall Priory in Shoreham, in Southeast Kent. Dunsany’s education intensified his sense of his Kent childhood as a lost paradise. His father, who died in 1899, wished him to become a soldier: Dunsany was sent to Cheam Preparatory School and to Eton, where his dreamy nature made him unpopular, before entering the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. In 1899 he became a lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards, and was stationed in Gibraltar, his first glimpse of the East. After World War I, Dunsany recalled the Boer War—which was widely criticized by British radicals at the time and is generally regarded as a point when Britain began to doubt its own colonial ventures—as a fight between honorable combatants, in contrast to the dehumanized trenches of the Western Front.[1] He left the army in 1901, thus avoiding the messy and often barbaric counterinsurgency campaign that followed the occupation of the Boer Republic, and settled at the family seat in County Meath, though he took little interest in business or farming. His property, including Durham coal mines, was managed by his uncle, Horace Plunkett, the former Unionist MP and advocate of agricultural cooperation.[2]

Dunsany resented his uncle’s bossiness, but Plunkett introduced him to the Dublin artistic and intellectual circles where Plunkett recruited publicists and collaborators for the cooperative movement. The most prominent of these was George Russell (Æ), a mystic, poet, painter, and associate of W. B. Yeats. Plunkett employed Russell as an organizer of his Irish Agricultural Organisational Society and as editor of the movement’s journal, the Irish Homestead, later the Irish Statesman. Like many writers of the time, Dunsany was fascinated by Tibet; the Himalayan ascetics in his stories owe much to Æ’s theosophy.[3] Dunsany had a memorable physical presence. He stood six-foot-four and dressed untidily. He was fond of practical jokes and parlor games. He hunted and shot, and was a keen observer of animals; his love of the Irish countryside developed through foxhunting with the Meath gentry and shooting on the bog. In 1904 Dunsany married Beatrice Villiers, daughter of the earl of Jersey; they had one son. Her sister married Lord Longford; the Dunsanys were close to their nephews Edward and Frank Pakenham (later sixth and seventh earls of Longford, respectively the cofounder of the Gate Theatre and eulogist of Eamon de Valera), for whom Dunsany invented fantastic and elaborate imaginary orders of chivalry.[4] Dunsany entered politics as a Conservative candidate for West Wiltshire in the 1906 general election; upon his defeat, he abandoned politics for literature. His later dismissive comments on politics obscure the fact that he always maintained he was right in 1906 to support tariff reform—“that dangerous novelty that is now a commonplace”—and ridiculed his Liberal opponents as naïve “peacemongers.”[5] He remained a diehard Conservative, naturally sympathizing with the advocates of continued rule by the traditional landed class, rather than with liberal reformism or the “new style” business-oriented conservatism associated with Andrew Bonar Law. Dunsany was a staunch Unionist; in 1914 he smuggled twenty rifles for the Ulster Volunteer Force across the Irish Sea in his luggage.[6] Beginning in 1905, Dunsany published short tales in fantasy Oriental settings. These were inspired by his youthful immersion in Grimm and Andersen, the rhythms of the Authorized Version of the Bible, the pantheism of Æ, and nostalgia for the Greek gods; his stories of capricious gods and fallen kingdoms also echo Edwardian fears about the transience of empire and the decline of aristocracy. After the death of Synge, Yeats briefly adopted Dunsany as a literary protégé, providing the scenario for Dunsany’s first play The Glittering Gate (1909). They quarrelled after Dunsany accused Lady Gregory of plagiarizing his play King Argimēnēs and the Unknown Warrior (1911) for her own Parnellite allegory about Moses, The Deliverer.[7] Dunsany briefly joined the National Volunteers after John Redmond’s declaration of support for the British war effort; when they would not subordinate themselves to the War Office he joined the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, and he was disappointed not to be sent to Gallipoli.[8] On April 25, 1916, hearing of the Easter Rising, Dunsany came into Dublin to report for duty; he ran into a rebel barricade, was shot in the face, and spent the week in Jervis Street Hospital. He was posted to France and the

16th Irish Division in January 1917. The utter devastation that he encountered on the Western Front, so different from chivalric idealizations of war, haunted Dunsany for the rest of his life. He came to believe that modern warfare was the end product of a machine civilization, which he thought most fully developed in Germany. His wartime and postwar writings display an inexorable hatred for Germany and the Germans as barbarians; he believed them to be inhuman, dull-witted machine men who must be fought without pausing for reflection. For example, in the 1918 story “The Road,” a German officer conveys an order, apparently as a matter of routine, by spitting in the face of a noncommissioned officer, who then beats his men with a stick to get them to obey.[9] Dunsany likes to contrast the systematic foresight that he believed characterized German military strategy—“I cannot feel that Hitler is a great man, but I think he is very likely the cleverest man in Europe”—with “my simple thought, that man cannot see the future.”[10] Just after World War II, he predicted that the Germans will examine carefully all Hitler’s mistakes, as Hitler examined the Kaiser’s, and try to do better next time . . . the Germans are not a far-sighted people, and, if one does not turn to the obvious, one is hardly likely to find their policy . . . nations change very little indeed, and, just as we are unlikely to set up a concentration camp on the lines of Belsen, in which to torture our late enemies, so they are unlikely to become mild and unwarlike.[11] In January 1918 he transferred to writing war propaganda. Dunsany returned to Ireland on demobilization in 1919. During the Anglo-Irish War he continued to shoot game on his estate, despite the danger of IRA arms raids or of being shot by crown forces; he was, in fact, prosecuted in January 1921 for arms possession. Dunsany Castle was not burned; Dunsany was regarded as a good landlord and employer, and his long-serving estate steward and gamekeeper James Toomey was a member of Sinn Fein, though also a British Army veteran.[12] Toomey may well have inspired the many Dunsany characters who combine murderous IRA records with a personal fondness for individual gentry. Dunsany—unlike many prominent Protestant or aristocratic Irish commentators of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—appears to have had a complete absence of guilt or regret over the impact of past conquests or landlordism. His diehard mentality contrasted with the liberal Unionism of Horace Plunkett, which admitted past wrongs but hoped to save the Union through economic reform encapsulated in the slogan “Better business, better farming.” Unlike such older Irish diehards as Frederick Trench (Lord Ashtown) who had experience of estate management and hoped to fight off the advances of nationalism, Dunsany accepted his reduction to a rentier-speculator, wistfully predicting that the tide would turn again.[13] Dunsany always resented what he believed was the betrayal of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, to the point of refusing to call it a treaty; he contended that using the term would imply that Ireland had been independent before the relevant act of parliament.

The years after Independence brought severe losses to the family fortune. When Horace Plunkett failed to anticipate the postwar decline in coal prices, which permanently reduced Dunsany’s income, drastic retrenchments were necessary. To raise cash, Dunsany lectured in America, where he was more widely admired than in Britain. Although many of their friends among the Anglo-Irish had been burnt out, the Dunsanys decided not to abandon Ireland; they felt this would be “shirking.”[14] Dunsany never forgave his uncle for the financial blunder. Plunkett is identifiable in one short story, “The Sign,” first published in 1935, as the arrogant philanthropist Horcher, who impresses with confident prophecies that never come true and promotes investments that never pay. Horcher also describes interference in others’ lives as philanthropy, and thinks he could have designed the world better than God did; the pompous Horcher expects an exalted reincarnation, but actually returns as a snail.[15] Dunsany’s memoir My Ireland (1937) accuses Plunkett of fettering Æ with agricultural economics when he should have been writing poetry (MI 13). His novel The Story of Mona Sheehy (1939)—one of his few works of fiction that is not a work of fantasy—features a savage depiction of Plunkett’s adulterous relationship with Lady Fingall and ends with the Plunkett character losing the heroine’s fortune in dubious investments. Dunsany’s old age produced still more bitter depictions of Plunkett as sanctimonious embezzler; one story features a man who loses another man’s money by rushing him into a shady speculation and then claims to have done him a favor, while in another an uncle who has robbed his nephew commits suicide after being found out under circumstances that he knows will cause his nephew to be convicted for his murder (CJ III 267–74, 275–89).[16] Dunsany’s artistic and social sensibilities were in many ways close to such Georgians as Rupert Brooke and Sir John Squire. He was self-consciously antiVictorian, but also ill at ease in the postwar world. In matters of art and design, he despised Victorian fustiness and Edwardian pastiche, and he often commissioned furniture and decorations from living craftsmen; he loved Art Deco, but considered International Style modernism to be further evidence that machines were displacing humanity. He saw the artist’s obligation as that of consciously creating an unreal, otherworldly beauty. Many of his works were dictated to his wife, Beatrice, for oratorical rhythm; he had a taste for effete flourishes, including writing with a swan’s quill on parchment. His literary career can be seen as a process in which he successively built up a series of private worlds (Dunsany had a tendency to become dominated by obsessions); but as these imagined new worlds were explored, they came closer to the quotidian, and were in turn abandoned for fresh fantasies. Dunsany never revised his writing, but rather, worked out ideas in his head beforehand like the parlor games that he loved to devise for his house parties. These work habits bespeak a sort of preciousness—the quill pen, the insistence on seclusion—coupled with an aristocratic and dandyish emphasis on effortlessness and throwing things off without care. Dunsany carried into the postwar world the attitudes of an Edwardian, aristocratic Tory. He lamented the decline of British agriculture and the unfit physical

condition of urban populations; he insisted that the cultivation of martial virtues was needed if the empire was to survive. Paradoxically, these positions meant that he shared many attitudes with his opponents among Irish cultural nationalists. He denounced feminism.[17] He ranted against “African” jazz as fiercely as did interwar Gaelic Leaguers (MI 226). He crusaded against processed foods and white bread; he carried rock crystal salt rather than “poison” himself with the commercial variety, at one point declaring that Hitler’s only good deed was bombing a salt factory.[18] In the 1930s he wrote radio plays for the BBC and made occasional appearances on the fledgling television service, where he proved a splenetic opponent of literary modernism.[19] Nonetheless, Dunsany did not embrace fascism, owing chiefly to his attachment to British institutions. In 1934, he published If I Were Dictator, a book sometimes presented as evidence of his authoritarian sympathies by such critics as Seamus Heaney, who appears to have assumed from the title that Dunsany favored dictatorship.[20] In fact, the title was commissioned by a publisher, who persuaded seven other writers, including St. John Ervine, to write books with the same title and theme. Dunsany’s imperialism and his diehard conservatism had their unsavory aspects, but they entailed respect for British political traditions and institutions—albeit with a preference for their monarchical and aristocratic elements. Dunsany used the 1934 book to air views he genuinely held, including the prohibition of ginger beer and other acidic soft drinks (IIWD 30); ending unemployment by demechanizing agriculture (IIWD 69–74); and declaring that, inasmuch as the House of Lords’ veto was abolished to bring peace and prosperity to Ireland, it should be restored because abolition had failed to do any such thing. Yet the book ridicules the very concept of dictatorship—perhaps because Dunsany saw fascism as a product of modernity— and pokes fun at the posturing and martial displays of continental dictators. Dunsany suggests the title “Grand Macaroni” in mockery of fascist Italy for his hypothetical dictatorship (IIWD 1). His minions will wear absurdly ornate gold braid shirts (IIWD 61–62). At the book’s close, he abdicates, denouncing dictatorship and declaring printers’ errors and adulterated food preferable to the loss of British liberty. During the interwar period, Dunsany continued to be preoccupied with politics and international relations. He summarized his central philosophy as staying mindful of “the wolf at the door”; there would always be external enemies, and keeping watch for them kept a people from decadence (SW 103–4). He regularly declared that natural national rivalries made war inevitable, and was convinced that trying to prevent war through Leagues of Nations and pacifist declarations was like trying to abolish the tides. When attacked for advocating war Dunsany reiterated his views, priding himself on vindication in 1939.[21] After the fall of France, Dunsany moved to Kent, where, as the Battle of Britain raged overhead, he prepared for guerrilla warfare.[22] In September 1940 the British Council appointed him visiting professor of English literature at the University of Athens; en voyage he brooded over Ireland’s “undefended coast,” which he

considered the product of British “madness” in abandoning the Union.[23] The Dunsanys arrived in Greece in January 1941 after journeying around Africa and Asia Minor; they left on April 17 on a refugee ship for Cairo, pursued by the Luftwaffe as the Wehrmacht neared Athens.[24] Returning safely to Ireland, Dunsany spent the rest of the war writing and dealing with estate matters. The atomic bomb reinforced Dunsany’s conviction that machines would ultimately destroy or replace humanity. His 1951 novel The Last Revolution compares humanity’s relationship to the machine to that of French aristocrats to peasants on the eve of the French Revolution.[25] His late work alternates between images of new inventions that destroy planets and even universes, and dreams of apocalypses that are somehow cosier—after which human life confines itself to its proper sphere, in Irish bog cottages or the Kent woods. * * * Clearly, Dunsany was a man of many contradictions. His unswerving belief in empire was accompanied by total disbelief in the claims of European civilization to political, economic, and religious superiority over indigenous peoples that characterized much nineteenth-century imperialism. He saw the belief in stadial progress—the notion that successive ages of history advance civilization over its preceding age—whether through Christian belief in the progressive working-out of revelation, or liberal-modernist belief in economic progress and the dissemination of liberal institutions, as undermining his own aristocratic world. From an early age, Dunsany lamented the spread of suburban London toward Shoreham and the mechanization of farming. Before the war, his denunciations of industrial society were held in check by his contemporaries’ reminders that industrialism made possible a much larger population than could be supported by peasant agriculture. As Dunsany contemplated the Western Front, he concluded that if the machine created greater populations, it also produced greater and more destructive wars, which would reduce human populations to preindustrial levels or to extermination; perhaps animals might run the world better than human beings (POS 204–5). Dunsany was an atheist, though attentive to Anglican observances in later life. His writings imply that he believed most contemporary British Christians were wellmeaning naifs ignorant of the harsh Oriental world where their religion began. One story, “The Angelic Shepherd,” describes an artist who discovers a model for the Good Shepherd on the Indian North-West Frontier; the model—a polygamous Pathan, carrying a sheep he has just plundered—kills and robs the artist (CJ II 69–72). A recurring theme in his work is a desire to escape from the law-bound Christian universe to the deathless fantasy world of Elfland or “the Country Beyond Moon’s Rising.”[26] He loved to fantasize about Shoreham’s preservation from modernity through a conversion to paganism.[27] In a late work, he looked forward to a postnuclear reversion to hunter-gatherer society.[28] This philosophical preference for eternal flux and recurrence—as opposed to a

Christian universe governed and shaped by a transcendental creator, whose inhabitants progress along an unique and unrepeatable course ending in an eternity unchangeably determined by actions in this life—led Dunsany to an interest in reincarnation. He treated the subject in comic mode in My Talks with Dean Spanley (1936) where a clergyman reminisces about life as a dog when rendered sufficiently tipsy with a rare wine. The wine is supplied by an Indian rajah, blandly indifferent to the narrator’s earnest protestations that this scientific experiment promises proof of Hinduism. He gives a bleaker depiction of rebirth in The Strange Journeys of Colonel Polders (1950) where a Brahman member of the colonel’s club magically compels him to experience a series of animal incarnations. The colonel’s demands that the club secretary expel the Hindu do not efface the evocation of nature as governed by tooth and claw in the long series of descriptions of animal deaths as experienced by the animals; the old hunter Dunsany dreams of experiencing the deer-stalk, the fox hunt, and wildfowling from new perspectives.[29] Dunsany’s personal experience of the British Empire and the Orient drew heavily on his several visits to Egypt, hunting expeditions to Algeria in 1913 and 1922 and East Africa in 1913, a shooting trip to the swamps of southern Sudan in 1925, a 1930 visit to his son (an army officer stationed in India) where he stayed with the Nawab of Ranpur and shot tiger, and on his wartime journeys to and from Greece via Africa, Egypt, and Turkey. His accounts of these trips show his point of view was that of an aristocratic tourist, focusing on the landscape, wildfowling, and the servants and guides who accompanied him. He celebrates mountain tribes and princely states, but pays little attention to urban natives, except to lament that they are being destroyed by civilization. Recalling conversations with the Nawab of Ranpur and other princes, Dunsany both pokes fun at their naïveté and insinuates that Oriental despotism may be superior to British Liberalism. In My Ireland, Dunsany recalls being questioned on British politics by the Nawab, which he compares to holding a political conversation with the ghosts of Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth, formidable despite their “preGladstonian” opinions. He recalls the Nawab asking, “Why does So-and-So not marry? . . . I command my sons to marry, and they marry.” “So-and-So” is the future Edward VIII; Dunsany, saddened by the Abdication Crisis (MI 186–88), implies that if George V had been able to follow the Nawab’s approach, things might have gone better (WSS 125). As a consistent reactionary, Dunsany derided statesmen who employed the violence necessary to maintain empire while justifying their actions in terms of the liberal moralism demanded by a squeamish and ignorant public. In 1944, Dunsany recalled reading of a punitive expedition in the 1930s in the Bahr-el-Gazal region of Southern Sudan against “two magicians called Pok and Jek, who dwelt in a pyramid.” The pyramid was blown up and its destruction explained to “the British public . . . [which] leant much towards pacifism at the time” as inspired by safety considerations, since the structure was unsafe after being shelled. “Such consideration for Pok and Jek,” Dunsany concludes provocatively, “was surely the height of appeasement” (WSS 74). If, as Dunsany fervently believed, the empire was a good thing, the force

necessary to maintain it should be used as unsqueamishly as a fox hunt; the hypocritical claim to act in Pok and Jek’s best interests was, for Dunsany, of a piece with self-deceiving British “appeasement” of Hitler. Dunsany cast his defense of empire in unabashedly paternalistic language. If I Were Dictator responds to American critics of British rule in India with the retort that India should revert to the Indians when North America reverts to its aborigines as the American Free State. Dunsany compares British promises of Indian self-government to promising a two-year-old child a loaded revolver, and suggests that trying to govern India by parliamentary institutions is as practical as trying to convert Britain to Hinduism; he also predicts Indian independence would produce a bloodbath dwarfing World War I and reducing the population to preconquest levels (IIWD 46–54). As the Raj crumbled after World War II, Dunsany predicted India’s disintegration into hundreds of states and a Muslim invasion from the north: “The Pax Britannica . . . prevented lesser war within the Empire . . . which I believe would have killed exactly the same amount.”[30] In his autobiography, Dunsany quotes his father’s denunciations of Home Rule, including his conviction that “surrender to crime in Ireland would be fatal in India.” Dunsany fears that his father was prescient (POS 18). In his 1952 story collection The Little Tales of Smethers, an American who sympathizes with Indian nationalism discovers the departure of the British has revived the practice of human sacrifice by the bandit cult of Thuggee.[31] And yet, though Dunsany defended imperialism as imposing peace through law, there is an abiding tension throughout his writings on empire. His disbelief in the narrative of progress and in the superiority of Christianity—both of which sustained earlier imperialists—leads him to suspect that primitivism may be preferable to modernity. In A Journey, he writes, “The Zulus throve on the corn that they ground in querns; they are helpless against the pale adulterated flour: it is sold to them and they eat it. So do we.”[32] Dunsany’s best-known literary creation, the character Joseph Jorkens who narrates many of his tales, inhabits the seedy side of the imperial, clubland milieu. During his 1925 visit to Sudan, Dunsany invented Jorkens—an elderly barfly at the Billiards Club who tells tall stories that can never be proved or disproved—in order to exploit and fantasticate memories of his own travels (WSS 78–79). Jorkens grows increasingly important in Dunsany’s later work; one might speculate that as Dunsany’s life wound down, he came to some extent to live through Jorkens as an outlet for his more outrageous feelings. Jorkens, like Dunsany, is often found searching for unknown beasts in the lower Nile swamps or pursuing Barbary sheep among the mountains of North Africa. In the stories, Jorkens continually undertakes dubious commercial speculations involving allegedly fabulous natural resources in remote territories, which somehow fail to deliver the vast wealth they promise. His sexual behavior resembles that of many isolated white men on the fringes of empire. At one point he intends to turn Muslim to marry four beautiful slave girls (CJ III 85–97). Jorkens lived and married among the Zulus as a young man, abandoning his wife precipitately; he also claims to have married a mermaid in Aden (CJ I 133–47).

Dunsany’s condemnation of these foibles is as ambivalent as his treatment of Jorkens’s ingeniously artless stories. Though his writings and his life were largely asexual, Dunsany’s friendship with Oliver St. John Gogarty led him to appreciate bawdy stories.[33] At points, one perceives a Swiftian delight in his covertly excremental description of Jorkens disposing of excessive gold stocks for the government by dumping them at sea from Thames sewage barges (CJ II 57–61) and his discreet attribution of Hyde Park’s reputation for al fresco sexual assignations to a visit by the god Pan, shepherded by Jorkens (CJ II 99–110). Dunsany also shows a certain relish for tales of bodily dismemberment, probably reflecting the hunter’s dealings with animal carcasses. Sometimes, Jorkens directly parodies the imperial hero. When confronted with cannibals, he imitates Rider Haggard by predicting an eclipse, only to find they are up to that trick; he eventually escapes with the assistance of chewing gum (CJ II 341– 43). In one story, Jorkens describes how, while living among the Zulus, he learned their intention to destroy the nascent mining town of Ullumslaagi, and rode to warn the townsfolk. This echoes Dick King’s celebrated 1842 ride from Durban to Grahamstown to fetch British troops to break the Boer siege of Durban; Jorkens’s dreams of the city’s future glory as he rides echo Dunsany’s description of Durban in The Sirens Wake, including the equestrian monument to the man who saved the city. Jorkens is delayed and the Zulus get there first—and “now it exists only in my memories and dreams” (CJ II 247–50). In invoking those “memories and dreams,” Dunsany suggests that there may be a more sympathetic side of Jorkens. His memories of youth evoke a sense of wonder through the opening up of strange new lands and peoples, which necessarily fades as they become known to the outside world—a process that sounds strangely familiar to much Tourism Studies discourse today. Perhaps, too, these unfamiliar lands will resist the outside world: in the Jorkens stories, tribal deities and charms prove unexpectedly powerful even where the story apparently pits native superstition against imperial rationality. Sometimes strange creatures are more intelligent than hunters (CJ II 183– 89). In the significantly titled story “Elephant Shooting,” an arrogant and complacent hunter tries to shoot the legendary and very old “four-tusked elephant” by rigging up a trap with an elephant gun while he watches from a nearby tree; the elephant, older and more experienced than expected, moves the rifle with its trunk and shoots the hunter (CJ II 119–24).[34] Jorkens is not always an exploiter; in such stories as “The Jorkens Family Emeralds” (CJ II 45–52) and “A Nice Lot of Diamonds” (CJ III 11–15), he expresses sympathy for the natives who inflict excruciating fates on adventurers looking for mineral wealth after having learned what happens to natives when mines are developed by outsiders. Even if these events only happened in Jorkens’s mind—or in Dunsany’s—their mere existence as stories serves “to add something of strangeness to our planet, just as it was tending to grow too familiar” (CJ I 3). For Dunsany, imperial contact and conquest might lead to the fading of material wonders; but the realm of story could not be defiled by modernity.

* * * In 1931 Yeats offered Dunsany associate membership of the newly formed Irish Academy of Letters, declaring him ineligible for full membership because he did not write about Ireland. Dunsany promptly wrote four novels set in Ireland: The Curse of the Wise Woman (1933), Up in the Hills (1935), Rory and Bran (1936), and The Story of Mona Sheehy (1939). His treatment of Ireland in these novels mirrors his ambivalence about empire. It appears as a land composed entirely of peasants, resembling his descriptions of Africa and India. Rory and Bran and The Story of Mona Sheehy present Irish rural life as a refuge from state bureaucracy and advertising agencies. The feeble-minded hero of Rory and Bran enlists the help of wandering lunatics to rescue his equally feeble-minded ladylove from “rational” bureaucrats who wish to consign her to the Mullingar madhouse. Mona Sheehy is the daughter of a flighty female aristocrat, deposited with her peasant father who brings her up in the mistaken belief that the woman who seduced him on the mountain was the Queen of the Fairies. Mona is yet another version of a female embodiment of Ireland. When she rejects clerical employment in London in favor of life in a cottage with an old schoolmate, she reflects Dunsany’s hope that Ireland will prove impervious to modernity. The best-regarded of Dunsany’s Irish novels, admired chiefly for its lyrical descriptions of Meath boglands, is The Curse of the Wise Woman, based loosely on the Land War and the Troubles. The hero, a Catholic aristocrat with a Jacobite—that is, not a legally recognized—title, rejoices in the successful attempt of a wise woman to prevent industrial development of the local bog by a London speculative company. [35] The narrator’s life, however, is saddened by a law-bound and rationalizing Catholicism that keeps him from marrying the Protestant woman he loves, as well as from embarking on a quest for “Tir-nan-Og” (though it is strongly implied that the quest would have led to drowning in a boghole). One of the more interesting characters in the novel is an amiable moonlighter who becomes president of the League of Nations. Dunsany later said the unnamed moonlighter was modelled on de Valera—Dunsany often refers to the character as a tall man in a long black coat— thus neatly displaying Dunsany’s patronizing contempt for both his country’s new rulers and the League. In a later story, “The Haunting of Halahanstown,” Dunsany similarly mocks the new regime by having a poacher casually appointed minister for fisheries, apparently by Fianna Fail (CJ II 191–202). Nonetheless, Dunsany grew fonder than he intended of the de Valera character, “the principal villain” (SW 21). It appears that Dunsany intended to use the de Valera character to express his resentment at the government of Ireland being handed over to, as he saw it, a pack of disreputable bogmen; but as he went along, developed an ambivalent admiration for the dexterous bogmen who had, in his opinion, shown up His Majesty’s Ministers by fooling them into accepting such a disgraceful humiliation. Dunsany’s sense that in the Anglo-Irish War and Treaty Britain had been shamefully outwitted by childish and destructive provincials acquires a sharper edge in

the 1935 novel Up in the Hills, set in April 1922, which satirizes the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War. As the first diplomatic triumph of the Free State, a new African republic called “Liberissima,” recently seceded from Liberia, sends archaeologists to excavate a crannog in County Meath in return for nominal trade concessions. The archaeologists are Episcopalian Protestants except for Umbolulu, a pagan hero of the war of independence. Dunsany draws both implicit and explicit parallels between the Liberissimans and the Catholic Irish. The Liberissiman Assembly meets in a reed-and-thatch replica of the Palace of Westminster, wearing evening dress; the archaeologists are inspired by the view that if Europeans excavate Africa, then Africans should excavate Europe, and wear frock coats while digging to signify their civilized status.[36] There is a contemporary reference in the satire: when Cosgrave’s ministers appeared in evening dress at official functions they were mocked by republican populists and ex-Unionist snobs alike. The archaeologists become unpopular when they excavate pre-Christian skeletons, which the locals see as necessarily Catholic because Irish; the local wise women call down pagan-sounding curses to punish this unchristian desecration. The hero, Young Mickey Connor, seeing the archaeologists uncover an ancient Irish idol, assumes that they brought it from Africa (UH 171–72). As the story unfolds, Umbolulu converts to Protestantism—and to wearing frock coats —under the influence of the Church of Ireland rector’s wife, which increases local discontent; the Catholics feel the Protestants have stolen a march on them. Shopkeepers refuse to supply the archaeologists, and Umbolulu grows hungry (UH 19–20, 71–75). Young Mickey Connor decides to escape the curses and the monotony of “digging rows and rows of potatoes” (UH 19). He forms eight young men into an “army,” camps in the hills, and requisitions provisions. This brings conflict with Patsy Heffernan, who commands a hundred men and is regarded locally as the greatest general in the world, inasmuch as the British beat the Kaiser and Patsy beat the British. Mickey’s stratagems preserve his army from destruction, but cannot defeat Patsy Heffernan. Once again, Dunsany parodies the Ireland of his day from two different and not entirely compatible perspectives, simultaneously: the disparity between Mickey’s and Patsy’s forces resembles that between the crown’s forces and the IRA in the Anglo-Irish War, and the latter conflict is burlesqued in comparison to the horrors of the Western Front (UH 153–54). Dunsany is less than fully hostile to Mickey; the reader is expected to delight in his ingenuity, which, in fact, has much in common with Dunsany’s own party games. The conflict between Patsy and Mickey ends in negotiations that bear the same relation to diplomacy that their previous exploits do to warfare—in other words, farce. The Treaty negotiators discussed the Free State’s share of the war debt and a Boundary Commission (of one representative each from north and south, with an outside chairman) to delineate the frontier with Northern Ireland; in the novel, Patsy demands an indemnity—paid by bank robbery—and the definition of a boundary by one officer from each side and “one eminent jurisprudence [sic]” (UH 193–98).

Dunsany both satirizes the IRA as fantasists and expresses anger at the British public and government for accepting their terms; Patsy and Mickey regularly comment that they are too clever to fall for tricks that would fool a British statesman (UH 70, 117, 187, 191). Patsy Heffernan is the local representative of an English insurance company, selling coverage on the very property that he is about to destroy. Patsy’s men “all have pensions from the government,” and Mickey’s indignant followers are told they did not do enough in the Troubles. “We burnt the Post Office,” they protest, symbolically deflating the 1916 rebels’ seizure of the General Post Office in Dublin to provincial vandalism. “We should have had our pensions like everybody else” (UH 205–6). Reality finally intrudes with the appearance of Free State forces led by General James Cassidy, whose military decisiveness, strutting manner, Free State uniform, and premature demise seem clearly modeled on Michael Collins—whom Dunsany and his wife detested.[37] Cassidy routs Patsy’s army and arrests Mickey. Throughout Up in the Hills, Dunsany’s presentation of the Free Staters displays even less sympathy than he can find for the rebels. Patsy’s men are never described as republicans; in fact, they appear to have no political agenda other than cheerful anarchy. In one of the Jorkens stories, the narrator warns, “Rebel, if [you] must, against a lawful government and never against rebels,” as “They know too much about rebellion, and they punish it as it ought to be punished” (CJ II 208). Patsy is summarily executed. Mickey is set to dig his own grave, but escapes into a cave formed by an underground stream. He is almost intercepted by General Cassidy while leaving the cave, but as Cassidy goes to organize a pursuit, he insults the starving Umbolulu, who in turn kills Cassidy and eats him. The Irish newspapers, knowing the truth but wishing to preserve Ireland’s good name, explain the sudden disappearance of the general by suggesting he has gone to America; a form of quasi-scientific reassurance is supplied by an archaeologist’s theory that cannibalism occurred in England during the Stone Age (UH 294–95). The money raised by the rector’s wife to commemorate Umbolulu’s conversion is hastily diverted to lunches for schoolchildren; in a grisly aside, the parish priest rubs in the ineffectiveness of Protestant evangelization by making it known that he is too magnanimous to ask about the content of the sandwiches (UH 268–70). Mickey escapes to Northern Ireland; in a final Kiplingesque touch, he becomes a “real” soldier, enlisting as a private in the Irish Guards. In its outlandishness and the terrifying quality of its satire, the novel’s plot shows the influence by Evelyn Waugh, whom, in fact, Dunsany admired.[38] Its racist undertones are evident, but it would not be quite correct to say its central theme is racist; rather, Up in the Hills implies all human beings are pagan savages in origin and nature, with Irish Christians and frock-coated Liberissimans in equivalent states of denial of their own depravity.[39] Dunsany’s travel book My Ireland (1937)—though often wilfully inconsequential— combines lyrical descriptions of Meath and fond memories of the Edwardian era with passages in which the author settles old scores and offers scathing comments on de Valera’s economic policy. A chapter on Irish industries treats the Fianna Fail

government’s attempts at industrialization as a risible fantasy, one so preposterous that it fails to kindle Dunsany’s usual anti-industrial jeremiads. No one can name any industries except Guinness’s Brewery, and the chapter ends with a vision of the Irish population standing glumly on the seacoast as even the Guinness barges sail away to England (MI 11–22).[40] A running joke concerns the narrator’s attempts to find out whether the people prefer the new dispensation of the Free State to the ancien régime; his failure to get an answer speaks volumes. This consoling Unionist fantasy coexists with sharp comments on such then-contemporary hypocrisies as the pretension that the proposed removal of Nelson’s Pillar by the new authorities was not politically motivated; Dunsany mocks the claim by the new government that “Sackville Street, now given a new name,” is “so congested and narrow that it was . . . necessary . . . to allow the carts to get by” (MI 257). Dunsany also reintroduces Old Mickey Connor (Young Mickey’s grandfather) from Up in the Hills to give a chillingly incisive expression of the vague criteria on which people were shot as spies by the IRA, and their subsequent self-deceiving justifications: “Ah, what was he only a Protestant? Not that anyone would think the worse of him for that . . . Only, sure, a man with a religion like that ought to be careful, and not be abusing the people’s tolerance” (MI 284). Ireland’s official policy of Irish neutrality during World War II deeply offended Dunsany; he saw neutrality as another instance of the Irish living in a fantasy world, and his comments took on a sharp edge. In 1937 he had poked semi-affectionate mockery at Ireland as a quasi-Oriental land of dreams retreating from the real world of empire into a delusion of independence, joking that “Hy Brasil is our colony” (MI 267–69). But as the war raged in Europe, Dunsany called neutral Ireland “Circe’s island” where men became beasts after having been lulled to sleep by the sorceress. [41] At times, Dunsany described the war as if it were a revival of the age of chivalry, with RAF pilots as knights doing battle against mechanical Nazi dragons. At home, Dunsany’s home guard were preparing their hunting rifles for use against deadlier game if German parachutists come to Kent. His wartime novel Guerrilla (1944)—a celebration of Serbian and Greek guerrilla resistance assisted by a downed Irish RAF pilot—reflects Dunsany’s 1940 plans for resisting an invasion of Shoreham. Its admiring portrayal of deadly ingenious stratagems contrasts with—yet in certain ways, resembles—his earlier satirical portrayal of the IRA.[42] Dunsany mocked the desire of the Irish government and populace to shut themselves off from the war as an instance of myopic peasant churlishness. The Fourth Book of Jorkens (1947) is dedicated “To Mr. and Mrs. David Gray,” the wartime American ambassador renowned for his contempt for de Valera and for his conviction that Ireland was full of lurking Axis agents.[43] This collection of stories contains more Irish material than previous Jorkens books; several of its spy stories, such as “Among the Neutrals” (CJ III 75–84), suggest that wartime Dublin did, in fact, crawl with German agents. In “The Haunting of Halahanstown,” a witch reduces a great house to decay by summoning a spectre made from river fog; the story is a

bitter reworking of The Curse of the Wise Woman. Along the way, Dunsany gets in a slap at compulsory division of demesne lands by the Land Commission. The witch’s curse begins because Lord Halahanstown would not rent her a field; while no one else would let her keep it without rent, “the Flinns had owned that field before the coming of the Normans, so that if she could only have got into it for a year, the government would have given it to her as soon as ever she applied for it” (CJ II 191– 202). The Year (1946), a stiff Spenserian verse journal of 1944–45, combines loving descriptions of the Irish countryside and exultation over the death throes of the Third Reich. He offers the opinion that deserters from the Irish army who joined the Allied forces and were court-martialed on returning home had done more for Ireland than their prosecutors.[44] Dunsany’s outrage at de Valera’s condolence call to the German legation on the death of Hitler is unsurprising.[45] At one point, he comments that de Valera must have been disconcerted by Himmler’s death, since the German legation had shut and Hell did not have a Dublin legation.[46] His 1946 pamphlet A Glimpse from a Watch Tower, written in the last weeks of the war, is full of dark prophecies of war, famine, and plague. The pamphlet is frequently overwrought, to put it mildly. For instance, Dunsany comments that with the invention of the atom bomb, “For the moment the white man is in the position that seemed so right and proper, which he occupied in books that I read as a boy, when he had the gun and the dark-skinned man had not.” He also predicts that the bomb will soon find imitators and remarks that those who justify Hiroshima as saving lives sound uncomfortably like Nazis defending terror warfare.[47] Dunsany makes hysterical predictions that Germany will start another war—“third time lucky”—and laments that “Surely after Versailles, and the treaty with Ireland, we realise that treaties are not kept except by us, poor mugs.” Dunsany fears Germany will use Ireland to breed distrust between Britain and the United States and mocks the idea that Ireland can be persuaded to resume dominion status by ending Partition.[48] Dunsany’s most significant postwar treatment of Ireland, His Fellow Men (1952), is a Voltairean depiction of an Ulster Protestant named Matthew Perry who rebels against his family’s expectation that on reaching manhood he will avenge the murder of his parents by nationalists; he has fallen in love with a redheaded Catholic girl and dreams of a society where they could be together. Perry has a remarkable flair for contradiction. He travels in North Africa and the Near East, combining a hunting expedition with a quest for universal tolerance. This leads him to adopt a fictional Eastern religion combining elements of Baha’ism with the Druze practice of kitman, which advocates respect for all creeds and causes as manifestations of the divine. The Druze employ kitman as protective camouflage; Matthew treats it as a positive commandment. On returning to Ireland, where he settles outside Derry City, Matthew joins the Orange Order, then promptly attends Mass. After being driven from Derry he goes to Dublin, where he is recruited into the IRA and soon thereafter drinks the king’s health with loyalist friends. Expelled to London, he joins a temperance

association, then socializes in a pub; driven to a country village, he experiences a short-lived attraction to a vicar’s daughter, who shuns him after he assists a stranded Hindu in performing his religious rites. His search for universal tolerance provokes universal execration. In the end, Perry returns to Ireland where his Catholic love makes it a condition of their marriage that he revert to Protestant bigotry. His Fellow Men deserves more attention from critics than it has received. Many read it as Dunsany unproblematically endorsing the hero’s quest, and some readers interpret the hero’s actions as a matter of numerous conversions, rather than as the consequence of a single underlying belief: the idea that all religions are manifestations of the divine, which Dunsany thought was hopelessly naive.[49] In fact, Dunsany uses the novel’s interwar setting to ironize those who believed that perpetual peace and universal tolerance were attainable in this world. Notably, the novel is Dunsany’s only treatment of Northern Ireland. His handling of the North shows Southern Unionist disdain for plebeian Northern bigotry. Perhaps, too, the sentimental lamentations over sectarian divisions of his literary protégé, the novelist Anne Crone, provide a partial explanation of why Dunsany should take an interest in Northern Ireland at this late stage.[50] * * * In Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (2001), David Cannadine makes the case that the importance to the British Empire of “ornamentalism”—that is, the assimilation of local feudal hierarchies to their British counterparts (to such an extent that some imperial reactionaries could hope “native” deference might offset metropolitan democratic decadence) through such trappings of aristocracy and social hierarchy as titles, parades, jubilees, and deference to elites—is underestimated.[51] Admittedly, Cannadine’s emphasis on colonizers’ faith in indirect rule and chivalric spectacle has been criticized, in part for downplaying the cynicism and modernity of even aristocratic colonial administrators and the limitations to their willingness to regard indigenous rulers and aristocrats as their equals. But “ornamentalism” held great relevance to an irresponsible nostalgic such as Dunsany. His central beliefs in art as play, in ornament as a self-conscious and selfjustifying excess, in story as a self-sufficient game of signification without the need for a signifier, may render Dunsany congenial to the age of postmodernism. But these beliefs also had limitations. Dunsany’s loss of faith in the Christian view of Providence driving “time’s arrow” forward, and his inability to embrace the Enlightenment belief in stadial progress undermined his belief in the inevitability of empire, but not his belief in its justification. At times, Dunsany’s unshakeable belief in his own rightness seems uncomfortably reminiscent of the very de Valeran nativism—that is, the political, economic, and cultural insularity and underdevelopment—that he satirized. Despite the intermittent sharpness of his satirical observations and the creative exuberance of his fancy, Dunsany’s prescriptions for a better world often strike a contemporary reader as naive, arch, and pompous. Peace, diversity, and equality are not

necessarily secured by the belief that history is a cycle of aesthetic blood games played by bored deities.

NOTES 1. See Lord Dunsany, Patches of Sunlight (London: Jarrolds, 1938), 88–97; hereafter cited parenthetically, thus: (POS 88–97); Lord Dunsany, The Sirens Wake (London: Jarrolds, 1946), 119–21; hereafter cited parenthetically, thus: (SW 119–21). 2. See Trevor West, Horace Plunkett: Co-operation and Politics (Dublin: Colin Smythe, 1986). 3. See: Mark Amory, Biography of Lord Dunsany (London: Collins, 1972), 34–37, 41, 73; Lord Dunsany, My Ireland (London: Jarrolds, 1937), 12–18, hereafter cited parenthetically, thus: (MI 12–18). 4. Dunsany, POS 166–69; Amory, Biography, 89–90. 5. Dunsany, POS 104–5, 122–23, 133–34. 6. Amory, Biography, 103. 7. Amory, Biography, 75–76. Dunsany’s accusation of plagiarism, based on style and atmosphere, is disputable; Gregory based her play on the biblical story of Moses as well as on Parnell. The Parnellite subtext in Lady Gregory’s play does not appear in King Argimēnēs. 8. Amory, Biography, 113–23. 9. Lord Dunsany, Tales of War (1918; Decorah, IA: Sattre Press, 2002), 21. There is personal bitterness in this description, as Dunsany is imagining the German artillerists whose shell killed his friend and protégé Francis Ledwidge. It should, in fairness to Dunsany, be noted that the Germanophobia of this wartime collection is principally focused on Kaiser Wilhelm II. Several stories emphasize the suffering the Kaiser brought to German civilians. 10. Lord Dunsany, While the Sirens Slept (London: Hutchinson, 1944), 7–8; hereafter cited parenthetically, thus: (WSS 7–8). 11. Lord Dunsany, A Glimpse from a Watch Tower (London: Jarrolds, 1946), 6. 12. Amory, Biography, 70, 172–73. 13. On Ashtown, see L. P. Curtis, “The Last Gasp of Southern Unionism: Lord Ashtown of Wood-lawn,” Eire-Ireland 40, 3 and 4 (Fall–Winter 2005): 140–88. 14. Amory, Biography, 175, 190, 204–7. 15. “The Sign” in The Collected Jorkens, Volume II (San Francisco and Portland: Night Shade Books, three volumes, 2004–05), 63–67; hereafter cited parenthetically, thus: (CJ II 63–67). Volume I (2004) collects The Travel Tales of Mr. Joseph Jorkens (1931) and Jorkens Remembers Africa (1934); volume II (2004), Jorkens Has a Large Whiskey (1940) and The Fourth Book of Jorkens (1948); volume III (2005), Jorkens Borrows Another Whiskey (1954), The Last Book of Jorkens (2002), and a selection of uncollected stories. 16. Amory, Biography, 205–6, 281. 17. Lord Dunsany, If I Were Dictator (London: Methuen, 1934), 16–18, 54; hereafter

cited parenthetically, thus: (IIWD 16–18, 54). Other crusades included a campaign against docking dogs’ tails and the denunciation of printers who “improved” punctuation. 18. Amory, Biography, 267–68; Hazel Littlefield, Lord Dunsany, King of Dreams: A Personal Portrait (New York: Exposition Press, 1959), 46. 19. Littlefield, Lord Dunsany, 89–98. 20. Seamus Heaney, “The Labourer and the Lord: Francis Ledwidge and Lord Dunsany,” in Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978 (London: Faber & Faber, 1980), 202–6. 21. Dunsany, WSS 96–97, 103–4. 22. Dunsany, SW 46–56; Amory, Biography, 245–47. 23. Lord Dunsany, The Journey (London: Macdonald, 1944), 17. 24. Dunsany, SW 56–106; Amory, Biography, 247–50. 25. Lord Dunsany, The Last Revolution (London: Jarrolds, 1951). 26. See, for instance, The King of Elfland’s Daughter (London: Putnam, 1924); The Charwoman’s Shadow (London: Putnam, 1926). 27. Lord Dunsany, The Blessing of Pan (London: Putnam, 1927). 28. Lord Dunsany, The Pleasures of a Futuroscope, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2003). The work was originally written in 1955 (introduction by Joshi, p. 7). 29. Lord Dunsany, The Strange Journeys of Colonel Polders (London: Jarrolds, 1950). For a more extensive discussion, see S. T. Joshi, Lord Dunsany: Master of the Anglo-Irish Imagination (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), 117–20. Joshi argues persuasively that this novel is undervalued. The recent film adaptation directed by Toa Frazer—Dean Spanley (2008, UK/New Zealand)—effectively captures many Dunsanyesque features, including his humor, but it associates reincarnation with emotional healing and reconciliation. Dunsany’s basic attitude is whimsical noninvolvement, which in Spanley produces humorous incongruity; in Polders the humor is subtly blended with an underlying bleakness. 30. Lord Dunsany, A Glimpse from a Watch Tower, 18–22. 31. “In Ravancore,” in Lord Dunsany, The Little Tales of Smethers (London: Jarrolds, 1952). 32. Dunsany suggests that civilization in a postnuclear world may seek the Zulus to learn how to grind corn. A Journey, 61. 33. Amory, Biography, 67. Dunsany also proposed that “sex appeal” in advertisements should be banned—not from prudery, but because it is degrading to exploit so sacred an instinct (IIWD 23). 34. Dunsany’s story was written in 1939. George Orwell’s classic essay on imperialism, “Shooting an Elephant,” appeared in 1936. Although Orwell’s antiimperialism contrasts sharply with Dunsany’s diehard conservatism, both stories present a colonial marksman whose objective is not so much to secure material benefit from the elephant’s death as to reinforce a sense of control that he knows to be much more insecure than it appears.

35. Lord Dunsany, The Curse of the Wise Woman (London: Heinemann, 1933). 36. Lord Dunsany, Up in the Hills (London: Heinemann, 1935), 5, 14–15; hereafter cited parenthetically, thus: (UH 5, 14–15). 37. Amory, Biography, 186. 38. Amory, Biography, 233. 39. See, for instance, passages in Up in the Hills on standing stones (UH 152), or My Ireland on holy wells (MI 20). 40. Guinness transferred its principal operations from Dublin to Britain in the 1930s to escape tariff barriers. 41. Dunsany, A Journey, 1. 42. Lord Dunsany, Guerrilla (London: Heinemann, 1944). 43. The dedication does not appear in The Collected Jorkens. For Gray’s credulity about reports of German spies in Ireland, see Eunan O’Halpin, Spying on Ireland: British Intelligence and Irish Neutrality During the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 198–200, 250–51; for the general credulity of Irish diehard Unionists toward rumors of espionage, and their influence on British perceptions, see Paul McMahon, British Spies and Irish Rebels: British Intelligence and Ireland 1916–1945 (Woodbridge: Boyden Press, 2008). 44. Lord Dunsany, The Year (London: Jarrolds, 1946), 186. 45. Dunsany, The Year, 157. 46. Dunsany, The Year, 175–76. 47. Lord Dunsany, A Glimpse from a Watch Tower, 41–44, 50–53. 48. Dunsany, A Glimpse from a Watch Tower, 29. 49. Joshi, Lord Dunsany: Master of the Anglo-Irish Imagination, 199–201. 50. Anne Crone (1915–1972) was a Fermanagh schoolteacher who had her first novel, Bridie Steen (London: Heinemann, 1949), turned down by several publishers until she sent it to Dunsany, who supplied an enthusiastic foreword hailing it as “one of the great novels of our time” and calling Crone “the Hardy of Fermanagh.” His view that Crone was the equal of his other literary protégés, Francis Ledwidge and Mary Lavin, has not been widely shared (though she published two further novels); he may have been influenced by the fact that the novel’s contrast between the religious divisions of rural Ulster and the unspoiled natural world of the bog where the heroine finds emotional refuge and, eventually, death, echoes his own The Curse of the Wise Woman, while the lonely and ethereal Catholic heroine mildly resembles Dunsany’s Mona Sheehy. 51. David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (London: Penguin Books, 2001).

Chapter 9

“The Laughter of the Gods” Max Duperray Contextualizing Lord Dunsany I came across Lord Dunsany at the time of the H. P. Lovecraft craze in France during the late 1960s. An issue of the literary review Les Cahiers de L’Herne (1969) had given full scope to the American master of nightmarish fiction and casually mentioned the name of his Irish predecessor among others. That same year, François Truchaud translated Supernatural Horror in Literature into French and defined a unique congregation—Arthur Machen, Algernon Backwood, Lord Dunsany, and Lovecraft—placed under the auspices of earth and dreams as twin “signposts”: an archeology of desire, entombed in a sedimented past and resurfacing in cosmic dreams.[1] Lord Dunsany’s status among Lovecraft’s forebears was, however, slightly troublesome. The mythic vein of the supernaturalist Arthur Machen of Celtic ascendancy seemingly stood out as the appropriate reference; Algernon Blackwood and his gift for mystic and atmospheric terror, M. R. James the gloomy antiquarian, and E. F. Benson could also fit in. Was Dunsany not the odd man out? He had been neglected as a minor writer, an aristocrat unconcerned by social or cultural commitment and playing second fiddle in the Irish revivalist movement. His relationship with Yeats bears testimony to a near embarrassment. Yeats was both admiring and skeptical, saying that such narratives as “The Fall of Babbulkund” or “Idle Days on the Yann” might have changed him as a young reader and regretting their distance from “real” life, suspecting that a plebeian background would have been a greater asset for a literary achievement. . . . Dunsany was above all a fantasist contriving never-never worlds in the leisured context of his social class, a regressive pseudo-medievalist, and, as a keen sportsman of fiery temperament, Ireland’s crack shot bent on open-air expeditions whether on the Irish moors or in the world deserts—in short, poles apart from the famous half-invalid of Providence. Looking up his first autobiography, Patches of Sunlight, few traces of flirtation with the dark—despite a mention of E. A. Poe’s haunted landscape of Weir (in his poem “Ulalume”)—can be found, but rather enthusiastic readings of biblical or Romantic and Victorian poetic literature, and a love for Japanese theatre. Writing an introduction to Arthur Machen’s The Hill of Dreams, he never mentions any association with a genre but focuses on the mystical attachment to the original land. In 1952, Peter Penzoldt’s thesis on the ghost story had singled out what was perceived then as the moralistic outlook of Dunsanian fabulation, and Penzoldt hosted him in another tetralogy with Stevenson, Kipling, and de la Mare.[2] Colin de la Mare had chosen “The Electric King” from The Travel Tales of Mr. Joseph Jorkens for his anthology They Walk Again (1931). Adventure, memories of imperialistic exoticism, and poetic supernaturalism opened up yet further

and more qualified vistas. Another direction, more American perhaps, contributing to a resuscitation of a forgotten work, was available when, in 1970, Lin Carter published a wide selection of Dunsany’s tales as heroic fantasy, a branch of popular literature in the Englishspeaking world completely unknown in France. Very early, in 1917, Dorothy Scarborough (in The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction) had situated him within the framework of the mythopoetic Celtic Renaissance, however individualistic his membership.[3] His stories probably accommodated memories of William Morris’s romances. Lin Carter, introducing a reprint of The King of Elfland’s Daughter, sketched a poetics of influence. Would Dunsany lead up to Michael Moorcock or Ursula Le Guin? A more recent reader, John Wilson Foster, analyzed the roots of the taste of the revivalists for a fairy-tale medievalism, which Dunsany shared with them as “a beneficiary of the current expansion of the boundaries of ‘legitimate’ fiction to accommodate science-fiction, adult fantasy, and children’s literature.”[4] Such an “expansion” certainly provided a recipe to coincide with the spirit of our times, but a somewhat loose approach to his achievement, with Tolkien and Lovecraft featuring as easygoing yet curious bedfellows. For one thing, creating a consistent and enduring other world, the way Tolkien had done in The Lord of the Rings, was alien to Dunsany. His early theogony The Gods of Pegāna, which might qualify there, is closer to the “gossamer palaces” of “The Bride of the Man-Horse” than to any definite mythology. Dissolution is inherent in creation, a fleeting, swiftly passing wonder. Despite many intratextual echoes—the return of William Sharp in a few stories, for instance—no plot ever builds up from the loosely related stories, often published separately in magazines. The three longer stories of “Beyond the Fields We Know” in Tales of Three Hemispheres and, above all, the creation of a glib-tongued double, yet another spinner of yarns, Mr. Joseph Jorkens, as a self-parodic persona, may compensate but not fill in the gap. Moreover, the epic warring feats are never common with him, despite the fame and apparent, though deceptive, conformity of his “Fortress Unvanquishable Save for Sacnoth” (The Sword of Welleran) or of some later novels. True, Dunsany’s versatility often invited a somewhat fragmented and diluted reception. Scanning criticism over half a century or so highlights the various approaches to a multifaceted work. Each “school” of criticism would tend to pick up the relevant samples: Penzoldt pointing out stories like “The Bureau d’Echange de Maux,” a picturesque fable; Scarborough relying on the tales of Time and the Gods, pseudo-naive but sinister, decadent in short, closer to Swinburne and late Victorian aesthetic trends; the neoheroic followers pointing out the great fantasy novel The King of Elfland’s Daughter. Jacques Bergier in the 1970s planned to produce a book whose title would have been “Lord Dunsany ou le Glaive de Welleran”—the sword of Welleran as iconic item. Most readers have tended to look backward, promoting the Anglo-Irish peer to the fatherhood of romance. Any endeavor to trace Dunsany’s fiction to a precise origin is bound to be bogged down by the wide gamut of possibilities and the sheer impossibility of

conceiving his work monolithically. Dunsany’s tales convene imaginative sources of every description. They are situated at the ill-defined crossroads of cultural references, very much like Welleran’s city, Merimna, behind its reminiscing walls bearing the statues of its former noble visitors. Biblical for its rhythmic style, Celtic and pagan, Northern in keeping with the Germanic Ragnarök, atmospherically Oriental following the contemporary taste for the East like G. W. Russell’s (AE) in Ireland. In one of his dreamer’s tales about the dead and mad city of Andelsprutz, all the extinct cities of yesteryear come to its bedside: “the soul of Camelot that had so long forsaken Usk [. . .], Ilion all girt with towers, still cursing the sweet face of ruinous Helen; and I saw there Babylon and Persepolis, the bearded face of bull-like Nineveh, and Athens mourning her immortal gods.”[5] Moreover, Dunsany always had an oblique approach to the question of genres, making any attempt to pigeonhole him inefficient. Can the famous “The Two Bottles of Relish” (The Man Who Ate the Phoenix), written later after the realistic mode of detective fiction, be classified as such? “At no point”—a reader remarks—“is Dunsany more a virtuoso of irony than [here]. He maintains throughout the story several delicate balances, between horror and humor, admiration and derision, realism and fantasy.”[6] The Lovecraft association that gave a definite impetus to Dunsany’s recognition in France had indeed done more to adumbrate his peculiar versatility, which was by no means circumscribed or limited to imaginative epos and Elfland spirits—still less to a traditional moralist parabolic style and certainly more sophisticated than children’s tales on an adult level as Sprague de Camp would define them. Maurice Lévy, the French specialist of the English Gothic novel, perhaps provided a better insight at the time by foregrounding the kinship with the Anglo-Irish aristocrat whose tales Lovecraft had discovered rather late, in 1919. What was it that fascinated the New England recluse so much? “A subtly decadent universe where the world we live in is presented as the fragile dreams of outdated gods . . . The unreal, the sublimation of sentiments and the belated aestheticism.”[7] Everyone knows that Lovecraft was very articulate about that, almost identifying with his Anglo-Irish master. Not only did he pick up the correct ingredients of Dunsany’s broil, emphasizing “modern disillusion,”[8] but he loved the abstraction, the noncommitment that has such a modern tinge, not alien from the Modernists’ wish to keep sentiment at bay, “paring [their] nails,” like Joyce in his portrait of the artist. A paradoxical modernity for someone who hated the developing industrial and urban world of the early twentieth century so much and loved antiquated narratives. “Architectural intellect,” Yeats writes, introducing Dunsany. Taking architectural dreams literally underscores the echo of Dunsany in the early Lovecraft. In The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath he had paid homage to Dunsany’s visionary tales; it is a Dunsanian text of surrealistic overtones. Not only does it recapture the spirit of neoromantic orientalism, for the cloud cities and paranormal landscapes, the onomastic vertigo of the journey down the Yann and of the world of Wonder at large,

but it also portrays the lonely dreamer’s necromantic nostalgia in his humdrum, unpretentious environment and melancholy aloofness—the lowly and the heroic in one. Randolph Carter’s journey, however, never swerves from its transcendental heavy demonic tone, never alleviated by humorous perspectives. Remarkably, the two fantasists diverged later, one to “eldritch abomination,” the other to deadpan humor, inventiveness, or verbal trickery. Lovecraft among others had been critical of that drift and uncomprehending of the lighter tone or grotesquerie, Irish perhaps, of Lord Dunsany, as S. T. Joshi duly reports.[9] Yeats had also expressed slight annoyance at Dunsany’s propensity to poke fun at his fellow men: “Doubtless the men of Perdóndaris, that famous city, have such antiquity of manners and culture that it is of small moment should they please themselves with some tavern humour, but we must needs cling to ‘our foolish Irish pride’ and form an etiquette.”[10] The Anglo-Irish storyteller remained faithful to his fundamental otherworldly turn of mind, choosing the borderline between the improbable and the actual, another edge, “at the end of . . .” logicality perhaps. Lovecraft nonetheless correctly noted the peculiar tone of those “brief fantastic tales all told in a certain humorous doubt of their own solemnity.”[11] * * * It indeed behooves any critical survey to trace Dunsanian fabulation back to its Irish roots at the time when he started writing, when fin de siècle sensitivity was still prevalent. As John W. Foster again correctly emphasized, the contextual Irish Renaissance added its Celtic sagas or national romances to the English background —pre-Raphaelite roots and art for art’s sake. It thus adopted the mold of the latenineteenth-century sensuous taste for decorative art, decadent spices, drug-induced vagaries, and mythological speculations.[12] The homage Dunsany indirectly pays to the treasure trove of literature in one of his early tales reads like a page from Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray: . . . the box contained fifteen peerless odes in the alcaic form, five sonnets [. . .] nine ballads in the manner of Provence that had no equal in the treasuries of man, a poem addressed to a moth in twenty-eight perfect stanzas, a piece of blank verse of over a hundred lines [. . .] as well as fifteen lyrics on which no merchant would dare set a price.[13] The substance of his own imaginative universe harks back to Ireland as the motherland first, the “unearthly garden,” the land of lost causes, of tragic yet sardonic texture, that of “alienation of life” and desultory if not quizzical disquisition on it. In My Ireland, Dunsany has defined “The land of Unlikely Events”—“melancholic and ironic philosophy” (Yeats again). It is a peculiar place with a definite love for the half-said. In a quaint ghost story among Jorkens’s tales whose title reads like a piece of wonderland, “The Haunting of Halahanstown,” one Malone, a local fisherman, is supposed to coach the visitor in a ruined castle of Ireland and introduce him to the

ghost of the owner appearing in the mist at nightfall. And his invitation cuts both ways: “I don’t say as I believe in witches, and I don’t say as I don’t.”[14] He speaks like a proper offspring of the “old shepherd at Langslide,” on the way to “the City on Mallington Moor,” “whose habits render him unreliable.”[15] There seems to be some dialectic relationship between the outflow of overwrought evocations of wonder and the scanty words, the relative muteness of the witnesses. Everything reaches back, indeed, to the opium eaters’ drug-induced visions, to Kubla Khan’s “stately pleasure dome” or perhaps to the dreams of De Quincey “beyond the splendour of Babylon and Hekatompylos.” “The Hashish Man” and “A Tale of London” pay tribute to those memories, but tea was the only drug Dunsany ever tasted, as he himself humorously confessed to one inquirer. A reader of Poe the poet, of the great Victorian poets, he enjoyed the knack for parody and pastiche that went together with a rationalist’s equanimity. Miss Cubbidge “on her balcony” waiting for her father to be made a baronet may sound like a parodic echo of “The Lady of Shalott.” The reader is informed in a short prefatory note that her story is narrated on Belgravia balconies and sung in The Brompton Road (“Miss Cubbidge and the Dragon of Romance”). Faint parodic echoes of Tennyson’s Arthurian poems might ring in such pieces as “The Hoard of the Gibbelins.” In “Thirteen at Table” (The Book of Wonder), one suspects a faint Poesque overtone, when the tired huntsman after a deadly ride is received by a reluctant host at a banquet of ladies’ ghosts, those he has sinned against in his dissolute lifetime, and helps dispose of the curse through tireless animated conversation with the spirits. * * * One recent reader has a felicitous way of sketching Dunsany’s particular manner: “What he could do, what he did better than anyone, was to take poetic images and airy tissues of imagination and weight them down at the corners with perfect details to craft a net to catch dreams in.”[16] Any reader is necessarily impressed by details, among the “little adventures at the edge of the world”—as his subtitle of The Book of Wonder runs—a wealth of incongruous notations, “tender” and “pathetic” (Yeats’s words), more disturbing than any straightforward plotting of terror, undermining both reality and convention, the reality of the world we know and the conventions of fantasy. It strikes its roots in a tendency to parody unawares and underlines the continuity between wonder and sarcasm, sublimation and derision, a pseudo-naive, half-witty half-ferocious tone at times. That culminates in A Dreamer’s Tales and in the quaint oneiric serial time travel of “Beyond the Fields. . . .” In the narrative of the mad city Andelsprutz: “The stolid conquerors awoke and turned in their beds and slept again,”[17] whereas in “A Shop in Go-By Street,” the young man “had for sale on the counter an instrument for picking up a lump of sugar in a new way [. . .] I asked him what was the use of it, and he said that it was of no use but had been invented only a week ago (and was very much bought).”[18]

A mystifying fastidiousness pervades the narratives even when phrasing the titles of the fabulous stories: the hero traveling to the land of none’s desires (“How PlashGoo Came to the Land of None’s Desire”) or the queer question of knowing “why the milkman shudders he perceives the dawn” (The Last Book of Wonder) read like mock-heroic pronouncements or near-absurd queries. Some terrible understatements lie in a single adverb: “where the Gibbelins lived and discreditably fed” (“The Hoard of the Gibbelins,” Book of Wonder). Framing the story gives it its distinct tonality, but framing too may come under the lash of satire: the narrator of “The Three Infernal Jokes” reports the words of “the desolate man,” but vouchsafes that he won’t quote too closely “his words with all his woeful interjections and the misery of his frantic self-reproaches.”[19] What is the method? Just then when the story promised to grip one there was something that was not there. Or perhaps that was too much, too many facts, too impartial a love of truth, that led so many of them to throw everything onto their tales, apart from its interest, merely because it was true.[20] Or another confession: “So I will tell the tale from the moment at which any brightness came into it, any merriment, any audacity.”[21] There is probably no end to a playful inventory of Jorkens’s know-how. Jorkens is without a past, like Dickens’s Mr. Pickwick. He comes out of the blue unless he remembers Dickens’s Jorkens in David Copperfield—and needs a foil: Terbut, exasperated about recurrent narrative delinquencies, illogicalities, and fictitious anomalies, but entranced as any member of the crew is. * * * Dunsany’s writings should not, however, be construed as purely light fiction bound to evaporate into mere fanciful oneirism, petering out into humorous entertainment as time wears on. The “tragic alienation of life” so much ingrained in the Irish temperament still hovers above it all. “He is Irish through that specificity inherent in Eire’s sons which is called the tragic alienation of life,” the French critic Paul-Dubois wrote.[22] The upshot is a somewhat unique compound. And a unique personality emerges along his peers. All Dunsanian dreamers, Gerald Jones, Thomas Shap, Mr. Sladden, an English Dutilleuil, Marcel Aymé’s absent-minded clerk who walks through walls, are “absent” city dwellers of London, “a desiderate city” in search of an illusory identity resurfacing when opening a wonderful window on a medieval city for Mr. Sladden, who bought it from an Oriental peddler, for Mr. Shap dreaming his selfcoronation as king of the dream city. Only there are dubious dreamers everywhere, and the talented Mr. Shap is ultimately locked up in an asylum. Lovecraft admired Dunsany’s capacity to minimize man, but the dismissed narrator of the inaugural theogony, the first pronoun, does return in biblical phrasing —“I will arise now and see Babbulkund, City of Marvel”—inaugurating “The Fall of Babbulkund” and the emphasized redoubling of the narrating persona: “I had said: ‘I

will see Andelsprutz arrogant with her beauty.’”[23] The I’s return looms large in later fancies: “The Return” (The Man Who Ate the Phoenix), where the narrator curiously realizes that he is the ghost back home a century late, not to speak of the recurring theme of the speaker’s eternity against the backdrop of a vanishing London (“When the Tides Ebb and Flow” or “A Shop in Go-By Street”)—that speaker whose reappearance echoes some unvoiced destiny: “So I came down through the wood to the bank of Yann, as had been prophesied [. . .]”[24] The intrusion of the narrator is gradually conducive to the recognition of the dreamer in the tableau similar to the dream of the Gods in Sardathrion (Time and the Gods). They flock to the city disguised as men to admire the exhibited symbols of the worlds. In their celestial universe statues personify their creations, and in the world of man stones are being carved as effigies of them. Similarly, London is the inaccessible dream that the Sultan wishes the “hasheesh-eater” to produce. In a fruitful exchange London is an allegory of reality. In “A Tale of London” the Sultan convenes his hasheesh-eater: “dream to me of London.”[25] Later, in The Fourth Book of Jorkens, one short story harks back the mood of wonder, “The Sacred City of Krakovlitz.” The shepherd Screbtz sees an exquisite Oriental city on top of Krakovlitz Hill; the names have a Slavonic ring: the shepherd of Eastern Europe has an Oriental architectural dream just as the Irish aristocrat who writes about him has. But the plot redoubles when another member of the club remembers the city of Lomb-Bah, which he had destroyed because of its evil ways and which rises again in the shepherd’s dream with another name. In the same collection, “Jorkens’ Ride” gives to the speaker the ultimate role by terminating on the commemorative figure of himself in the town square: “a bronze statue of a tired man, forty years old by now and turning green, with the plain words cut in the marble on which he stood, ‘He saved the city’ . . .”[26] A fallacious claim, though, since he actually failed to reach the threatened city, Ullumsgali, on time. Everything strikes root in the early enigmatic sculpted images of mythical Pegāna, Ranorada, or the hidden face of Mluna, self-created images, similar to the Sphinx-like persona watching the delirious occupations and petty cares of men as in “The House of the Sphinx.” The dreamer, the fountainhead of the tale, speaks of nothing else than his narration, but faces retribution for his excess or imaginative transgression—according to a near stereotype of romance. . . . Troublesome Terbut in the Jorkens saga, impervious to the specific nature of fictitious truth, typifies another impediment that Jorkens easily brushes aside to satisfy the ritual of the narrated story. In Dunsany’s language-conscious universe, the poet is confronted by the mystery of creative language and its attractive power, esoteric pronouncements of mysterious opacity. Made-up vocabulary, phonetic mirages, re-created “astronomic” words, as St. John Gogarty once called them, are a step toward nonsense for the man who prefaced Edward Lear. In never-heard-of purlieus imaginary languages proliferate so much that “namelessness ironically looms on a darker horizon, en route to a nameless

city. . . . ” But the coined language is also carefully based on pseudo-realistic research: Mallington comes from the Norman “Mal lieu, afterwards Mallieu town.”[27] In the country of the Yann (“The Avenger of Perdóndaris”), a humorous surge of personal linguistic tastes occurs as the time traveler hears some barbarian tell him “av er kike,” an obscure phrase until he realizes that Cockney has survived: “I had always disliked the Cockney dialect—and with the arrogance of an Irishman who hears from rich and poor the English of Elizabeth.”[28] Obviously myth-making and mystification have an everlasting kinship if you choose to highlight them. His mythology dramatizes the pretense of a curse on fearless curiosity, on the violation of ominous secrecy when there is none to speak of. There again one recurring question, as in all writings of fantasy, is that of the relationship between realism and imagination. A question that should include an investigation into the occasions of his compositions, the come and go between Sidney Sime’s drawings and his tales, for instance, or the need to refer back to fruitful experiences as when he relates his sojourn in Gibraltar as giving the idea for his “Fortress Unvanquishable” or the flower-girt statue of the lost city Strasbourg on the Place de la Concorde in Paris for the mad city of Andelsprutz: “the purpose of my book is quest for human imagination, and having one myself. I am trying to see if anything can be found out concerning its ways.”[29] That question does appear even more urgently in the case of Dunsany’s drama, a series of Symbolist tableaux stripped bare of any psychological individuality, a Greek tragedy as thin as air intent on adapting wonder for the stage. Ford Madox Ford undermined the playwright’s claims of Symbolist and abstract treatment and maintained that what makes his drama alive is the inclusion of the domestic desires of human beings, as the reference to tripe and onions in The Glittering Gate for the two burglars trying to pry the Gate of Heaven open with a nutcracker; exactly what Ernest Boyd had noticed before: “There is [. . .] a sardonic humour which Synge would have enjoyed in the dialogue of the pair whose dreams of paradise are incongruously coloured by their chief desires when alive.”[30] Most of Dunsany’s drama relies on the ultimate rise of the mocked divinity under the guise of some sort of retributive commander, an embodiment of the literalistic impulse orchestrated by disquieting laughter according to the phrase used to title one of his most famous plays: The Laughter of the Gods—man the laughingstock of the gods; as if Dunsany were laying the foundations of the future Beckett but not earnestly, just for the sake of escaping from the drawing-room convention with Synge as a model: “as if someone in a drawing room comedy had opened the window to air blowing fresh over cornfields.”[31] One recent study based on F. M. Ford’s paradoxical reference to Dunsany as a realist defines him as a representative of “the self-deprecatory tradition,” and that brings him closer to Saki or G. K. Chesterton.[32] That is mostly the true source of his potent mendacity, not free from the wistful suspicion of futility. In “A Tale of London,” after listening to the inspiring and exquisite description of London, the dream city, the

Sultan bluntly asks about government: “‘Is their government good?’ said the Sultan,” like some irrelevant, incongruous anticlimax. That is precisely the question asked by the writer of My Ireland to Old Mickey, which he never answers. Jorkens’s tall tales soon occupy the front stage, of course: elaborate fallacies of a master of deadpan humor with the knack of taking the impossible for granted or spurious logic at face value, following the trail already set by the tales of wonder. The sad walker in the sad landscape of the Highland road offers the narrator to entertain him curiously: “I will tell you a thing that will make you die of laughter.”[33] Only that is to be understood literally; there follows the incredible story of the deadly jokes, two of them, horribly destructive; one last, the third, yet untold, may benefit the narrator if he chooses to, and so the poor elect prefers to take to his heels before he risks hearing it. Can you trust the power of imagination so much that you can die of it? One actually does (“Jarton’s Disease,” The Fourth Book of Jorkens). Literalistic reception has always been deciphered as a fruitful source of fantastic fiction, despite strong denial by the storyteller. For stories are indeed about the compelling power of the word. Jorkens is a guide for an in-depth understanding of what “truth” is. He definitely emphasizes details as if he had read Roland Barthes’s lesson on the “reality effect” in advance. As a consequence, he will rectify inexactitudes. When narrating the extraordinary event of his marriage with a mermaid he takes care to correct the price of the admission to the cage, fearing scepticism fed by such errors (“Mrs. Jorkens,” Travel Tales). Speech itself is a feat not so much of logic as of legerdemain; Jorkens’s tall tales are crammed with specious argument sounding like syllogisms. It is a flashing exhibition of plausible thought and spurious logic. After all, that is Ireland’s genial taste for oratory and anecdotes on the mere fringe of truth. In “The Long Porter’s Tale,” one sentence runs: “his name is a byword for loquacity wherewith they mock the talkative.”[34] Loquacity is no table talk but reveals the gratuitousness of imagination as its most serious asset. The Carrollian flavor of “Beyond the Fields . . . ,” with the speaking cat of the shop in Go-By Street, may echo sardonically that eloquent description, not forgetting the deadening denouement of “The Long Porter’s Tale”: that grizzled man tells out-and-out lies. * * * More exactly than humorous escapism, Dunsany contrives a decidedly modernist narration. Hence J. L. Borges’s choice of “Idle Days on the Yann” for his Library of Babel, his taste for the Bureau d’Echange de Maux, and his distinction of “Carcassonne” as close to Kafka. The source of that text had been distinctly linguistic, not a trip to Languedoc, but a line coming from nowhere: “Ah, but he, he never came to Carcasonne,” with this recurrent emphasis on the negative. “Three Literary Men’s” recurring phrase, “better not to,” almost sounds like a funny echo of Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, and his obsessively negative formula. Elsewhere the storyteller’s ultimate and undefined culpability at the hands of unremitting destiny— through ritualistic proceedings by a gang of masked fanatics who never tire of putting

the corpse back to unhallowed soil—develops a dark humor of repetition. “Where the Tide Ebb and Flow” is one of Dunsany’s masterpieces; it indeed minimizes the actors of the drama by the stupendous story of a time travel that belittles the cares of men and makes them Lilliputians trudging along to unimaginable times when London is no more. The “bureau universel d’échange,” for one, is a mixture of spooky allusions, satirical irreverence, and bizarre proceedings. The man at the door, innkeeper of sorts, biting his coin, belongs to the unsavory hosts in the underground premises of Dunsany’s little adventures. The exchange of evils is reminiscent of W. W. Jacobs’s “The Monkey’s Paw,” another queer insight into ironical concatenation of events as inescapable necessity. The most awe-inspiring part of the game is the exchange of death for life, and the most hilarious that of the trapped protagonist who acquires a deadening fear of elevators—before the place evaporates as it does in a number of texts of the fantastic: petty choices are yet of no return. When adapting his tale for the stage (The Bureau de Change, Plays for Earth and Air), Dunsany introduced the character of Salignac who maintains an absolute secret of what he exchanges for the guillotine: “What he exchanges for the guillotine is not revealed [. . .] this is a serious improvement on the tale,” he writes.[35] The Irish fabulist cannot be forgotten as highly skilled chess player, a distant cousin of Lewis Carroll who would teach Alice Liddell chess game intricacies by inventing stories for the chess pieces. Like the Red Queen, “a Fury cold and calm” in Through the Looking Glass; the chess game is a more potent guideline than the mere thematic reference of “The Three Sailors’ Gambit” would suggest: sheer mystery in ciphers. * * * The archetypes of a period are there under the colors of a bygone oneirism; from the memories of a first Romantic era and its spontaneous sense of retrieved meaning—familiar to Elfland and neo-Arthurian quests—to what was sometimes called the second Romanticism and its paradigm of meaning lost so much embedded in the oscillation between the tragic tonality of failing escapism, the pathos of wonder, and the temptation of the absurd, Jorkens’s whimsical talks—a growing impatience with the archetype. The architectural theme as the major iconographic parameter modeled after the romantic form of centrality and self-divination is a case in point. It is also, as a symbol, the evidence of a distance between report and narration, an onomastic experience, and the testimony of the awe-inspiring proximity of marvels and demons. Dunsany’s incursion into the field of the drama bears testimony to that duality: the sardonic formulation of that basic nothingness that glares the visitor in the eyes, the revenge of the gods, but one cannot forget here, where the gods are concerned, that “his mythological characters [. . .] are frequently what is described as all-human.”[36] Another irony perhaps is that Dunsany should have written such poetic prose in a narcotic and sensuous environment but unremarkable poetry, or such brilliant stories

but lackluster novels, as if he were deliberately flaunting his own weaknesses. I would suggest that Dunsany’s position in literary history is that of a post-Romantic, postDecadent ironist in the lighter, more casual tone and distanced manner of the Modernists, prying the Gate of Heaven open casually, with a nutcracker, for lethal but sartorial epiphanies.[37]

NOTES 1. François Truchaud, “Introduction” to H. P. Lovecraft, Epouvante et surnaturel an littérature (Paris: Chrisian Bourgois, 1969). 2. See Peter Penzoldt, The Supernatural in Fiction (London: Peter Nevill, 1952; rpt. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1965). 3. Dorothy Scarborough, The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1917; rpt. New York: Octagon Press, 1967). 4. John Wilson Foster, “A Dreamer’s Tales: The Stories of Lord Dunsany,” in Fictions of the Irish Revival: A Changeling Art (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1987), 292. 5. Lord Dunsany, A Dreamer’s Tales (London: George Allen & Sons, 1910), 37–38. 6. Warren S. Walker, “‘Tales One Never Wants to Hear’: A Sample from Lord Dunsany,” Studies in Short Fiction 22 (Fall 1995): 453–54. 7. Maurice Lévy, Lovecraft ou du fantastique (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1972), 42. 8. H. P. Lovecraft, “Lord Dunsany and His Work” (1922), in Collected Essays, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2004–06), 2.61. 9. S. T. Joshi, The Weird Tale (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 41. 10. W. B. Yeats, “Introduction” to Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsany (Churchtown, Dundrum, Ireland: Cuala Press, 1912; rpt. Shannon: Irish University Press, 1972), n.p. 11. Lovecraft, “Lord Dunsany and His Work,” 2.58. 12. Foster, “A Dreamer’s Tales,” 294. 13. Lord Dunsany, “The Probable Adventure of the Three Literary Men,” in The Book of Wonder (London: Elkin Matthews, 1912), 26. 14. The Fourth Book of Jorkens (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1948), 20. 15. The Book of Wonder, 23. 16. Jo Walton, “Licensed to Sell Weasels and Jade Earrings: Lord Dunsany’s Short Stories,” tor.com, SF, fantasy and the universe http://www.tor.com/blogs/2009/06. 17. A Dreamer’s Tales, 35. 18. Tales of Three Hemispheres (1919; London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1920), 121. 19. The Last Book of Wonder (as Tales of Wonder) (London: Elkin Matthews, 1916), 176. 20. The Travel Tales of Mr. Joseph Jorkens (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1931), 66. 21. Jorkens Remembers Africa (London: William Heinemann, 1934), 186.

22. Louis Paul-Dubois, “Un Conteur irlandais: Lord Dunsany, le maître du merveilleux,” Revue des Deux-Mondes (15 August 1933): 915. 23. A Dreamer’s Tales, 33. 24. Tales of Three Hemispheres, 71. 25. The Last Book of Wonder, 1. 26. The Fourth Book of Jorkens, 82. 27. The Last Book of Wonder, 25. 28. Tales of Three Hemispheres, 143. 29. Patches of Sunlight (London: William Heinemann, 1938), 81. 30. Ernest Boyd, “Lord Dunsany, Fantaisiste,” in Appreciations and Depreciations (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1918), 89. 31. My Ireland (London: Jarrolds, 1937), 260–61. 32. Jared C. Lobdell, “The Man Who Didn’t Write Fantasy: Lord Dunsany and the Self-Deprecatory Tradition in English Light Fiction,” Extrapolation 35 (Spring 1994): 33–42. 33. “The Three Infernal Jokes,” The Last Book of Wonder, 176. 34. The Last Book of Wonder, 53. 35. The Sirens Wake (London: Jarrolds, 1945), 22. 36. Lobdell, “The Man Who Didn’t Write Fantasy,” 35–36. 37. “Lethal epiphanies” is a phrase by Almire Martin. See “Lord Dunsany, Decadent or Discoverer?” Cahiers du Centre d’Études Anglo-Irlandaises, Université de HauteBretagne, 1 (1976): 61–77.

III

On Dunsany’s Fiction

Chapter 10

Introduction to A Dreamer’s Tales and Other Stories Padraic Colum A tall and spare young man wearing incongruous spectacles across most eager eyes was addressing an audience in a literary society in Dublin. Somebody said, “He looks like a portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson,” and indeed in the sparse moustache, in the eager eyes and in the suggestion of hollowness in the face, there was a resemblance. He was speaking on poetry and by his intense interest in his subject he was able to enliven his audience as though by the spell of poetry itself. Every poem he quoted seemed inspired. He had none of the tricks, but everybody could see he was a natural orator. He was Lord Dunsany, whose plays “The Glittering Gate” and “King Argimēnēs and the Unknown Warrior” had been produced by the Irish Theatre (in 1909 and 1911). He was an officer in the British Army, a notable cricketeer and a good huntsman and had already been through one war. But one could see that what he prized above all were the things of the imagination. He was praising the work of a young poet who belonged to his own territory in Ireland—the County Meath. He spoke of that county with such gusto that one felt that Dunsany himself would put the fact that he was a Meath man before the fact that he was an Irishman. Meath is Ireland’s middle county. It has the richest soil, and for that reason it has been fought for by every conquistador who broke into Ireland. Before the Normans came Meath had already a thousand years of story. It was the demesne of the Ard-ri, the Imperator of the Celtic-Irish states. In Meath is Tara which was so sacred and venerable that the King who obtained possession of it had the other Kings of ancient Ireland for his vassals. And Cuchullain whose name evokes a whole cycle of myth and story had part of Meath for his patrimony. “Even the man who beat Napoleon was a Meath man,” Lord Dunsany exclaimed. That is not true, however. Wellington, though he came of a Meath family, happened to be born in another Irish county. Lord Dunsany’s progenitors, the Norman-Irish or Norse-Irish Plunketts, were able to root themselves in this famous, not to say fabled, Irish territory. The first conquistador founded two lordships—the lordship of Fingall and the lordship of Dunsany. The domains, the castles and the titles remain from the thirteenth century and form the oldest baronial possessions in the British Islands. Lord Dunsany then belongs to one of the half dozen families in the British peerage who are of actual Norman descent. His father it is of interest to note was a considerable orator, and his uncle is the well-known Irish statesman, Sir Horace Plunkett. Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, the present Lord Dunsany, went to an English public school and an English university; he became an officer in the Guards, and he had gone through the South African war before he began to write. His work began like an ancient literature with mythology. He told us first about

the gods of the lands where his kings, his priests and his shepherds were to abide. The gods were remote upon Pegāna, but below them were the thousand Home Gods —Roon, the god of Going, whose temples stand beyond the farthest hills; Kilooloogung, the Lord of Arising Smoke; Jabim, who sits behind the house to lament the things that are broken and cast away; Triboogie, the Lord of Dusk, whose children are the shadows; Pitsu, who strokes the cat; Hobith, who calms the dog; Habinabah, who is Lord of Glowing Embers; old Gribaun, who sits in the heart of the fire and turns the wood to ash. “And when it is dark, all in the hour of Triboogie,” says the Chapter in “The Gods of Pegāna” that tells of the Thousand Home Gods, “Hish creepeth from the forest, the Lord of Silence, whose children are the bats who have broken the command of their father, but in a voice that is ever so low. Hish husheth the mouse and all the whispers in the night; he maketh all noises still. Only the cricket rebelleth. But Hish has sent against him such a spell that after he hath cried a thousand times his voice may be heard no more, but becometh part of the silence.” After he had written “The Gods of Pegāna” Lord Dunsany discovered a figure that was more significant for him than any of his gods—the figure of Time. “Suddenly the swart figure of Time stood up before the gods, both hands dripping with blood and a red sword dangling idly from his fingers.” Time had overthrown Sardathrion, the city they had built for their solace, and when the oldest of the gods questioned him “Time looked him in the face and edged towards him, fingering with his dripping fingers the hilt of his nimble sword.” Over and over again he tells of the cities that were wonderful before Time prevailed against them—Sardathrion, with its onyx lion looming limb by limb from the dusk; Babbulkund, that was called by those who loved her “The City of Marvel,” and by those who hated her “The City of the Dog,” where over the roofs of her palace chambers “winged lions flit like bats, the size of every one is the size of the lions of God, and the wings are larger than any wing created”; Bethmoora, where window after window pours into the dusk its “lion-frightening light.” We all must regret that these stories by Dunsany were not amongst the stories we read in our youth. “Had I read ‘The Fall of Babbulkund’ or ‘Idle Days on the Yann’ when I was a boy,” says W. B. Yeats, “I had perhaps been changed for better or worse, and looked to that first reading as the creation of my world; for when we are young the less circumstantial, the further from common life a book is, the more does it touch our hearts and make us dream. We are idle, unhappy, exorbitant, and like the young Blake admit no city beautiful that is not paved with gold and silver.” From the making of tales he has gone on to the making of plays, and he has brought into the theatre the impressive simplicity of his myths and stories. His kings and beggars and slaves are utterly simple and single-minded; they have nothing but a passion or a vision or a faith. He came to the theatre with little knowledge of what is called dramatic construction, but with an astonishing feeling for dramatic situation. It is by virtue of this feeling for situation that his “Gods of the Mountain,” his “King Argimēnēs and the Unknown Warrior,” and his “Night at an Inn” are such effective theatrical pieces. As fundamental as the sense of situation should be the dramatist’s sense of

exalted speech. There are words, words, words, but no speech, let alone the exaltation of it in the theatre of today. Lord Dunsany, with W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge, has restored speech to the theatre and has made it exalted. “O warrior spirit,” cries King Argimēnēs, apostrophising the dead man whose sword he has found in the slave fields—“O warrior spirit, wherever thou wanderest, whoever be thy gods; whether they punish thee or whether they bless thee; O kingly spirit that once laid here this sword, behold I pray to thee having no gods to pray to, for the god of my nation was broken in three by night. Mine arm is stiff with three years’ slavery and remembers not the sword. But guide thy sword till I have slain six men and armed the strongest slaves, and thou shalt have sacrifice every year of a hundred goodly oxen. And I shall build in Ithara a temple to thy memory wherein all that enter in shall remember thee, so shalt thou be honored and envied among the dead, for the dead are very jealous of remembrance. Aye, though thou wert a robber that took men’s lives unrighteously, yet shall rare spices smoulder in thy temple and little maidens sing and new-plucked flowers deck the solemn aisles . . . O but it has a good blade this old green sword; thou wouldst not like to see it miss its mark, thou wouldst not like to see it go thirsting into the air; so huge a sword should have its marrowy bone. Come into my right arm, O ancient spirit, O unknown warrior’s soul. And if thou hast the ear of any gods, speak there against Illuriel, god of King Darniak.” This is dramatic speech that is truly exalted and noble. The eloquence which is natural to him when he speaks of imaginative things and which may be his by inheritance has its finest expression in the speeches in his plays. We are all fictionists nowadays: Lord Dunsany, however, is that rare creature in literature, the fabulist. He does not aim at imposing forms on what we call reality— graceful, impressive or significant forms: he aims at transporting us from this reality altogether. He is like the man who comes to the hunters’ lodges and says, “You wonder at the moon. I will tell you how the moon was made and why.” And having told them about the moon he goes on to tell them about marvellous cities that are beyond the forest and about the jewel that is in the unicorn’s horn. If such a one were rebuked for filling the folk with dreams and idle tales, he might (had he the philosophy) make reply: “I have kept alive their spirit of wonder, and wonder in man is holy.” Lord Dunsany speaking for himself would say with Blake, “Imagination is the man.” He would, I think, go on to declare that the one thing worth doing for mankind is to make their imaginations more and more exalted. One can hardly detect a social idea in his work. There is one there, however. It is one of unrelenting hostility to everything that impoverishes man’s imagination—to mean cities, to commercial interests, to a culture that arises out of material organization. He dwells forever upon things that arouse the imagination—upon swords and cities, upon temples and palaces, upon slaves in their revolt and kings in their unhappiness. He has the mind of a mythmaker, and he can give ships and cities and whirlpools vast and proper shapes. It is easy to find his literary origins—they are the Bible, Homer and Herodotus. He made the Bible his book of wonder when he was young, being induced to do this

by a censorship his mother had set up—she was adverse, as he tells us, to his reading newspapers and current periodicals. From the Bible he has got his rhythmic, exalted prose. He took from it too the themes that he has so often repeated—fair and unbelieving cities with their prophets and their heathen kings. Homer he loves and often repeats, and the accounts of early civilizations that Herodotus gives delight him. I do not think he reads much modern literature, and I am certain that he reads none of the philosophic, sociological and economic works that fill the bookshops today. He would not judge a book by its cover, but he would, I am sure, judge it by its title. I have seen him become enraptured by titles of two books that were being reviewed at the time. One was “The High Deeds of Finn,” and the other “The History of the East Roman Empire from the Accession of Irene to the Fall of Basil the Third” (I am not sure I have got the Byzantine sovereigns in right). He has a prodigal imagination. I have watched him sketch a scenario for a play, write a little story, and invent a dozen incidents for tales, in the course of a morning, all the time talking imaginatively. He thinks best, I imagine, in the open air while he is shooting or hunting around his castle. And he exercises a very gracious hospitality in that twelfth century castle of his in the County Meath, and he would travel a long way afoot, I know, to find a good talker that he could bring into the circle. It is a long time now since an ancient historian in Ireland wrote into “The Annals of the Four Masters,” “There be two great robber barons on the road to Drogheda, Dunsany and Fingall; and if you save yourself from the hands of Fingall, you will assuredly fall into the hands of Dunsany.”

Chapter 11

Dunsany Lord of Fantasy Arthur C. Clarke Dunsany is a poet in the truest sense, but it is in prose rather than in verse that his finest work has been done. No one has ever approached his skill in suggesting, so flawlessly and with such economy of means, that the world is not exactly as we suppose. No one can make the blood run cold with a simpler phrase, no one can suggest so much while saying so little. His stories sparkle with ideas, often single sentences that challenge the mind with vertiginous implications. Under the magic of his art, the commonest things become enchanted, and when his imagination soars away from earth, we enter realms of fantasy indeed. By Walls of cities not of Earth All wild my winged dreams have run, And known the demons that had birth In planets of another sun.

Let me quote a few passages which may give some idea of the flavour of his finest stories, little though I like to wrench these jewels from their settings. Something so huge that it seemed unfair to man that it should move so softly stalked splendidly by them . . . There the Gibbelins lived and discreditably fed. There watched him ceaselessly from the Under Pits those eyes whose duty it is. . . . then he began to fall. It was long before he believed and truly knew that this was he that fell from this mountain, for we do not associate such dooms with ourselves; but when he has fallen for some while through the evening and saw below him, where there had been nothing to see, the glimmer of tiny fields, then his optimism departed. And one more passage, the conclusion of “The Probable Adventure of the Three Literary Men,” who were so rash as to try and steal the golden box of poems from the house at the End of the World. . . . and then it befell that as they drew near safety, in the night’s most secret hour, some hand in an upper chamber lit a shocking light, lit it and made no sound. For a moment it might have been an ordinary light, fatal as even that could very well be at such a moment as this; but when it began to follow them like an eye and grow redder and redder as it watched them, then even optimism despaired. And Slippy very unwisely attempted flight, and Slorg even as unwisely tried to hide, but Slith, knowing well why that light was lit in that secret upper chamber and who it was that lit it, leaped over the edge of the World and is from us still through the unreverberate blackness of the abyss.

Perhaps—and it will not surprise me in the least—all these extracts leave you unaffected. For it is sad but true that Dunsany’s peculiar genius is all too rarely appreciated. One of his earlier books has the pathetic preface: “These tales gather together here for the few that seem to read my books in England.” This lack of appreciation may be due to Dunsany’s unfortunate choice of parents, for an artist with a title is regarded as a dilettante and is not taken seriously. The critics have not always been kind to Dunsany. From little fountain-pens they wring The last wee drop of inky spite: “We do not like the kind of thing That lords,” they say, “most likely write.”

But who can deny that the man who penned these lines is a true artist: So much there is to catch, And the years so short, That there is scarce time to snatch Pen, palette, or aught, And to seize some shape we can see, That others may keep Its moment of mystery, Then go to our sleep.

The radio has done much to make Dunsany known to a wider public, for he has written many plays for broadcasting as well as for the stage. Golden Dragon City and The Use of Man have been broadcast several times: those who are familiar with the latter and its implied denunciation of hunting may be surprised to know that its author is a Master of Fox Hounds. Mr. Joseph Jorkens, the well-known club raconteur who can always be relied upon to produce a good story in return for a drink, is Dunsany’s best-known character and his adventures seem to be popular with the general public. At any rate such statistical studies as I have made in libraries appear to show this. Jorkens thinks nothing of finding icebergs in the Red Sea in midsummer, or a diamond which fully justifies description of it as “a large one”—he walked across it for many hours under the impression that it was a frozen lake. Nevertheless, much as I like Jorkens, the far-rarer stories of World’s End and other places, related in Tales of Wonder, A Dreamer’s Tales, and The Book of Wonder, appeal to me more strongly. And of them all this is the one that at the present moves me most. It is called “The Field” and was written more than thirty years ago. Not far from London is a field, beautiful and peaceful, where the poet loved to rest. Yet as he grew to know it better, there seemed something ominous about the place and the feeling grew with each successive visit. He made enquiries and found that nothing had ever happened there, so that it was from the future that the field’s trouble came.

Once to distract my thoughts I tried to gauge how fast the stream was trickling, but I found myself wondering if it flowed faster than blood . . . and then the fancy came to me that it would be a terribly cold place to be in the starlight, if for some reason one was hurt and could not get away. So at last he took to the field a friend who would be able to tell what evil thing was going to happen there. By the side of the stream he stood and seemed very sad. Once or twice he looked up and down it mournfully, then he bent and looked at the king-cups, first one and then the other, very closely, and shaking his head. For a long while he stood in silence, and all my old uneasiness returned, and my bodings for the future. And then I said, “What manner of field is it?” And he shook his head sorrowfully. “It is a battlefield,” he said. Is this only a story? Or is there such a field? There is foreboding there, matched equally by another line of Dunsany’s: “Over mossy girders the old folk come back.” I cannot leave Dunsany without making some mention of the incomparable artist, S. H. Sime, who has illustrated so many of his stories. No one has ever captured the spirit of fantasy more perfectly than Sime, though sometimes Finlay (whose style is similar) has approached him. And now before we part let us gather one more quotation to take upon our separate ways. These words of Dunsany’s prefaced the first volume of Georgian Poetry when it appeared in 1912. Of all materials for labour, dreams are the hardest; and the artificer in ideas is the chief of workers, who out of nothing will make a piece of work that may stop a child from crying or lead nations to higher things. For what is it to be a poet? It is to see at a glance the glory of the world, to see beauty in all its forms and manifestations, to feel ugliness like a pain, to resent the wrongs of others as bitterly as ones own, to know mankind as others know single men, to know Nature as botanists know a flower, to be thought a fool, to hear at moments the clear voice of God.

Chapter 12

A Dreamer’s Tales John Wilson Foster The Stories of Lord Dunsany On the whole, Yeats’s formulation—from the leisured classes, fantasists, from the mass, realists—has much to recommend it, especially if we mean by “leisured classes” (as Yeats no doubt meant) the Anglo-Irish or well-off Protestants and by “the mass” Catholics or native Irish.[1] A writer who seems to fit Yeats’s formula to perfection is Lord Dunsany whose gift for fantasy was in no wise trammelled by social or cultural commitment of a nationalist kind. Colum praised him as “that rare creature in literature, the fabulist . . . One can hardly detect a social idea in his work. There is one there, however. It is one of unrelenting hostility to everything that impoverishes man’s imagination.”[2] Dunsany himself distinguished the imagination or inspiration of his stories from the intellect he used when playing chess,[3] yet that he was a chess champion seems fitting since his stories and novels have a pure inventiveness we associate with highly skilled games. And this fantasist was an aristocrat, of the kind Yeats could seek as a revival patron and participant and, if Gogarty is to be believed, envy: It would be a mistake to think that the rivalry between Dunsany and Yeats was a literary one. Far from it. Yeats had no rival to fear among contemporary poets. It was not so much rivalry on Yeats’ part as it was envy. Yeats, though his descent was from parsons, dearly loved a lord. He was at heart an aristocrat, and it must always have been a disappointment to him that he was not born one. Not by taking thought could he trace his descent from the year 1181 . . . This then was at the bottom the cause of the failure of friendship between Dunsany and Yeats. Dunsany sensed some sort of opposition, real and imaginary for some of the forms it was reputed to have taken were probably part of an over sensitive suspicion.[4] Dunsany’s wealth and title were troublesome. Stephens’s early praise of his stories, “The Hashish Man,” “Poltarnees” and “Blagdaross,” expressed in letters in 1910 and 1911, might appear fulsome by his desire to secure Dunsany’s patronage for The Irish Review: “I do believe you are one of the greatest living writers,” Stephens told him in 1910, “& are going to do amazing things.”[5] The following year he wrote: “I do believe that you & I are the only writers doing real stuff, the artist seems to have died out of English prose & the Jerry builders reign in his stead.”[6] Long after the question of patronage, however, as late as 1938, Stephens wrote praisingly to Dunsany whom he continued to admire. Despite Yeats’s efforts to coax Dunsany into his revival circle (“claiming you for

Ireland”),[7] Dunsany was reluctant to think of himself as a member. He cared little for Irish sagas and folktales and did not especially draw on them as models or sources for his fantasies; he felt with commendable honesty that Irish folklore did not truly belong to him.[8] Associating culturally with revivalist Protestants desperately seeking new identities, Dunsany persisted in associating socially with unliterary Protestants, the vast majority of whom foolishly refused to adapt at all to a changing Ireland. Occasionally his literary and social worlds collided, as on the evening before World War I when he ferociously defended England in defiance of Colum’s German sympathies.[9] This double life led one of Dunsany’s biographers to wonder if he was a writer who shot or a shooter who wrote. Dunsany’s social class stretched unbroken across the Irish Sea, and though he was proud to be a Meath man, it was to England that he owed his birth (in London), his education (at Cheam, Eton, and Sandhurst), his title (a British baronage), his marriage (to an Englishwoman), and his final resting place (near the family’s second home in Kent). There is something close to admirable, however unwise, in Dunsany’s unflinching loyalty to lineage and proven values. Here was a man who in the teeth of arms collections by authorities and terrorists, of fire and counterfire, literally as well as figuratively stuck to his guns, a giant hunting on Irish bogs with genial sangfroid. Perhaps his experiences with the British Expeditionary Force in France made Ireland, even during the Civil War, seem small beer. His fiction was equally unaltered by political convulsion; nor was it altered by the withering of the revival, suggesting that even in its heyday that movement hardly molded his work. Literature was outside his life; it was in both senses a fantasy (a handicraft, some critics implied), where the revivalists sought a mutuality of life and letters. (If he sought in his fables an escape from environment, it was a temporary escape and not for nationalist or even cultural, much less social reasons.) It is appropriate, then, that if today Dunsany’s fiction after years of eclipse is undergoing resuscitation, that resuscitation has nothing to do with the revival. He is seen in the United States as a master of “adult fantasy” and shelved alongside J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis (another Irishman), and H. P. Lovecraft, a few Dewey decimal points, as it were, from the science fictionists and ghost story writers. Dunsany is a beneficiary of the current expansion of the boundaries of “legitimate” fiction to accommodate science fiction, adult fantasy, and children’s literature. Dunsany shares with Tolkien the contrivance of entire imaginary cultures and kingdoms. In his work can be found invented theogonies, geneses, legends, and dynasties—mock myth, epic, and romance rolled into one. Ancient Irish literature and tradition contribute little to the synthesis. Nor does the real Ireland figure commonly in the early stories; the real world when it is present (“the fields we know”) is more often a Georgian English landscape half-remembering its medieval ancestry. However, after his dream journey down the river Yann that traverses so much of Dunsany’s invented geography, the narrator of “Idle Days on the Yann,” from A Dreamer’s Tales (1910), fancifully recalls his Irish homeland and “those hazy fields that all poets know, wherein stand small mysterious cottages through whose windows, looking westwards, you may see the fields of men, and looking eastwards

see glittering elfin mountains, tipped with snow, going range on range into the region of Myth, and beyond it into the kingdom of Fantasy, which pertain to the Lands of Dream.”[10] Myth, fantasy, dream: these are regions progressively distant from the workaday world; they are Dunsany’s successive goals as a storyteller and they halfexist already, it is suggested, at least in this story, in the living Ireland. Perhaps it was the rare mention of Ireland in “Idle Days on the Yann” that caused Yeats to find seductive this dream journey through imaginary places nectared with Dunsanian exoticism: Goolunza, Kyph and Pir, Mandaroon whose inhabitants sleep because when they awake the gods will die, Astahahn whose inhabitants “have fettered and manacled Time, who would otherwise slay the gods,” and Perdóndaris with its immense city gate alarmingly carved out of one solid piece of ivory, cities revisited by the narrators of “A Shop in Go-by Street” and “The Avenger of Perdóndaris” from Tales of Three Hemispheres (1919). Yeats’s praise is ambivalent: “Had I read the Fall of Babbulkund or Idle Days on the Yann when a boy I had perhaps been changed for better or worse and looked to that first reading as the creation of my world; for when we are young the less circumstantial, the further from common life a book is, the more does it touch our hearts and make us dream. We are idle, unhappy and exorbitant, and like the young Blake admit no city beautiful that is not paved with gold and silver.”[11] Idleness is a recurring condition in Lord Dunsany’s stories, but never does it have the social implications of Joyce’s depressed lower middle-class Dublin; occasionally we cannot avoid thinking of the vast leisure men of Dunsany’s class enjoyed, though Dunsany as a writer was anything but idle. The idleness is of a kind that Yeats had to throw over before he could activate a literary revival and had to outgrow as a prescriptive theme before his own work could mature. The influences that operate on Dunsany’s early fiction include those that operate on the revival as well as those repudiated by the revivalists, yet the suggestion in Yeats’s praise of a sigh of relief after a close shave is unavoidable. Among those influences might seem to be a fin-de-siècle preoccupation with narcotic and sensuous environments of spices, tapestries, and incense. Like writers of the nineties, Dunsany “occultivates” such environments but in an artificial and conventional way appropriate to fantasy. Aleister Crowley praised in a letter “The Hashish Man” from A Dreamer’s Tales but chided the author knowledgeably: “I see you know [hashish] by hearsay not by experience. You have not confused time and space as the true eater does.”[12] Incidentally, Dunsany’s use of drugs and dreams to half-explain his heroes’ fantastic voyages threatens to violate what according to Tolkien is a principle of the fairy tale, that “it cannot tolerate any frame or machinery suggesting that the whole story in which [marvels] occur is a figment or illusion.” Hyde too claimed that the strange happenings in Irish folktales are never explained in terms of dreams.[13] The oriental elements in Dunsany’s fiction derive from a Victorian curiosity pricked by empire, and the promiscuous invention of imaginary kingdoms we might even interpret as transposed imperialism. Given that Dunsany was a welltraveled man, as hunter and soldier, it was appropriate that Sir Richard Burton was a

relative and Kipling a friend. In contrast we might think of AE, a genuine mystic who had been to India, but by transmigration of soul, for he had never set foot there. The Irish literary revival had to produce its own alternatives to empire and orientalism, but Dunsany’s fiction played small part in the attempt. William Morris was useful to Yeats in his efforts at a literary revival, and because Dunsany’s stories seem to have an affinity with, if they do not owe a direct debt to, Morris’s prose romances, we might insist on seeing Dunsany as a revivalist writer. At first glance Dunsany’s pseudo-medievalism seems part and parcel of the medieval revivalism of the Irish Renaissance. That revivalism had its distant roots in the romantic medievalism of Keats, in Pugin’s Catholic and Ruskin’s Protestant gothicism, in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Morris circle.[14] On one level the Irish movement simply added new sources—the Celtic sagas and heroic romances—to the sources already plundered by nineteenth-century British romantic medievalists who shared both a detestation of the European Renaissance and a longing for a changeless world. The quests, imaginary kingdoms, dream atmospheres, and pseudo-medievalism of Morris’ prose romances, The Wood Beyond the World (1894) and The Well at the World’s End (1896), suggest the utopianism of a decayed romanticism, though they were probably meant to imply condemnation of an industrial, capitalist, puritan, Whig present, a condemnation Yeats, who was no socialist, could echo from an assumed aristocratic vantage point.[15] Divided by perspective, Morris and Yeats shared their objects of hatred; they met, moreover, in their admiration for high craftsmanship and their nostalgia for an anachronistic medievalism; they met, too, in their desire for a vigorously objective art that would avoid “the little doubtings, and little believings, and little wonderings” of introspective art.[16] The influence of Morris on Yeats is well-attested,[17] but it may be worth remarking on the variety of medievalisms in the Irish movement, including those of O’Grady and all those who drew inspiration from Middle Irish literature, Synge (life on the Aran Islands was thought to be medieval), Joyce (very different, his medievalism from the others’—a theology and pedantry doubly fossilized in Ireland and Stephen Dedalus), and of course Yeats. Morris’s influence is detectable in the stories of The Secret Rose and mingles with that of Poe, another romantic medievalist. In his Preface to Cuchulain of Muirthemne, Yeats admitted that his early fiction was an attempt to find an equivalent of Morris’s prose in his medieval romances, that he had failed but that Lady Gregory had now succeeded with Kiltartanese. He made the admission in 1902; the previous year he had already planned the revision of his Hanrahan stories with Lady Gregory’s help. Moreover, Morris with his poetic voyages among wondrous isles and his real voyage to Iceland had already gone over some of the ground the Irish revivalists were to tread. Lord Dunsany occupied in fact the aristocratic vantage point Yeats occupied in principle. His stories share with Morris’s prose romances the quests, imaginary kingdoms, dream atmospheres, and pseudo-medievalism I already mentioned, as well as archaisms and dialect words, and a vigorous pictorialism. Despite Morris’s radicalism and historical knowledge, C. N. Manlove has called Morris’s prose

romances, and Dunsany’s “escapist” in order to distinguish them from the “imaginative” fantasies of Charles Kingsley, George MacDonald, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Mervyn Peake.[18] Certainly Dunsany’s are escapist and testify to the limitations of pure story devoid of the mystery of tradition as well as of the relevance to life. Dunsany’s stories also exhibit what Manlove terms a sense of enclosure: however well written, their impersonality is not just that of fantasy but also of wellstaged entertainment. There is a comforting impression of properties being moved around. Gods, kings, magicians, and princesses are his cast, unicorns, gargoyles, centaurs, hypogriffs, and dragons his bestiary, cities, deserts, mountains, and woods his geography. There is a strong sense of compound and facsimile in the folk form of his work. Not only is there no didacticism, but there is little of what Tolkien calls “applicability” to life, certainly no strong personal sense of revelation or Sehnsucht. This indulgent conventionalism, even if superbly exploited, prevented Dunsany from being active in the Irish literary movement. The same qualities, AE claimed, put Morris beyond the interests of revivalists. “I find it curious,” he wondered, “that Yeats, who so often speaks of passionate literature when he is generalising, loves in fact the romances of William Morris, the least passionate inventions in English literature, more perhaps than any other imaginative works. He himself is endlessly speculative, while the worlds of Morris are without speculation. . . . I suppose an intellect which is so restless must be envious of a spirit so content with its vision.”[19] It was indeed the “contentment” of The Well at the World’s End—Yeats’s word to describe his apparent favorite among the prose romances that he thought Morris’s highest artistic achievement—that early attracted Yeats, a quality not unlike that of idleness which attracted him to Dunsany’s romantic tales. Perhaps it was a question of masks, of unlike poles attracting, as AE implied. But Dunsany if he is not speculative is at least inventive, and it is inventiveness that sharpens his fantasy. The splendidly titled quest romance, “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth,” from The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories (1908), is one of Dunsany’s best stories, full of felicitous and imaginative strokes. The hero Leothric sets out on a journey perilous to destroy the fortress of the evil magician Gaznak, who has sent bad dreams to plague Leothric’s village of Allathurion. The fortress is unconquerable except by the sword Sacnoth that protects the spine of the metallic monster Tharagavverug which can only be killed by starvation. Tharagavverug, having been slain (emitting dying breaths that resemble “the sound of a hunt going furious to the distance and dying away”), is melted down “till only Sacnoth was left, gleaming among the ashes.” Gaznak has conjured his fortress and its inhabitants into existence: the pinnacles and spires are in fact marble dreams, and dreams also are the beautiful women whose eyes are little flames and the Queens wearing jewels, each one of which has an historian to itself who writes no other chronicles all his days. The combat between Leothric and Gaznak is reminiscent of the Irish sagas: until Leothric severs his opponent’s uplifted hand, Gaznak escapes the sword Sacnoth by clutching his head by the hair, lifting it aloft while the sword

cleaves thin air, and replacing it on his shoulders. Upon Gaznak’s death the dream fortress and the dreams that plague Allathurion vanish. Lord Dunsany’s stories rarely achieve the sense of “spontaneity” that Stephens admired in them, though certainly Dunsany composed spontaneously, dashing off on frequent occasions a story or play, in almost finished form, between tea and dinner. The best of them, however, manage, as does “Sacnoth,” to transcend contrivance; they include “In the Land of Time,” from Time and the Gods (1906), in which an army invades what is believed to be the country of Time but loses men to old age in the campaign and returns unavailing to its native city to find it dilapidated and the inhabitants wizened; “Of the Gods of Averon,” from the same volume; “Poltarnees, Beholder of Ocean,” from A Dreamer’s Tales; the superb “Idle Days on the Yann”; and “The Probable Adventure of the Three Literary Men,” from The Book of Wonder (1912). Dunsany’s conventionalism denotes a reflexive interest in stories and storytellers that sometimes reminds me, in the nature of its inventiveness, not so much of Irish writers, past or present, as of that more speculative fantasist, Borges. Borges knew Dunsany’s work and was, I suspect, influenced by his stories.[20] The historians of jewels in “The Fortress Unvanquishable”; the stories exacted from travelers as a toll in “The Idle City” from A Dreamer’s Tales; the fearful tales told by the Wanderers in “Idle Days on the Yann”; the “poems of fabulous value” kept in the Golden Box that is the object of the quest in “The Probable Adventure of the Three Literary Men”—all must sound familiar to readers of the Argentine. There is in the fiction of Lord Dunsany an absence of that self-consciousness we discovered in fiction of the revival. The selflessness of his work is of no urgently personal or patriotic kind; indeed, there is very little presentation of the self at all, few heroes with whom he or we can identify save on a purely narrative level and through the technical device of point of view. We might account for the composure of Dunsany’s fiction in terms of his imagination which, Colum’s opinion to the contrary that Dunsany has “the mind of a myth-maker,”[21] seems to me to lack the Einfühlung which Stephens’s imagination had in abundance and which is the basis of mythopoeia. Stephens, Blake, and Lawrence seem to me essentially mythopoeic writers, creators of myth; Tolkien, Dunsany, Morris, even Joyce, seem to me formally mythopoeic writers, users of myth. Yeats stands between, a maker of legends. Of course, the conventions of fantasy (like those of the folktale) are impersonal ones, highly suitable for authors who wish to create selfless worlds without the pain of transcending the self through various forms of self-expression. But we might also take into account, and possibly could do so in the cases of Lewis and Tolkien as well as Dunsany, a social self-confidence. Lord Dunsany, whose social station and sense of self seem to have been so closely entwined, apparently considered no reason for self-questioning to exist. Perhaps we could see in his double life, fantasy and literature on the one hand, snipe shooting and safaris on the other, the Irish law of the excluded middle, or in his fashioning of otherworlds an Ascendancy longing for social security (dreaming his fracturing world intact), yet his English literary affinities suggest otherwise. If he and his literature are Irish, they are

so in a peculiar and negative way, which might, after all, be said equally of the orthodox Ascendancy during the Irish struggle for independence. Colum chose to see Dunsany’s imaginings as socially innocent. But surely there is a connection between, firstly, Dunsany’s ignoring of Irish folk and bardic material and the purity of his fantasy, and, secondly, the conservatism of his mind (he detested modern poetry, for example) as well as of his politics. His freedom from self-questioning and political anxiety released his imaginations from the demands of social reality. The social ideas are there in his work, but like nineteenth-century landlords, are detectable by their absenteeism.

NOTES 1. Indeed, Yeats equates “the mass of the people” with those “who come from Catholic Ireland.” He mentions Padraic Colum and Edward Martyn on the Catholic side; realizing that Martyn’s father came from a very old family, he maintains that Martyn has inherited his temper of mind from his mother, whose family was of no account. The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London: Hart-Davis, 1954), 464. 2. Introduction to A Dreamer’s Tales and Other Stories (New York: Boni & Liveright, n.d.), xvii. Colum’s Introduction is dated August 1917. 3. Cited by Hazel Littlefield, Lord Dunsany: King of Dreams (New York: Exposition Press, 1959), 49. 4. Quoted from Gogarty’s “Lord Dunsany” (Atlantic Monthly, March 1955) in Mark Amory, Biography of Lord Dunsany (London: Collins, 1972), 75. In Hail and Farewell, ed. Richard Cave (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1976), 540, George Moore, with his characteristic two-edged irony, tells AE’s anecdote: “one day whilst Yeats was crooning over his fire Yeats had said that if he had his rights he would be Duke of Ormonde. AE’s answer was: I am afraid, Willie, you are overlooking your father—a detestable remark to make to a poet in search of an ancestry; and the addition: We both belong to the lower-middle classes, was in equally bad taste. AE knew that there were spoons in the Yeats family bearing the Butler crest, just as there were portraits in my family of Sir Thomas More, and he should have remembered that certain passages in The Countess Cathleen are clearly derivative from the spoons.” 5. Letters of James Stephens, ed. Richard J. Finneran (London: Macmillan, 1974), 15. 6. Letters of James Stephens, 26. 7. Letter from Yeats to Dunsany, quoted by Amory, 78. However, Yeats reserved the category of associate membership of his Irish Academy of Letters for those Irish writers, whether or not they resided in Ireland, who did not set their work in their native island, such as Stephen MacKenna and Lord Dunsany; Dunsany was offended by what he considered a slight: see Amory, Biography, 231. Yeats’s prejudice has lingered in the Irish literary scene. 8. In his book My Ireland, Dunsany contrasted himself with Francis Ledwidge (the

poor poet who was his neighbor and whom Dunsany befriended and helped) on the ground that Ledwidge shared with his other neighbors “a golden hoard of folk-lore” that he, Dunsany, merely glimpsed: My Ireland (London: Jarrolds, 1937), 59–60. 9. Reported by Stephens to a correspondent, Letters of James Stephens, 161. 10. “Idle Days on the Yann,” in a miscellaneous collection of Lord Dunsany’s stories, At the Edge of the World, ed. Lin Carter (New York: Ballantine Books, 1970), 117. 11. Quoted by Amory, Biography, 78, and by Colum, Introduction to A Dreamer’s Tales, xv–xvi. 12. Quoted by Amory, Biography, 72. 13. Tolkien is quoted by C. N. Manlove, Modern Fantasy: Five Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 6. Hyde’s observation appears in Beside the Fire: A Collection of Irish Gaelic Folk Stories (1890; London: David Nutt, 1910), 189. 14. See Graham Hough, The Last Romantics (Oxford: University Press, 1961), 83– 102. 15. The differences between Yeats and Morris may not be so great as first appears: according to Walter E. Houghton, the medieval focus in the art of Morris and BurneJones on knights and saints “had its roots in the Anglican-aristocratic tradition”: The Victorian Frame of Mind (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1957), 326. 16. The phrases are from a contemporary commentator on Morris, quoted by Houghton, Victorian Frame of Mind, 336. 17. See Peter Faulkner, William Morris and W. B. Yeats (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1962). 18. Manlove, Modern Fantasy, 11. However, although Dunsany seems not to have been a religious man, he might with profit be linked to the Protestant fantasists, George MacDonald, C. S. Lewis, Charles Kingsley, and Charles Williams, the first three of whom Manlove discusses. Manlove does not, however, openly consider fantasy as transposed theology or as a mode particularly attractive to Protestants. The parallel between the fantasies of Manlove’s subjects with the Celtic writings of the Protestant revivalists may be worth pursuing. 19. Quoted by Faulkner, William Morris and W. B. Yeats, 14. Moore’s reaction to Morris is not unexpected: “In Wales, whilst staying with Howard de Walden, I read some Morris, The Well at the World’s End and The Wood Beyond the Well [sic], and at the end of the week felt like one who had been poisoned. I would sooner go to the galleys at once than write like Morris, but I wish I knew the language as well as Topsy. Topsy seems to have been able to write that language spontaneously. All the same, nobody ever did, and nobody ever will, read the stories he wrote in it, except perhaps W. B. Yeats”: Letters of George Moore, ed. John Eglinton (Bournemouth: Sydenham, 1942), 55. 20. Borges refers to Dunsany at the close of “Kafka and His Precursors,” in Other Inquisitions, 1937–1952, trans. Ruth L. C. Sims (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968), 108. 21. Introduction to A Dreamer’s Tales, xvii.

Chapter 13

Lord Dunsany Angelee Sailer Anderson The Potency of Words and The Wonder of Things The first requirement of good fantasy, whether fashioned in the mold of high myth or of simple fairy tale, is that it awake in the reader a sense of wonder. This may be achieved by artistry of language or choice of content, and no fantasist has been more a master of both than Lord Dunsany. What content must a fantasy have to succeed in its high calling? On the surface, the wonder of fantasy would seem to lie solely in what it contains of the supernatural or magical, and there is no question that the presence of magical things in a story does evoke wonder. However, those who love and understand fantasy know that its virtue can be much greater than this. J. R. R. Tolkien, in his essay, “On Fairy-Stories,” says: Fairy-stories deal largely . . . with simple or fundamental things, untouched by Fantasy, but these simplicities are made all the more luminous by their setting. . . . It was in fairy-stories that I first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of the things, such as stone, and wood and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine.[1] Fairy-stories enable us to grasp anew the goodness of the “natural,” by placing it in another context in which the pall of familiarity falls from it and its inherent beauty and wonder shine forth. Tolkien called this ability of fairy-stories “Recovery.” As realism in literature is primarily concerned with the particular, fantasy is primarily concerned with the universal and the elemental. In a good realistic story, a detailed description of a tree may impress us with a clear vision of that particular tree and its worth. The best fantasy impresses us with the idea of “tree,” or “stone,” or “fire,” or “wine,” so that the worth we find in the idea may be applied to every particular embodiment of “tree,” “stone,” “fire,” or “wine” we encounter. The best fantasy does this, while at the same time impressing us with ideas of things we may never encounter: trees that walk, stones that speak, fire that blossoms, wine that transforms into gold. Whether natural or magical, fantasy deals primarily with things or concepts whose value and potency have been recognized by men in all times and all places. It is upon the reexperiencing by each reader of this universal experience of recognition that the emotional effect of fantasy depends. The fantasy of Lord Dunsany succeeds highly, first because of his gifted use of universalities. For example, “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth,” a Dunsanian short story from which all illustrations in this essay are taken, begins thus:

In a wood older than record, a foster brother of the hills, stood the village of Allathurion; and there was peace between the people of that village and all the folk who walked in the dark ways of the wood, whether they were human or of the tribes of the beasts or of the race of the fairies and the elves and the little sacred spirits of trees and streams.[2] Here at once, Dunsany introduces a wealth of words which strike a common chord in human hearts. “In a wood older than record . . .” One of Dunsany’s favourite universal themes is that of time, both the romance of the things from which it separates us and our frailty in the face of its passing. In “Sacnoth,” describing the door of the Fortress Unvanquishable, he compares its vastness to that of “the marble quarry, Sacremona, from which of old men cut enormous slabs to build the Abbey of the Holy Tears” (p. 55). He speaks of Queens with jewels in their hair, “each jewel having a historian all to itself, who wrote no other chronicles all his days” (p. 59). This sense of history pervades all that Dunsany wrote, and sheds a light of immense significance upon the things and persons which populate his stories. It also casts a shadow of poignancy and loss, reminiscent of the world-weary pessimism of Ecclesiastes. The concluding passage of “Sacnoth” is typical of Dunsany: “The gardener hath gathered up this autumn’s leaves. Who shall see them again, or who wot of them? And who shall say what hath befallen in the days of long ago?” (p. 68). Dunsany delights in painting pictures for us of the wonders of mighty cities built by man, but never ceases to remind us that they fall. So at the destruction of the dream palace of the magician Gaznak: . . . the tall pinnacles went down into the earth, and the wide fair terraces all rolled away, and the court was gone like the dew, and a wind came and the colonnades drifted thence, and all the colossal halls of Gaznak fell. And the abysses closed up suddenly as the mouth of a man who, having told a tale, will forever speak no more. (p. 67) The sense of distance in time which Dunsany uses to captivate us is mirrored by an equivalent sense of distance in space. He is acutely aware of the overawing effect of the vast on little man. He speaks of “cloud-abiding gables,” “mighty vaults,” and “lofty rafters,” of “innumerable arches” vanishing into gloom, of “inner darknesses,” “profound precipices,” and “abysses full of stars” (pp. 55, 62, 59, 57, 61). An almost giddy sense of height and depth characterizes his descriptions, as in this one of the dream palace: Beyond the wide court slept a dark abyss, and into the abyss there poured a white cascade of marble stairways, and widened out below into terraces and balconies with fair white statues on them, and descended again in a wide stairway, and came to lower terraces in the dark, where swart uncertain shapes

went to and fro. All these were the dreams of Gaznak, and issued from his mind, and, becoming marble, passed over the edge of the abyss as the musicians played. And all the while out of the mind of Gaznak, lulled by that strange music, went spires and pinnacles beautiful and slender, ever ascending skywards. (pp. 65–66) Or consider this example, in which the distance spanned is even greater: “And when the baying of the remotest dragon had faintly joined in the tumult, a window opened far up among the clouds below the twilit gables, and a woman screamed, and far away in Hell her father heard her and knew that her doom had come” (p. 56). In this sense of distance, as in that of time, there is also sometimes a sadness: “Scarce audible now at all was the sound of his heart: it was like a church bell tolling beyond hills for the death of some one unknown and far away” (p. 54). Returning to the opening of “Sacnoth,” we see Dunsany’s juxtaposition of the magically mysterious and the naturally familiar, a technique which not only makes the magical seem more wondrous by contrast, but which bestows borrowed wonder on the natural. “Woods,” “hills,” “villages,” “trees,” and “streams” are things near and very dear to man, and Dunsany has a way of constantly bringing us back to these intimacies from the remotest distances: “Then the sun set and flamed in the village windows, and a chill went over the world, and in some small garden a woman sang” (p. 54). Fairy tales generally end with their heroes achieving a purely natural happiness—marrying their true love, or coming home. So in “Sacnoth” the events which attend Leothric’s homecoming from his quest are the singing of birds and the breaking of dawn, natural wonders both, but wonders nonetheless. Yet Dunsany speaks not only of the woodland paths that are familiar to us, but also of their “dark ways,” inhabited by beasts and fairies and elves and sacred spirits that are strange and perhaps dangerous to us. For all his gift of mystifying the commonplace, Dunsany’s imagination provides us with a veritable menagerie of the anything-but-common; in “Sacnoth” we have magicians, dragons, gargoyles, a giant spider, wolves rushing around the wainscotting, vampires giving praise to Satan, a procession of men on camels, women weirdly beautiful. The lure not only of Elfland but of the more exotic locales of earth is strong in Dunsany. In giving us a sense of the Middle Eastern, he does not bombard us with details of geography and culture, but gives us the fleeting yet indelible image which would impress us if a troop of Middle Eastern personages passed by: There appeared a procession of men on camels riding two by two from the interior of the fortress, and they were armed with scimitars of Assyrian make and were all clad with mail, and chain-mail hung from their helmets about their faces, and flapped as the camels moved. (p. 56) A widely travelled man, Dunsany’s experience of many lands sharpened rather than dulled his fascination with the alien. To whatever extent that fascination is

universal, Dunsany casts an irresistible spell. In choice of content, then, Dunsany draws upon a huge reservoir of ideas and things which universally evoke wonder. But what of the function of the language which expresses that wonder, the potency of the words themselves? Among readers of fantasy one can find a huge divergence in taste as to writing style. There are those who prefer “plain” language, where no strong sense of style is in evidence; there are others who find an aid to wonder in the “high” style, which is generally both more poetic and more archaic. Dunsany’s style falls into the latter category, and on his part it was not a random choice. The deliberate use of archaic language strikes many modern readers and critics as clumsy and affected. There is no doubt that it can be so in the hands of a poor writer, whose work may read as though it had been written in modern language and then “translated.” In the case of Dunsany, however, the archaisms flow so naturally and are of such a piece with the content they express, that it is apparent that he is speaking in his native tongue. Dunsany claimed that his prose was influenced by the Bible, and one does not have to look far to find passages in him which might have come directly from the King James version: “besought him to tarry”; “caused them to praise Satan openly with their lips”; “danced to cymbal and psaltery”; the occasional “thou” and “doth” (pp. 60, 49, 52). Besides word-oriented archaisms—“fell” for “deadly,” “straightway” for “right away,” “ere” for “before,” “writ” for “written,” “oft” for “often,” “fain” for “gladly,” “wot” for “know”—there are archaisms in the choice of sentence structure as well. One of these is the inversion of common word order: “Leothric dropped not down,” rather than “Leothric did not drop down”; “other light there was none,” rather than “there was no other light”; “not with the edge smote Sacnoth,” rather than “Sacnoth did not smite with the edge” (pp. 66, 62, 63). Another feature which readers of the King James Bible may recognize is the tendency towards run-on sentences with many connective and’s, which modernly is considered a technical fault, but which is used by word masters like Dunsany to hold the reader suspended and rapt within a hypnotic flow of images: And so Leothric came into a well-lit chamber, where Queens and Princes were banqueting together, all at a great table; and thousands of candles were glowing all about, and their light shone in the wine that the Princes drank and on the huge gold candelabra, and the royal faces were irradiant with the glow, and the white tablecloth and the silver plates and the jewels in the hair of the Queens, each jewel having a historian all to itself, who wrote no other chronicles all his days. (p. 59) The success or failure of Dunsany’s archaisms in conveying the wondrous must be judged individually by each reader. But can anyone doubt that power would have been lost if, instead of, “Then spake Leothric, son of the Lord Lorendiac, and twenty years old was he,” Dunsany had written, “Then Leothric, the twenty year old son of

the Lord Lorendiac, said” (p. 50)? The archaic in Dunsany’s style serves to bestow the same sense of history and weight on his language as does his use of the theme of time on his content. But the whole power of his style does not lie in its archaisms. More perhaps than that of any other writer of fantasy, the prose of Lord Dunsany sings. Dunsany is aware and makes use of the rhythmic and tonal qualities of words in a way more common to poets than to storytellers. To achieve his musical effects, he uses repetition—as in “Sacnoth,” with the repeated phrase “the cindery plains of Hell” (p. 49)—and, more often, alliteration and assonance. Consider this passage, in which the repeated consonants and long vowel sounds create such a resonance that we can almost hear the tolling bells of which Dunsany speaks: Along the narrow corridor hung huge bells low and near to his head, and the width of each brazen bell was from wall to wall, and they were one behind the other. And as he passed under each the bell uttered, and its voice was mournful and deep, like the voice of a bell speaking to a man for the last time when he is newly dead. Each bell uttered once as Leothric came under it, and their voices sounded solemnly and wide apart at ceremonious intervals. For if he walked slow, these bells came closer together, and when he walked swiftly they moved farther apart. And the echoes of each bell tolling above his head went on before him whispering to the others. Once when he stopped they all jangled angrily till he went on again. (pp. 64–65) The sudden short, harsh sounds in the words “jangled angrily” interrupt the mood exactly as Dunsany intends. This same consciousness of the power of word sounds is evident in Dunsany’s invented names. The Germanic-heroic quality of Leothric and Lorendiac, the sweetness of Allathurion and Sacremona, the weightiness of Sacnoth, the sinister humour of Wong Bongerok and Tharagavverug all convey to us something of the quality of the things Dunsany is naming—not to mention the name of the evil magician, Gaznak, whose harsh consonants are those of Tolkien’s language of Mordor. Dunsany’s “native tongue” is so rich in associations and evocative in sound that he has no need for the frequent use of simile or metaphor to add to its power. When he does use them, it is to compare one potent image with another equally as potent. Sometimes he juxtaposes a fantastic thing with a natural one: the noise made by a dragon’s tail is “as when sailors drag the cable of the anchor all rattling down the deck”—a strong image for use in fantasy because of the romance of ships and the sea (p. 63). The track left by a dragon’s tail is “like a furrow in a field”—strong because of its connection with the soil and man’s fundamental need to grow food (p. 51). At other times, Dunsany heightens the fantastic by relating it to a thing equally fantastic: a dragon’s cry is “like the sound of a great church bell that had become possessed of a soul that fluttered upward from the tombs at night—an evil soul, giving the bell a voice” (p. 52).

It may be that there is as little of a consensus on the use of poetic language in fantasy literature as there is on the use of archaisms. This reader, for one, is happy that the dragon Wong Bongerok did not merely “die,” but “lay still to rust” (p. 64). If the main substance of Dunsany’s style is in his masterful use of archaism and poetic technique, he has another excellence which, though arguably not necessary to the fantasist, is delightful as a sort of “dessert.” Dunsany is musical, Dunsany is majestic—and Dunsany is funny. Sometimes his humour derives from the archaism of his style, as in this amusing if frightening bit of dialogue: “The Lord Gaznak has desired to see you die before him. Be pleased to come with us, and we can discourse by the way of the manner in which the Lord Gaznak has desired to see you die” (p. 57). At other times the humour depends on unexpected word choices, such as dragons with “leather gums” who “bark” and “slobber” their master’s hand (pp. 56, 63). This humour is made more effective by its contrast with Dunsany’s poesy. In this sentence, he builds a sombre mood for several lines, only to topple it with a sheer frivolity at the end: And the spell was a compulsive, terrible thing, having a power over evil dreams and over spirits of ill; for it was a verse of forty lines in many languages, both living and dead, and had in it the word wherewith the people of the plains are wont to curse their camels, and the shout wherewith the whalers of the north lure the whales shoreward to be killed, and a word that causes elephants to trumpet; and every one of the forty lines closed with a rhyme for “wasp.” (p. 49) For all lovers of fantasy and believers in its purpose, there is much to be learned from Lord Dunsany’s success in evoking wonder. Those who write, by studying the “what” of Dunsany’s content and the “how” of his style, may come to an understanding of his excellencies and apply them to their own work in their own way. Those who read, by their deep imaginative and emotional response to him, may recognize and find joy in the secret longings of their hearts, which are those of all hearts that beat.

NOTES 1. J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” in Essays Presented to Charles Williams (Oxford University Press, 1947; rpt. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1966), 75. 2. Lord Dunsany, “The Fortress Unvanquishable Save for Sacnoth,” in The Sword of Wellern and Other Stories (London: George Allen & Sons, 1908); rpt. in At the Edge of the World (New York: Ballantine, 1970), 48. Hereafter cited in text.

Chapter 14

Jorkens Megan Mitchell At the time of their publication, the Jorkens stories were Dunsany’s largest commercial success. For readers who are not admirers of the fantasy genre, they are Dunsany’s most readable and entertaining efforts. During Dunsany’s lifetime these stories appeared in five volumes: The Travel Tales of Mr. Joseph Jorkens (1931), Jorkens Remembers America (1934), Jorkens Has a Large Whiskey (1940), The Fourth Book of Jorkens (1947), and Jorkens Borrows Another Whiskey (1954). A sixth collection, The Last Book of Jorkens (2005), appeared posthumously as part of The Collected Jorkens Volume 3. Thematically, the stories continue to explore Dunsany’s favored realms—foreign lands and mysterious or supernatural happenings. Rudyard Kipling, in a letter to Dunsany about the Jorkens stories, wrote that at first he “resented the introduction, as camouflage, of your Mister Jorkens,” but observed that Dunsany’s imagination “is real proper imagination, which is a scarce article indeed. And over and above things in general, it has got luminosity and compass and a lot of other incidentals.”[1] Although these stories were highly regarded by his contemporaries, Dunsany considered them “a step down from the realms of pure imagination towards drab reporting.”[2] What separates the Jorkens tales from Dunsany’s other short fiction is that they inevitably originate from a conversation that transpires in the Billiards Club in London where Jorkens and the narrator are members. The narrator has a voice and background similar to Dunsany’s own. He repeatedly attempts to assess the veracity of Jorkens’s tales, claiming to be loath to report anything of uncertain factual content to his readers. However, “the reader is left feeling that Jorkens is a liar.”[3] The narrator is never named, but Amory in his commentary on the stories refers to the narrator as Dunsany. Although no positive identification can be made, Dunsany’s preface to The Fourth Book of Jorkens implies that he is the narrator and that Jorkens is an acquaintance of his. The invention of Jorkens creates a credible atmosphere for Dunsany’s usual fantastic fiction. Instead of asking the reader to believe the narrator, a more effective device has been found. The narrator introduces Jorkens. The tales and adventures are told secondhand, with the narrator coping with his own disbelief and reporting to his readers those tales that seem most plausible. The distance created by the secondhand narration of these adventures is emphasized by the comments and observations of the other club members. Their queries are presented within the body of the text. Aside from answering the reader’s potential doubts by having a club member challenge the dubious aspects of the narrative, the questions create within the text a vivid sense of conversation. Enhancing the ambiance of the billiards club setting, the intermittent dialogue provides Dunsany for the first time with an interesting and continuous cast of human characters. Jorkens himself is a raconteur. Whatever else he is, and his attributes seem to

vary with his moods and the particular tale he is interested in telling that afternoon, he is a master storyteller. He is modest, even humble. His lack of pretension makes his audience more sympathetic to his otherwise inconceivable adventures. Not particularly flush, Jorkens’s attempts at financial gain are often the originating impulse behind his ventures. Although interesting experiences accrue, monetary wealth does not. So as he entertains the Billiards Club members with his tales, Jorkens accepts the large whiskey and sodas that they purchase for him as his due. His consumption of alcohol is immense. When the narrator casts aspersions on the veracity of a certain tale or indicates that a few details have been exaggerated, Jorkens’s fondness for whiskey is always available to excuse his verbal excesses. The narrator is very tolerant of this aspect of Jorkens’s character, feeling that a whiskey and soda is a small price to pay for being so well entertained. The narrator’s genuine affection for Jorkens and his adventures is perceived by the readers. Although never precisely certain how much of what Jorkens says should be believed, the reader invariably enjoys the stories and has a fondness for the man himself. Dunsany has created a sympathetic character because he contrasts Jorkens’s exotic experiences with his human frailties. Amory observes that “Jorkens is more than a device, he is the only lively, varied character Dunsany ever created.”[4] Although Jorkens lies, he is a credible character. Jorkens, although not trustworthy as a narrator, is believable as an individual. With the creation of Jorkens, Dunsany finally devises a technique by which his fantastic tales can be linked into an extended narrative. Jorkens is a person at least as intriguing as the fantastic adventures he relates. Having added an interesting character to already strong plots makes the Jorkens stories Dunsany’s most well-developed works.

ATMOSPHERE Before examining individual stories for the interaction of themes, characterizations, and the developments within the Dunsanian short story since Mr. Joseph Jorkens’s advent, it seems advisable to explore the location in which these tales have been placed—the Billiards Club—and the audience to which they are being told. Each tale opens with some observation about either the club or its members. Although many of the stories are too weak to warrant individual consideration, the ambiance of the club is cumulative, and the reader’s sense of place depends on a familiarity with numerous stories. The opening of “On the Other Side of the Sun,” a singularly unremarkable story, provides an excellent detail about the Billiards Club and the order of happenings there: One of our members strolled into the Billiards Club the other day and stood in front of the book-case, for we have a book-case there, although we don’t so much read in the Billiards Club as talk about one thing and another. He wasn’t actually going to read either: his eyes merely rested on one of the books,

because he happened to be standing in front of it and was tired and wanted a drink.[5] A sense of place is developed through the unnamed member’s entrance into the club and the simple motions that occupy him. The narrator’s recollection of a conversation at the Billiards Club often introduces a Jorkens tale, for it illustrates how Jorkens managed to commandeer the conversation that preceded his own arrival: One of our members, Chidderling, had been telling a story, not perhaps especially long, as stories go, but rather especially pointless, and I do not think we should have noticed its length had it not been for the little gasps of impatience that Jorkens was quietly making. (“The Secret of the Sphinx,” CJ 2.251) The narrator’s tolerance of Jorkens’s rudeness is noticed by the reader; however, the sentiment is not shared. The discrepancies between the reader’s, the narrator’s, and Jorkens’s opinions about a situation is a device that Dunsany uses extensively. Often it is through these differences of perception that the humor of the stories is achieved. Attempts are frequently made to exclude Jorkens from the conversation, revealing that the fondness the narrator has for Jorkens’s exploits is not shared universally among the club members: There may almost be a monotony in my recitation of the various devices by which some members of the Billiards Club have tried to turn conversation far from Africa when Jorkens has been in the Club; and yet I often record them, because it is from these very efforts that his greatest flights of biography have arisen. (“The Khamseen,” CJ 2.255) A favored subject for Jorkens is Africa, because it contains so many exotic locations and has connotations of mystery when discussed in the smoky London club rooms. An additional advantage is that the other club members are unfamiliar with Africa and cannot easily contradict Jorkens’s interpretation of its nature. Jorkens’s principal detractor is Terbut, who often has a sarcastic or cutting remark to contribute but who has learned a wary caution of Jorkens’s wiles. The narrator reveals at one point that it is not just Jorkens’s tales that Terbut enjoys criticizing, but that Terbut takes “a special delight in finding little faults in any story he hears” (“Jarton’s Disease,” CJ 2.235). Amory describes Terbut as “a pedantic lawyer . . . [with a] motiveless malignity, [and] an overwhelming desire to destroy and humiliate a character built on a grander scale than his own.”[6] With Terbut, Dunsany creates a perfect foil for the gullibility of the narrator. Terbut is often instrumental in advancing the conversation within which Jorkens’s own narrative is located. The narrator’s professed belief in Jorkens’s narratives echoes Dunsany’s sentiment expressed in the preface to The Fourth Book of Jorkens: I retell these stories of [Jorkens] rather for the amusement of those who may

care to read about travel, than with the intention of refuting the settled beliefs of science, or of adding to its discoveries. At the same time, there are, in some of these stories, things that must necessarily cause scientists seriously to reconsider whether biology is as they had conceived it to be, or as my friend Jorkens has found it.[7] By referring to Jorkens as a real person and a member of a billiards club to which Dunsany belongs, Dunsany further obfuscates the line between fact and fiction. Reality is nebulous within the tales themselves. They contain no decisive indication of what should be believed, and lack a single authoritative voice that is reliable. What Dunsany has created is a situation remarkably similar to reality. The readers must rely on their wits to distinguish what is factual. No final or absolute truth is offered by the text.

FAIRY STORIES Two stories that Dunsany recounts in The Fourth Book of Jorkens are comparable to the narratives that Lady Gregory and W. Y. Evans Wentz record in their collections of Irish folklore. “Jorkens in Witch Wood” deals with being led astray, whereas “Fairy Gold” presents Jorkens’s experiences digging for a crock of gold. A third story from The Last Book of Jorkens, “A Deal with a Witch,” addresses the recurring theme in Irish legend of there being a high cost for dealing with the supernatural. So exactly has Dunsany captured the ambiance of the traditional tale that in these instances the stories could be excerpts from a study of Irish folk culture. Jorkens introduces his tale about fairy gold with an insightful observation about opportunity. He indicates to the club members that he had an excellent chance to study a “curious specimen of zoology” (CJ 2.337), but that he had gone after monetary gain instead. Terbut, functioning in his predictable role of skeptic, asks why Jorkens had not pursued the opportunity. Jorkens responds with a piece of common sense—“because it was an opportunity, does one ever take them?” (CJ 3.337)—that resembles those curious fragments of wisdom recorded in folktales. A faintly surrealistic conversation between Jorkens and a leprechaun immerses the reader in the world of the tale and establishes its parameters. The leprechaun warns Jorkens that it is impossible to obtain his crock of gold, but Jorkens does not heed him. Dunsany’s ability to write subtly humorous dialogue is not one that he often uses, but his skill with it is revealed in the following passage: “I said ‘Good morning’ to the leprechaun. And he said ‘Good morning’ rather sulkily. ‘I suppose you’ve buried a crock of gold there,’ I said. “‘It’s no use denying it,’ said he. ‘But neither you nor anyone else would ever find my crocks of gold if it wasn’t for that damned rainbow that is always giving them away.’ “‘Well, I’ve found it,’ I said. ‘And, if the rainbow guided me here, it meant me to

have it . . . [for] finding’s keeping where crocks of gold are concerned.’ “For that is the custom of the country, and nobody calls it robbery to take his gold from a leprechaun. He counts no more than a political opponent. A leprechaun is a mere game.” (CJ 2.337–38) Jorkens departs and secures the loan of a spade from a nearby cottage. He intends to dig up the crock of gold, but when he has it in sight, the crock of gold along with the rainbow and leprechaun slowly begin to fade—becoming dreams, as the leprechaun had warned Jorkens they would. Nothing remains for Jorkens to do but return the spade to the old man from whom he had borrowed it. He apologizes, but the man has no recollection of the event: “‘Ah, sure I never lent you a spade,’ he said, in those very words. I tried once more, but he still stuck to his point. And then I saw that the spade had gone with the crock so utterly into dreamland, that in this earth it had no existence, either at that time or ever.” (CJ 2.339) Although the conclusion of “Fairy Gold” may bring to mind the receding of Elfland in The King of Elfland’s Daughter, the loss of memory concerning events that have taken place in the otherworld is a common occurrence in folklore. A similar legend pertaining to the protection of fairy wealth is related by a Clare woman to Lady Gregory, who recorded the following narrative: As to treasure, there was a man here dreamt of some buried things—of a skeleton and a crock of money. So he went to dig, but whether he dreamed wrong or that he didn’t wait for the third dream, [she] didn’t know, but he found the skeleton, skull and all, but when he found the crock there was nothing in it, but very large snail-shells. So he threw them out in the grass, and the next day when he went to look at them they were all gone. Surely there’s something that’s watching over that treasure under ground.[8] Although the story that Dunsany attributes to Jorkens has been refined and contains more detail, the actual occurrences are similar. In both instances, the treasure vanishes with no wealth coming to either of the men who have sought the crock of gold. The experience of being led astray, another traditional genre of fairy folktales, is the subject of another story Jorkens offers to his Billiards Club audience one afternoon to fill in the conversational doldrums. In a typical story, the person being led astray becomes lost in either a very small area or one that is familiar to him. He may or may not be aware of another entity that is misleading him, but in all cases the coming of morning releases him from the spell. An example of such a tale is one told to Lady Gregory by an army man:

One night he was making his way home, and only a field between him and his house, when he found himself turned around and brought to another field, and then to another—seven in all. . . . For after that he was taken again, and found himself in the field over beyond. And he had never a one drop taken, but was quite sober that night.[9] Jorkens has a similar experience to relate; although, in his case, he was warned that a witch had cursed a particular portion of a field. Jorkens does not believe Twohey, the Irish peasant who warned him of the curse. Deciding he could “walk through that wood in less time and with less exertion than it would take him to explain that a witch had not the powers with which Twohey appeared to credit her” (“Jorkens in Witch Wood,” CJ 2.313), Jorkens agrees to meet Twohey the next morning and report on his walk through the wood. Of course, the wood changes by night, and Jorkens is lost within it. He builds a fire, resigned to passing the night in the forest. The next morning, Jorkens concedes to Twohey that the witch was as powerful as Twohey had indicated. This tale is closely akin to those repeated in collections of folklore. The main difference in both cases is that Dunsany has Jorkens classify both the “witch” and the “leprechaun,” which is not something that is done by people who have actually encountered some sort of supernatural being. Such creatures do not announce themselves to be of this or that variety. Jorkens addresses the issue of witchcraft directly in “A Deal with a Witch,” explaining how to his detriment he learned firsthand that witches could not be trusted. The story opens with Jorkens joining a conversation on witchcraft in the Billiards Club, warning those discussing it to “keep away from it . . . no good comes of it” (CJ 3.295). This cautionary remark allows Jorkens to validate its existence in an indirect way. “Once in Ireland [he] asked a man about it rather tentatively” and was told “the whole country’s rotten with it” (CJ 3.295). This statement and the way it is structured closely parallel Yeats’s introduction to his 1888 collection Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, where he wrote: “‘Have you ever seen a fairy or such like?’ [Yeats] asked an old man in County Sligo. ‘Amn’t I annoyed with them,’ was the answer.”[10] Dunsany would almost certainly have been aware of the Yeats quotation as it appears in the first paragraph of his first published book. As Dunsany and Yeats did not enjoy the highest of admiration for each other, certainly it is curious to observe this seeming literary allusion. Although Dunsany removes the actual witch in the narrative from the Irish countryside to England’s New Forest, the underlying theme echoes those found in the traditional Irish folktale. The cost of dealing with the fae outweighs the potential benefit underlying the transaction. In this case, the witch grants Jorkens the ability “to foretell the workings of chance” (CJ 3.296). Jorkens uses it very successfully at first to win prizes for crosswords and then bets on horse races. However, the witch requires higher payments from Jorkens to maintain his skills, and when he refuses to meet her increased monetary demands, she double-crosses him. The older and wiser Jorkens who offers the tale to the Billiards Club believes the

bookies found him out and offered to pay the witch her higher fees to prevent their own ruin and that she sold him out. However, perhaps because she was upset at Jorkens’s own refusal, or perhaps because of the capricious nature of supernatural bargains, it went much worse for him than if he had never gotten involved in the first place. Jorkens did not just lose the ability to foretell the future; he lost it but remained certain of the correctness of his own premonitions. In fact he believes more strongly than ever in them, leading to his being “ruined like any young man who thinks he can spot winners” (CJ 3.299). Jorkens states that his losses were much greater than his total financial gain on the bargain and ends up with the warning: “No. Keep away from witches. They’re all alike. They don’t care whether you win or whether you starve. They may help you, till someone outbids you, and then you’re done” (CJ 3.299). As often happens in Jorkens adventures, the reader ends up with a greater belief in witchcraft because Jorkens offers a firsthand account illustrating how profoundly detrimental to his own finances it had been. A great number of traditional Irish folktales use as a primary theme the extremely high cost to the human participant in a supernatural bargain, and Dunsany uses this as the basis for “A Deal with a Witch.” In fact, all three of these fae-themed stories have strong echoes of the traditional folktale themes. So exactly does Dunsany capture the flavor of the traditional tale these three stories could be excerpts from a book of Irish folklore.

SOMETHING FROM NOTHING Dunsany’s ability to build a story around a few seemingly unexceptional details or facts is passed along to Jorkens, who manages to make elaborate stories from inconsequential events. In one instance, unconsciousness induced by an overindulgence in alcohol gives Jorkens a story called “The Neapolitan Ice.” The conversation at the Billiards Club had focused on polar exploration in an attempt to exclude Jorkens from the conversation. Jorkens works his way in by saying whiskey is overrated for keeping warm, and he knows of nothing better than a liqueur he was served one night. The liqueur liberated Jorkens’s spirit, he claimed, until it went sailing over all of England and reached the polar regions. There he crashed into the snow, and the scent of strawberries reached him. This tale bewilders Terbut, who makes a derogatory remark about Jorkens’s “powerful imagination” (CJ 2.75). Jorkens retorts that it “was just sheer fact. It wasn’t imagination at all. I was lying over the table with my face in the Neapolitan ice” (CJ 2.75). From what in actuality was nothing more unusual than passing out from imbibing a strong liqueur, Jorkens has made a fantastic adventure. Another similar instance is recorded in “Strategy at the Billiards Club.” In this tale Jorkens omits all the mystical details about who conjured the spirit or how they summoned it. He simply relates a lot of strategic details that the narrator doesn’t overhear but that seem to interest a general who happens to be in the club. The narrator interprets the general’s attention to mean that the details are plausible, but

only states that the spirit’s government had refined the atomic bomb for more than a hundred years before they used it in this particular war. After Jorkens supplies the general with a detailed description, locating the armies and bombed areas, the general says it is preposterous because he “never heard of anything like that anywhere” (CJ 2.310). After explaining to the general that it was the end of those people’s history—the implication therefore being that of course the general could not have heard of it—Jorkens tells the general to take a look for himself. Outside the club window is the moon, its crater face crushed, Jorkens claims, by an atomic bomb. Although perhaps not convincing to the general, the piece remains an excellent example of a story created mostly out of imagination, having few real details to sustain the plot. In “The Secret of the Sphinx” Dunsany writes a similar tale. It is one in which nothing ever happens. It begins with Jorkens’s presence in a bar in Anatolia. He is in the company of some Turks who assure him that the sphinx is standing on the stage and will speak before the end of the evening. Jorkens eventually concedes to the man with whom he is conversing that the woman indeed does look like the sphinx. However, before she speaks, Jorkens rushes out to catch a train. The story contains a lot of build up, but in the end, nothing happens nor is learned about the sphinx. Although this piece is not one of the stronger Jorkens stories, it is interesting to observe that Dunsany has written a fairly successful story in which absolutely nothing happens. E. F. Bleiler noted that Dunsany had the ability of “being able to turn almost anything into a saleable story.”[11] This skill was instrumental in the creation of the stories analyzed in the preceding section.

MYSTICISM Dunsany’s style has substantially altered from the lyricism of his early tales of wonder. No longer are his stories populated by mysterious, mythical creatures and forsaken gods. The magnificent heroes of “The Sword of Welleran” have been supplanted by the Billiards Club members. Dunsany retains his interest in mystical subjects, however, and Jorkens’s narratives are often concerned with mystical powers. Jorkens’s interest in magic is “a practical proposition” (“Jorkens Consults a Prophet,” CJ 2.133). He is interested in profiting from either mystical power or the ability to see the future. Failing this, supernatural elements have other merits, even if only to enhance a story, and Jorkens does not hesitate to employ them to make his adventures more astonishing. Only six Jorkens stories were chosen for the Dover collection Gods, Men and Ghosts. Although Dunsany’s early collections contain his most admired tales of wonder, “The Sign” is one of the finest pieces Dunsany wrote about Mr. Joseph Jorkens. Whereas the typical tale related by Jorkens is an adventure tale with subtle underpinnings of mystery, this story tackles a more intricate subject—transmigration. Because of the more ambitious and philosophically complex ideas dealt with in this tale, the reader’s attention remains fixed upon the narrative and does not have time to

anticipate the reversal of expectations that concludes many of the Jorkens stories. The topic of transmigration had been undertaken by the members of the Billiards Club in an unsuccessful attempt to exclude Jorkens from the conversation. As usual, Terbut functions as a foil for Jorkens, and his comments are placed so as to create a smooth transition into Jorkens’s narrative. The character physically experiencing the transmigration is Horcher, a man Jorkens knew in his youth; and from the description Jorkens gives of him, it is apparent that Horcher was a hero of a sort to Jorkens. The reader can see that many of the traits that Jorkens attributes to Horcher have been emulated by Jorkens. The development of the narrative is paralleled by Jorkens and Horcher’s walk through a garden. They walk and discuss the philosophy of reincarnation, Horcher claiming the Brahmins were wrong “in a great many particulars, not having studied the question scientifically or being intellectually qualified to understand its more difficult aspects” (CJ 2.64). The unconscious arrogance that brings about Horcher’s decline is apparent in the previous quotation. As they walk through the garden, Horcher absently steps on and kills snails that are crawling on the pathway, not out of cruelty, but as if “it could not matter to forms of life that were so absurdly low” (CJ 2.64). This detail, which seems to be casually included in the text, reveals Horcher’s character. He walks regally along, explaining to Jorkens how he has indelibly impressed the Greek symbol for naught into his consciousness. Horcher believes he will continue to make it in future incarnations. It is by this symbol that Jorkens will be able to identify Horcher should they meet in a future life. Because of his conviction that he will be rewarded for his tireless efforts on behalf of common men, Horcher has no doubt that he will be a monarch in his next existence. With the tact that often epitomizes the narrator’s own position toward Jorkens, when asked if Horcher had any basis for this belief, Jorkens replies: “Well . . . he was a very busy man, and it isn’t for me to say to what extent his interest in other men’s lives was philanthropy or interference: I took him at his own valuation then, so I don’t like to value him otherwise now he’s dead. His own view was that pretty well all men were fools, so that somebody must look after them, and that at much personal inconvenience he was prepared to do so himself.” (CJ 2.65) It is evident from the wording of Jorkens’s statement that his true opinion of Horcher differs from what he purports to profess. Horcher dies, having convinced Jorkens to watch in his old age for a ruler in an eastern country making the symbol naught. However, a year later, when Jorkens is walking in the same garden and thinking of Horcher, he notices a snail “on the wall making its slow journey, and remembered [Horcher’s] contempt for them, and was somehow glad to think [Horcher] had not despised the poor things more than he seemed to despise men” (CJ 2.66). Jorkens watches incredulously as the snail circles and then crawls a line through the middle of the circle—forming the Greek symbol for naught. Although not in

the way he expected, Horcher has proved transmigration to exist. Terbut queries Jorkens if he did anything for the snail, and Jorkens’s answer and the rationale behind it quintessentially reveal his own character: “I thought for a moment of killing it, to give Horcher a better chance with his third life. And then I realized that there was something about his outlook that it might take hundreds of lives to purify. You can’t go on and on killing snails, you know” (CJ 2.67). The knowledge of Horcher’s fate ends Jorkens’s admiration of him. Although there are certain similarities between the two characters, there is a humility about Jorkens, perhaps produced by the discovery of the “reward” that Horcher received in his subsequent incarnation. Another tale with mystical overtones is “A Mystery of the East,” which also appears in the Dover collection of Dunsany’s best supernatural fiction. The Jorkens stories that Dover reissued all have a thematic complexity that elevates them from the anecdotal into more sophisticated realms bordering on the purely magical. The boundary between magic and mundane reality is one theme of the story. Jorkens finds this division to be synonymous with the split between East and West. For Dunsany, the East embodies the magic and wisdom abandoned in the West for technological advances. Jorkens begins the tale by propounding this tireless Dunsanian theme, saying that in the East the magicians, whose business it is, “understand magic perfectly” (CJ 1.327). The adventures related by Jorkens in this tale result from his attempt to win a sweepstakes in Dublin. The only implausible detail is that he carried the ticket with him to India and had it on his person when he met a holy man meditating beside the Ganges River. It occurred to Jorkens to ask the man if he could cause a ticket with the same number to be chosen first in a drawing in Dublin. After Jorkens labouriously explains to the man what a sweepstakes is and how it works, the man says he can cause the ticket to be drawn out first. So Jorkens departs “pretty pleased, for [he] could see that if there is anything whatever in magic, or whatever it is that these people practice, then [he] was sure of the prize” (CJ 1.329). Jorkens left India the same week. On the boat was a western man who was knowledgeable of the East and its ways. Jorkens questions him about his chances of winning the thirty thousand pounds in the sweepstakes. Obviously, the gentleman knows nothing of the holy man Jorkens met by the Ganges; however, he does know a man in Northern Africa who can do such feats. Jorkens, with his own peculiar brand of logic, heads for Africa. On his way he acquires another sweepstakes ticket from a man in Marseilles and persuades the second mystic to cause it to be drawn first in the sweepstakes. The acquisition of the second ticket proves to be Jorkens’s great error because both men caused their respective tickets to be drawn first out of the barrel. Terbut is able to read for himself from a newspaper clipping that Jorkens carries in his pocket: “A door in the drum was then opened, and the first nurse put in her hand to bring out the fortunate number. She accidently brought out two tickets, and Mr. O’Riotty ordered them both to be put back” (CJ 1.334). Jorkens has managed to verify to his own satisfaction that there is magic in the East; however, he has not profited by it. The mistake is at first not

comprehended by Terbut, who mulls it over while Jorkens agonizes about his now obvious error. The narrator, sympathizing with Jorkens’s agony, offers him a whiskey, which Jorkens amazingly declines, asking, “What is the use of that?” (CJ 1.334). For the narrator, Jorkens’s aberration from his usual willing acceptance of drink is the strongest statement that can be made in favor of the veracity of the story that Jorkens has told. Another Jorkens tale exploring the supernatural abilities that are inherent within certain men is “Jorkens Consults a Prophet.” Perhaps the most complex of all the Jorkens tales, this one combines mysticism with the philosophical debate of free will versus destiny. Jorkens claims to have gained insight into the debate through the paranormal endeavors made on his behalf by a seer. Again, Jorkens’s motivation for the exploration is monetary gain. He interrupts the club conversation on the subject with a seemingly innocuous statement. He merely remarks, “There is a lot to be said for destiny, but you can’t ignore free will” (CJ 2.133). Terbut, with his skeptical comments, unintentionally coaxes Jorkens’s narrative from him. Jorkens’s interest in destiny was not philosophical but concerned a practical proposition. He reasons that if he knew which horse would be victorious in a race, he could amass wealth through wagers. He visits a seer who shows Jorkens the conclusion of the race in a crystal ball, even allowing him to sketch it. Jorkens attends the race and places no bets. The race happens precisely as he had seen it in the crystal ball. Jorkens returns and asks to see the conclusion of another race. This time, amazed by the accuracy of the previous prediction, he is prepared to gamble on it. Jorkens departs and bets heavily on the winning horse. Shortly before the race is scheduled, he returns to the seer, nervously querying if the man is absolutely certain of the outcome of the race. The prophet asks had the other race not turned out as he had foretold. The prophet elaborates, explaining the balance between free will and destiny. This is one of the most complex and intriguing themes that Dunsany ever explores in his fiction. Giving the dialogue to a prophet is insightful of Dunsany, for a seer is the only mortal who would have actual experience with the interrelationship of free will and destiny. Jorkens’s recollection of what the prophet said is that free will is a force that is almost equal to destiny. If either he or Jorkens were to interfere with the events surrounding the horse, then the horse might not win. But because they were the only two people who had any insight into the horse’s future, the horse would win unless one of them exerted free will that prevented it. The prophet took an oath saying he would not interfere and informed Jorkens that “provided [Jorkens] exerted no free will against what was planned for the horse, it was destined that it must win” (CJ 2.135). The simplicity to which the entire philosophical debate is succinctly summarized is one of Dunsany’s finest endeavors, and indeed one of the best extant resolutions of the argument. It provides, if someone takes “violent measures against whatever was ordained, the thing could not happen; just as, if you divert a river, it won’t go its old way to the sea; but leave it alone, and it will” (CJ 2.135). Because Dunsany cannot

allow Jorkens to profit substantially from his endeavors—for if Jorkens had, he would likely not be “at a London club to cadge drinks”[12] —Jorkens does not benefit from this scheme. Instead the tale is resolved by having Jorkens bet too heavily on the winner—the bookies then fix the race—and what was foretold does not happen because Jorkens has unwittingly interfered with destiny. The philosophical intricacy of this tale is not equaled anywhere in other Jorkens stories. Indeed it is revelatory of the powerful intellect that aided Dunsany in his composition of his various tales of wonder. Although Dunsany continues to write stories concerned with magic, the tales no longer are magical. The lushness of Dunsany’s early prose has been replaced by the mundane phrasing of conversation. There are more than one hundred Jorkens stories, unfailingly amusing, but few are substantial pieces. Amory observes that “Jorkens was a satisfactory device that Dunsany used effectively without ever working out.”[13] That Dunsany wrote more stories about this character than he had originally intended is attributable to Jorkens’s character. Amory identifies Jorkens as “our hero, and with all of his failings he certainly was that.”[14] Jorkens permits Dunsany to continue his exploration of mystical subject matter when no longer writing fantasy short stories.

NOTES 1. Reprinted in Mark Amory’s Biography of Lord Dunsany (London: Collins, 1972), 227. 2. Amory, Biography, 224. 3. Amory, Biography, 223. 4. Amory, Biography, 224. 5. “On the Other Side of the Sun,” in The Collected Jorkens, ed. S. T. Joshi (San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2004–05; 3 vols.), 2.241. Hereafter abbreviated in the text as CJ. 6. Amory, Biography, 225. 7. Lord Dunsany, “Preface” to The Fourth Book of Jorkens (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1948), n.p. The preface is not included in the British edition (London: Jarrolds, [1947]) or in CJ. 8. Lady Gregory, “Astray, and Treasure,” Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (1920; Gerrards Cross, UK: Colin Smythe, 1970), 165. 9. Lady Gregory, “Astray, and Treasure,” 163. 10. W. B. Yeats, “Introduction” to Fairy & Folk Tales of Ireland (New York: Macmillan, 1983), 3. 11. E. F. Bleiler, “Introduction” to Gods, Men and Ghosts (New York: Dover, 1972), viii. 12. Bleiler, “Introduction,” viii. 13. Amory, Biography, 223. 14. Amory, Biography, 225.

IV

On Dunsany’s Plays

Chapter 15

Mencken on Dunsany H. L. Mencken A dramatist of far greater originality, if of less instinct for the theater, [than Giuseppe Giacosa] is Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, eighteenth Baron Dunsany. Dunsany is an Irishman and is commonly counted among the adherents of the Neo-Celtic movement, but as a matter of fact his connection with it is of the slightest. His plays are not peasant comedies of modern Ireland like those of Synge, Lady Gregory, Padraic Colum et al., nor romances out of Irish legend like those of Yeats, but fantasies upon a plan he seems to have invented himself. Let “The Gods of the Mountain,” a piece in three short acts, serve as a specimen. The scene is vaguely “the East,” and the principal characters are seven roguish beggars. These beggars have fallen upon evil days: “there has been a comet come near to the earth of late and the earth has been parched and sultry, so that the gods are drowsy and all those things that are divine in man, such as benevolence, drunkenness, extravagance and song, have faded and died.” What to do? One of the seven, Ulf by name, suggests a plan. Why not try a bold hoax? Why not get revenge upon the recreant gods by impersonating them and grabbing their revenues? More specifically, why not impersonate the seven green gods of the mountain, whom all the people worship blindly without ever having seen them? The plan appeals to the other rascals, and they employ a thief to steal suitable costumes. Then, in godly array, they go into the city. But they are too shrewd, of course, to announce themselves in so many words, and thus challenge inquiry and suspicion. They know a far better plan than that. They go about the city apparently unconcerned, but all the while diligently talking god talk—referring casually to their sister, the moon; complaining of the ingratitude of humanity; hinting darkly about mysterious events to come. The people of the city do the rest. In an hour the rumor runs in all directions that the gods of the mountains are visiting their lieges incognito; by the end of the day the seven rogues are installed in magnificent quarters, and the pious are coming from near and far to worship them and flatter them and curry favor with them, and they are being stuffed with the lordliest victuals the vicinage affords. And so it goes for several blissful days, perhaps more. The god business is vastly more agreeable than the begging business. But then comes the inevitable agnostic, the higher critic, the fellow with pointed and embarrassing inquiries. At the start he is disregarded and even denounced, but by and by his questions begin to get attention. Can it be true that those greedy and boisterous fellows are really the green gods of the mountain? Suppose they are actually blasphemous impostors? Suppose it turns out, on investigation, that the gods of the mountain are still in the mountain? At once a couple of sharp fellows on dromedaries are sent out to look into it. They travel for days over the hot sands, into regions where few men have ever set foot. They come at last to the mountain. And then, full of news, they hasten back. The gods of the mountain are not in the

mountain. Ergo, the seven rogues are genuine. (Ah, the logic of theology! The syllogism divine!) And so, triumphantly sustained, exculpated, acquitted, the seven face long lives of ease and honor. The faithful struggle to pay them tribute. They feast until their tummies are as tight as drumheads. But in all this triumph there is still a touch of disquiet. No man can disbelieve utterly in the religion of his race and time; no man can shake himself wholly free from the ideas prevailing about him. And so the seven are pricked by conscience, that ancient handmaiden of the gods. “I have a fear,” says Ulf, “an old fear and a boding. We have done ill in the sight of the seven gods.” They withdraw into their sanctuary to talk it over. And then comes the final grotesquerie, the true Dunsanian touch. As they consult in whispers a heavy marching is heard outside, and presently there enters a file of seven green men. “They wear greenstone sandals; they walk with knees extremely wide apart, as having sat cross-legged for centuries; their right arms and forefingers point upward, right elbows resting on left hands.” Who are these mysterious strangers? They are the real gods of the mountain! And at once they inflict their terrible punishment and enjoy their terrible revenge. Each points his green forefinger at one of the shrinking impostors. The latter falls into the attitude of his accuser—and turns to green stone! Then the real gods vanish and the people come rushing in. They see the seven dead beggars—stiff, cold, petrified. They fall on their faces, contrite and panic-stricken. “We have doubted them! They have turned to stone because we have doubted them! They were the true gods!” Maybe this will give you some notion of the peculiar quality of Dunsany’s plays— the outlandish color in them, the mordant humor, the exuberant fancy, the amazing strangeness. And every one of the five in the book is just as far from the usual. This Dunsany, indeed, seems to have invented a wholly new type of drama, part extravaganza, part allegory and part comedy. And if you turn to two of his other books, “Time and the Gods” and “The Book of Wonder” (Luce), you will find that he has also invented an entirely new type of story. To give you his formula in a few words is quite impossible. He mixes the fantastic and the commonplace in a way that, to me at least, is wholly new. His scenes, more than once, suggest the Arabian Nights, but in his themes, his situations and his dramatis personæ there is little to recall the Sultan Shahriyar and his garrulous bride. In one of the plays, for example, the only characters are two burglars—“both dead”! In one of the stories the action hinges on a golden dragon’s kidnapping of “Miss Cubbidge, daughter to Mr. Cubbidge, M.P., of 12a, Prince of Wales Square, London, S. W.” In another story young Thomas Shap, a clerk in the City, is crowned emperor of the Thuls, with a hundred and twenty archbishops, twenty angels and two archangels in his train. One is transported to strange countries—Zith, Zericon, Mluna, Moung, Averon, BelNarana. One meets men of strange names—Zarb, Argimenes, Darniak, Akmos, Illanaun, Oorander. Here in brief is something new under the sun, a world of fancy unheard of until Dunsany explored it. No wonder Frank Harris, emerging from the first performance of “King Argimenes and the Unknown Warrior,” in London, said, “It was one of the best nights of my life.”

* * * When George Nathan and I took over the editorship of this great family magazine, in the summer of 1914, the first author we invited to invade its pages was Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron Dunsany. Since then we have been hymned more than once, in public prints, as his discoverer, and Nathan, to this day, exhibits himself in Broadway pothouses in that character. All buncombe, my dears! We no more discovered Dunsany than we discovered the precession of the equinoxes. Two of his books of tales, “Time and the Gods” and “The Book of Wonder” (Luce), were actually in print in America a full year before we trained our siege guns upon him, and at least one of them had been in print in England since 1905. Moreover, three of his plays had been produced at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, two had been put on with success at the Haymarket in London, one had toured Russia, another had been done in Manchester, and still another had actually seen the light in Buffalo, N.Y. (One is reminded here of the first production of an Ibsen play in English—in Louisville!) And in the meantime no less than four further volumes of his tales had been got into type across the ocean. Dunsany was thus anything but a newcomer; on the contrary, more than twothirds of his work was already behind him. But for some reason that remains unfathomable as the doctrine of infant damnation he was still almost, if not quite unknown. In London the Saturday Review printed a few of his shorter stories, and a few connoisseurs of the fantastic occasionally mentioned him; in the United States he was not even a name. If you don’t believe it, turn to Cornelius Weygandt’s “Irish Plays and Playwrights” (Houghton), a bulky and possibly exhaustive tome, published in February 1913. The name of Dunsany, in small type, appears twice in a list of plays produced by the Abbey Theatre, but there is not a word about him in the body of the book, and he is not even mentioned in the index! Search the whole critical literature of that year, and of the next year no less, and you will find no more. The Little Theatre movement was already in full swing; the jitney Frohmans were combing the ninth-rate playhouses of Vienna, Berlin, Paris and Budapest for new one-acters. But not one of them had ever heard of Dunsany. Nor had any of the Forty-second Street Hazlitts. Nor had any of the Taines, Brandeses and Max Beerbohms of the literary weeklies. Wherefore, when the noble lord was introduced into the pages of this great moral periodical, he went off, as it were, like a bomb. In two months all the corn-fed literati were gabbling about him; in two months more even the women’s clubs had become aware of him; by the spring of 1915 he was produced on the East Side, and the Broadway Walkleys braved the garlic to inspect him, to announce him, to whoop for him. What followed was characteristic, and a bit humorous. The dramatist who had been overlooked for five or six years, standing in plain view all the while, suddenly became the rage, and all the managers of Little Theatres and Portmanteau Theatres and Vestpocket Theatres and Demi-Tasse Theatres and Short-Order Theatres began loading the cables with offers for his plays. The production of “A Night at the Inn,” in May 1916, brought the climax. This adept and creepy melodrama, as William Winter

would say, knocked New York cold. The newspapers flamed with the news of its success; great caravans of limousines rolled down Grand Street nightly, knocking over hundreds of pushcarts, maiming thousands of children; even Brander Matthews and Diamond Jim Brady went to see it. By the end of the year Dunsany got to Broadway. Since then he has been the reigning favorite of all those New Yorkers who love and venerate art, vice Vernon Castle and Charlotte Greenwood, retired. . . . Eheu, a sad fate for a great artist! To be pawed by millinery buyers from Akron and St. Louis! To be praised in the Evening Telegram! If, despite my caveat, I had any part, however small, in setting off this clapper-clawing I apologize to Dunsany with tears in my eyes, and promise to sin no more. For here, undoubtedly, is one who belongs to the small company of first-rate men; here is one who has heard the authentic sirens sing; here is a true priest of romance; here, after Synge (and perhaps not after him), is the finest poet that Ireland has produced in five hundred years. There is something in his work so delicate, so simple, so childlike, that he seems one with the makers of fable in the nonage of the world. It is with sure instinct that he sets his scenes in antique mists and peoples them with folk out of fallen and forgotten empires; he has no more to do with the life of today, or with the passions of today, or with the rouged and simpering beauty of today than Peter Pan. He has the magic to conjure up what has been long gone and out of mind, and to make it live again, and to make us sorry that its day is done. He is a visionary whose visions transcend space and time. He has brought back into English letters a fragile and precious thing, so ancient that it seems quite new . . . And behold how fate rewards him. His fancies out of dead heavens and hells soothe the distended stomachs of carnivora who weep when the band plays “Dixie.” He himself inhabits a ditch in some French cabbage field . . . A Dunsany literature begins to spring up. There is an excellent estimate of his plays in “The Contemporary Drama of Ireland,” by Ernest A. Boyd (Little-Brown), a book that I shall notice at length on some other day. There is a larger study in “Dunsany the Dramatist,” by Edward Hale Bierstadt (Little-Brown), and, what is more, a clear statement by Dunsany himself of some of his chief ideas. Better still, his own writings appear in new editions, convenient, cheap, complete. Before me, for example, lie five uniform volumes of the tales: “The Gods of Pegana,” “Time and the Gods,” “The Sword of Welleran,” “A Dreamer’s Tales,” “The Book of Wonder” and “The Last Book of Wonder” (Luce)—an admirable edition, indeed, with all the amazing illustrations by S. H. Sime. It is time to be laying in Dunsany. It is time to be discovering him as a great artist, as well as a Broadway sensation and a star of the magazines. His work has something in it that is rare and potent and infinitely charming. He can fetch up moods and images that belong to other literatures and other ages. . . .

Chapter 16

If Rebecca West There can be no doubt at all but that Lord Dunsany was sent into the world to aid in the great task of cheering us all up. He has an exact analogue in another art in the person of that excellent craftsman, Mr. Rowley, who makes pictures out of inlaid woods of different colours, which, though of necessity lacking in tonal values, have a flat yet rich beauty that entirely justifies the method, though one would be sorry to see anyone else of equal quality lowering his talent by adopting it. Even so, Lord Dunsany has a way of piecing together highly artificial, voulu dramatic moments into plays which have no depth but quite enough of this same flat yet rich beauty to justify the effort. There is no play of his that I have ever seen which has not left some exquisite though unmoving vision behind. There was King Argimenes and the Slave [sic], which left an impression altogether more distinct than we would have thought within the power of the Irish players working crampedly at the Court, and with other beauty than pictorial in mind, of slaves bending in strong sunlight to sandy toil under the lash of overseers; of the discovery of the sword; of the onrush of slaves into cool courts where the king’s women drowsed in scented twilight. There was The Gods of the Mountains [sic], produced at the Haymarket in the days of Mr. Herbert Trench; it was a good moment, when the six beggars, who had tricked the people of the city into believing that they were six gods of the mountains, were sitting round in a circle boasting of the spoils of their trickery, saw the six great jade green figures looming over them, and knew that the true gods had come. . . . There was that other play which showed two burglars breaking out of Hell, forcing the lock, swinging open the great gates, and looking out into bleak, unfriendly, empty space. . . . All these plays I remember with great pleasure, but I am not in the least distressed because the dialogue has entirely escaped my memory. To demand that Lord Dunsany’s plays should, as well as providing this special sort of pictorial beauty, be full of verbal beauty and original ideas is as unreasonable as it would be if anyone also brought a decorated mirror or fire screen from Mr. Rowley should demand that he accompanied it with a pound of tea grown on his own plantation and a tract written by himself. It would be very nice if Lord Dunsany were a universal genius, but he is not, and it is absurd not to realise this and to concentrate on enjoying the really delicious fruits of his limited gift. I lay emphasis on this matter because the producers of If at the Ambassadors are not being quite fair to Lord Dunsany in this matter. If is full of his special quality. If one considers its central motive as an idea there is no reason for excitement; it is simply a variant of the idea, treated far more subtly and exhaustively in Dear Brutus, of the second chance. John Beal, a Cockney clerk living in Lewisham, is given a magic crystal by a Persian gentleman who is disappointed about a loan he has negotiated with Beal’s firm, which has the property of allowing him to go again. He chooses to catch a train to the City which, ten years before he had missed, as one

had been shown in the first scene, where a railway porter had put his hand in Mr. Henry Ainley’s handsome face and pushed him backwards from the barrier. (A murmur went up from the pit, as from those who witness a scene of sacrilege.) Since his journey brings him in contact with Miss Miralda Clement, one of those helpless little women who are more to be feared than the sabre-toothed tiger, who suggests that he should go out to Persia and look after some property there which she has been left in her uncle’s will, it leads his destiny away from the villa in Lewisham and his nice little wife and towards the adventurous East for which he has always longed; with the result that ten years later he finds himself a hungry beggar, poorer for the memories of the days when he was a Shereef and took toll of the traders in turquoises, on the doorstep of the villa of Lewisham which now, like his nice little wife, belongs to another man, and seems an unattainable Paradise. It is not a very original nor a very profound parable, but it gives a magnificent opportunity to this pictorial gift that is Lord Dunsany’s special quality. One sees, or is stimulated to see, visions of the little Cockney clerk, ridiculous with underbreeding, beautiful with bravery, waddling out into the desert, leaving in-toed footprints in the sand yet following a track that only a hero could tread; halting at times and mopping his brow as he looks up at the skies and sees that the night is more purple than it is at Lewisham and that the clustered stars have the appearance of conspirators, or looks forward and sees that the peaks of the mountains are like the faces of gods banked with earth, and that the town at the pass that shines white in the moonlight has a secret, but resolving to push on; and, when he arrives, out-facing bronze gods that drink blood and shereefs whose eyes are like daggers, and laying the yoke of his innocence on the crafty East until the blonde Miralda, loyal and loving as the creeping snake, betrays him, and he has need to pass by the hidden stairway to the river and take the boat that his counsellor has moored under the golden willow. Whether these visions are only suggested to us by the context or take shape on the stage, there is a quality about them that is unique, a flatness and richness, an unprofound yet authentic glamour that keeps the imagination floating happily in a warm ether though it does not send it on any very long journey of discovery. One of the best scenes is that which shows Hafiz el Alcolahn instructing the Bishareens as to the assassination of John Beal. Hardly anything is said. Only one sees a group of men huddled together at the base of the towering walls as of an alley; and one raises a flute to his lips and plays a little tune; and the others bid him repeat it, so that they may be certain of remembering the signal. . . . But somehow all the eeriness of the Arabian Nights, when those held tales of murder, is compressed in this brief scene. For this reason it is the greatest of pities that the producers of If insist on it being played as slowly as a funeral conducted by a clergyman of unusually dreamy temperament. It is in many ways an admirable production, as anything in which Mr. Nigel Playfair was concerned would be. One can see his mark in the general brilliance of the acting, which comes to its amazing apex in the first-rate performance of Miss Gladys Cooper as Miralda Clement. To see her in John Beal’s tent, keeping the integrity of her Cockneyism intact, though with the blood-drinking bronze gods all

round her, and bursting into tears and wailing that she is so helpless when the great brutes of men will not gratify her little whim and murder her enemies, is to realise that an excellent character actress has for years been gagged. Usually the gag has been the most becoming that Messrs. Reville and Rossiter could provide, but when one has seen Miss Cooper eating acid drops in the railway carriage scene one realises that this has been a serious loss to the theatre. But she and all the rest of the cast have been induced to act so slowly that all the good points of the play have been minimised and the bad points emphasised. Each line is not so much spoken as gingerly handed across the footlights for examination by the audience. There is no reason why we should examine them carefully, or, indeed, with anything but the outside edge of the attention, for they are mostly scaffolding lines that lead up to these visually satisfying situations. If one is given time to think over the play one begins to criticise it as if it made an appeal to the intellect, and one perceives that from that point of view it is full of weaknesses. How does it happen, for instance, that the Oriental gentleman who gives the magic crystal is under the impression that it is Beal and not his business partner who has given him ten shillings instead of fifty pounds when he has such clairvoyant powers that he knows what the second chance will hold? I have not the slightest ground, except my low view of human nature, for alleging that Lord Dunsany himself is responsible for this portentously reverent pace of the production, that he himself has insisted on the dialogue being regarded as precious as a string of pearls, but I feel sure that it is so. It is notorious that authors never know how their own plays ought to be acted, as used to be curiously proved by Mr. Granville Barker, whose casting of his own plays was always so much worse than his casting of anybody else’s; and this particular error is just the one into which an intellectually unrobust artist like Lord Dunsany would be likely to fall. For what it means is that he cannot bear to think that he has written a play which is intellectually negligible. To admit that would be, he thinks, the same as admitting that he had written a bad play. One would have thought that the Russian Ballet would have made it plain that this was a fallacy, and that everyone recognised nowadays that a play hangs between literature and the pictorial arts. It can never become pure literature; a play that does not recognise that part of its business is to appeal to the eye squanders its own resources, and is necessarily an incomplete work of art. It can never become purely pictorial; one at least fingers the counters of logic and romance even in designing something so abstract as Les Sylphides. But it may be next door to either of these two extremes, and Lord Dunsany’s play is very near to that position in regard to the pictorial wit. None of the lines spoken by any other than the three principal characters, John Beal and Miralda and John’s wife (beautifully played by Miss Marda Vanne) matter at all, but every situation, with its invariable evocation of visual beauty, does. If this play were acted at breakneck speed, so that vision passed into vision without any interludes in which characters slowly dripped remarks, like taps in need of a new washer, the effect would be intoxicating.

Chapter 17

Dunsany Ludwig Lewisohn Plays of Gods and Men. By Lord Dunsany. G. P. Putnam’s Sons. $1.75. Plays of Near and Far. By Lord Dunsany. G. P. Putnam’s Sons. $1.75. It was in 1915 that Stuart Walker’s Portmanteau Theater gave the first performances of plays by Lord Dunsany in New York. One remembers especially The Gods of the Mountains [sic] and The Sword of King Argimenes [sic]. One remembers, across all the intervening years and their many brilliant and interesting theatrical events, the sharp, massive, magical colors and architectural contours of those productions, the strange beauty of spears and helmets and thrones and pillars and breastplates and greaves, the sensitiveness and power with which Mr. Walker grasped and embodied the imaginings of the only genuinely mythopoeic writer of this generation. That is the brief but necessary definition of Lord Dunsany’s talent. To him myth is not instrument but substance. His plays, in his own words, are not allegories. Neither are they symbols except in so far as all that is human is symbolic. His place, therefore, is apart from the practitioners of the neoromantic drama—Yeats and Hofmannsthal and even Shaw and Hauptmann in their latest phases. He has no theories, not even favorite truths. He tells himself somber fairy tales. We overhear them. He is not naive; he has no affiliation with his folk. His art is not an art of union; it is an art of flight. He escapes from his country, people, world as too troubling, subtle, intricate, and dreams of desert kingdoms that were old when Helen was not yet grown to womanhood. The prevailing tone of these mythopoeic dramas is dark. Men and things dash themselves against a granite fate. But this is merely a matter of tone, of mood; it is an artistic and not a philosophical method and is to be ranked and appreciated with the velvety cruelty of the dialogue, with the invention of that marvelous nomenclature which has the timbre of muffled kettledrums heard across vast spaces. Other moods come to Dunsany rarely and as though by chance. There is the eternal yearning for freedom in that lovely play The Tents of the Arabs; there is the withering estimate of cheap astuteness, of the wisdom of this world, in A Night at an Inn. But in The Laughter of the Gods and in The Compromise of the King of the Golden Isles he returns to that overwhelming sense of the inscrutable and relentless character of human fate which he has found so fruitful an artistic mood. It is a curious fact but nonetheless a fact that these plays are not felt to be monotonous despite the monotone of their dominant key. Dunsany is a highly concrete writer. He is a born storyteller. He is so good a storyteller that he does not need intrigue which is but the refuge of the barren. You are breathless over his tales as mere tales. Which cup will the King of the Golden Isles drink? Consider that one of

them contains a poison that “is no common poison, but a thing so strange and deadly that the serpents of Lebutharna go in fear of it.” Which? That is what I call a thrilling question—thrilling, beautiful, and remote. Remote, thank heaven! Which shows that Dunsany’s art of escape triumphs. I can see the gorges of Lebutharna; I can see its wise and wary serpents. Their fangs are as terrible as ever because they never were. To shudder at them—there is an aesthetic experience that is as purely delightful as the reading of childhood. The playlets of contemporary life, Cheezo, If Shakespeare Lived Today, and Fame and the Poet, are keenly thought out and executed with an almost Shavian pointedness and speed. But other men could have written them. There is only one guide to Barbul-el-Sharnak, only one to the city of Thalanna that is at the edge of the great desert, only one to the golden islands of King Hamaran.

Chapter 18

Beyond the Fields Ben P. Indick The Theatre of Lord Dunsany Admirers of the writings of Lord Dunsany know him for his exquisitely written fantasies of strange gods and exotic lands. They are set beyond “the fields we know” at “the edge of the world,” the evocative expressions of his haunting novel, The King of Elfland’s Daughter, and the collection, The Book of Wonder. These sites are the locus as well of early plays by Dunsany. Few recall that, for a time, he was also one of the world’s most widely known playwrights. The Gods of Pegāna, his first published fiction, had appeared in 1905; only four years later he was also represented on stage with the first of many equally fantastic plays. They were remarkably successful, at home in Ireland and elsewhere. After World War I his fictional writing style altered. The mysterious gods and cities vanished, as, without losing his wit and charm, his work began to be more of his own world. This was reflected as well in his drama. Yet his stage work all too quickly lost its popularity. His work was performed infrequently and, at last, not at all, except in occasional small theatre group showings. Today his drama is a museum piece, like some of his gods, who vanished or sat immobile to passing history. Is the work of no consequence, then, his moment past? Or has the time come for reexamination, to avoid abandoning that which may be worth cherishing? It was no less a luminary than William Butler Yeats, poet and playwright himself, and a founder of the Irish Literary Theatre, who urged Dunsany, who had never written a play, to write something for the Abbey Theatre, as it came to be known. True to his own literary tastes, the tyro used Fantasy as his medium, although in his first play, The Glittering Gate (1909), his protagonists are ordinary, very simple men, actually thieves. Subsequently, however, it is not uncommon to find, as in his stories of the mystical Pegāna, a non-earthly and exotic nomenclature of gods and humans populating the stage: “Agmar, Oorander, Illanaun, Zarb, Queen Atharlia,” in cities such as “Marma, Thalanna, Barbul-El-Sharnak.” The new naturalism of Ibsen, against which Yeats was struggling, the war between the sexes of Shaw, the drawing-room comedy of Wilde and Pinero, the sentiment of a Barrie—these were not, at least at this time, a part of Dunsany’s stage. Poetic instincts still commanded his dramatist’s pen. Within a decade, his plays were being performed in Ireland, England, Russia, and America. King Argimēnēs and the Unknown Warrior played at the Abbey in 1911, and six months later The Gods of the Mountain appeared in London, featuring in its cast a very young Claude Rains. The Golden Doom appeared in 1912 in London. Of the latter, performed together with two plays by other writers, a British

critic wrote: “The solemn and mysterious ritual of the priests . . . is most amusing, and not without its moral.” A photo of the Haymarket Theatre production reveals the large set is very well adapted from a Sidney Sime drawing for what the critic describes as Dunsany’s “strange” book, The Gods of Pegāna.[1] Dunsany was receiving attention in America too. H. L. Mencken wrote that when he and George Jean Nathan “had taken over the editorship of The Smart Set in the summer of 1914, the first author we invited to invade its pages was Dunsany,” although, he adds, since the author was well-known already he refuses to take credit as his “discoverer.”[2] The London productions were so successful (a popularity which diminished) that they were soon produced in America. A Buffalo presentation was unsuccessful, but more sympathetic and understanding stagings of his work in New York City followed, several of the plays appearing even before London had seen them, and were enormously popular. The following year, 1916, an unnamed New York Times critic is quoted in the June 1916 Current Literature as finding the production of a A Night at an Inn by the Neighborhood Playhouse “an event of great importance . . . [Dunsany is] a playwright of extraordinary beauty and power.” He said the first audience was “half hysterical with excitement” and the play “stirring beyond belief.” Indeed, as Edward Hale Bierstadt, his perhaps too highly enthusiastic early biographer, writing in 1917, soon after the event, put it, “all New York was Dunsany mad.”[3] S. T. Joshi and Darrell Schweitzer in the introduction to their bibliography of Dunsany’s works write that in 1916 he “became the only playwright ever to have five plays running simultaneously on Broadway, as each of the plays in Five Plays (1914) were produced at different theatres.”[4] While Bierstadt’s opinions of the magnitude of Dunsany’s achievement would reluctantly soon thereafter be modified (see below), he was correct as to the playwright’s broad popularity in New York City; this is clear from the many newspaper and periodical reviews and articles. Fortunately, Dunsany’s American producer, Stuart Walker, collected them, in a huge scrapbook, and they may be perused.[5] However, the statement by Joshi and Schweitzer, while correct in essence about the particular plays, is not otherwise correct. The five plays are none of them a full night’s entertainment, and were staged either together with plays by other writers or, once, in a grouping of three (see below). Furthermore, none was on Broadway itself. It would be another decade before a Dunsany play was to reach “The Great White Way.” Walker, a writer as well as producer, operated in several theatres. One was on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, on Grand Street, The Neighborhood Playhouse, what would today be described as “Off-Broadway.” He staged other plays in the Broadway area itself under the umbrella name of the “Portmanteau Theatre.” This was, as the name implies, designed to be a portable theatre, capable of being easily set up and dismantled. It used a single set for its productions, with different drops to establish a scene. Walker advertised it as “The Theatre That Comes To You.” For his

Dunsany productions here he used The Punch and Judy Theatre, a diminutive house. He used other venues as well, successfully producing Booth Tarkington’s Seventeen and others and writing his own dramatic reading for the Book of Job. Reading today the browned and very fragile newspaper notices which Walker collected eighty years ago in his large and equally fragile scrapbook is an exercise in nostalgia. However, the insight into the ephemeral nature of theatrical popularity is rewarding. The earliest American review is in the Boston Transcript of March 26, 1915. “HKM” remarks presciently for a production of Dunsany’s first play, The Glittering Gate, that it indicated “some of the virtues of an author whose plays we shall doubtlessly see in some quantity before two seasons have passed.” The Golden Doom, done in New York in 1916, was a success. The New York Dramatic Mirror, December 1916, found it, performed again with two other plays, “the most interesting of the three . . . a study in superstition, presenting in a few laconic lines the trifles of which creeds have been founded and dynasties destroyed.” Walker was bringing the plays into New York now to his several theatres. Of his production of King Argimēnēs and the Unknown Warrior, a critic wrote, “from a scenic and histrionic point of view is better than either The Gods of the Mountain or The Golden Doom . . . There are four Lord Dunsany plays available to New Yorkers now, and all in Thirty-ninth between Broadway and Sixth Avenue, and New Yorkers are taking advantage of that fact. [Producers] are preparing a Broadway production of A Night at an Inn which the Neighborhood Players presented so adequately last season . . . and the Portmanteau Players across the way have been showing the Irish playwright’s Gods of the Mountain and The Golden Doom.”[6] A Night at an Inn did not, however, play Broadway. Le Beau Monde, in 1917, comments: “As the New Year dawns, no dramatist is more widely discussed than Lord Dunsany. . . . It must be admitted he is more appreciated in America and in Germany than in Britain. Blending as he does the virility of Robert Louis Stevenson and the delicacy of [Maurice] Maeterlinck, he has given the critics a difficult problem to solve, but none deny the thrills and suspense with which these fantastic plays abound. . . . Of one thing one may be certain in these remarkable tragi-comedies and that is the beauty of the writing.”[7] Dunsany was a star. The many clippings often include articles and photographs of Lord and Lady Dunsany, especially during his recuperation from World War I wounds. A London actress, Gertrude Kingston, wrote, for an unnamed American newpaper, “About six feet eleven inches and very thin, he is a wild Irishman with a shock of fair hair. The last news I had of him he was motoring through the Irish rebellion and got himself wounded in the leg. I think he is at Dunsany Castle unless he has returned to the front.” Other cities either reviewed his New York plays or printed syndicated columns. “There can be no mistake in the fact that Lord Dunsany, the Irish soldier-dramatist, is the big vogue of the present dramatic year.”[8] Critic Walter Pritchett Eaton said in an unattributed clipping: “The Gods of the Mountain—a work of singular dramatic simplicity and force . . . infused with the magic of poetic speech.” New Haven,

Chicago, Peekskill, N.Y., and more referred to the modestly staged but very talkedabout playwright and his plays. The “acts” by which Dunsany usually subdivided his longer plays were at best the length of normal scenes, so that the play would not occupy an evening, especially at a time when an evening at the theatre consumed at least three hours. Walker’s Portmanteau Theatre would fill out the bill with shorter plays. Thus, The Laughter of the Gods, “a tragedy in three acts,” was supplemented by A Night in Avignon, a romance of Petrarch and Laura by Cale Young Rice, and Sting, a musical by Maxwell Percy. On another occasion, Walker played his own dramatic staging of the Book of Job together with Dunsany’s The Tents of the Arabs (two acts). It was not a success; however, he did have success in February 1919 with an all-Dunsany program, King Argimēnēs and the Unknown Warrior (two acts), The Golden Doom (one act), and The Gods of the Mountain (three acts). Ticket prices were $1.00 to $2.50, and the performance run was two weeks. A typical review described the evening as a “full feast of delight.”[9] By 1919, the reviews had been nearly all positive. “There is no resisting the imaginative spell of Lord Dunsany and especially when he touches his favorite theme of the Great Gods.”[10] “No other recent dramatist, with the exception of his fellowcountryman John Millington Synge, has been accepted so quickly by all critics as one of the immortals.” The reviewer did, however, acknowledge a certain sameness in his review.[11] “Hardly a season has passed since the green jade gods of Lord Dunsany first left their mountain home at Marma and descended, with the awful tread of living stone, upon the unhallowed places of Broadway. Yet in that brief space their creator himself became a god in the Pantheon of American theatre.”[12] The reviews were, however, sometimes mixed or even unenthusiastic. Burns Mantle, who would later achieve fame as a critic and annual play anthologist, wrote: “The Laughter of the Gods saves an otherwise lifeless opening bill.” However, he added, “It is overlong. It is wordy and diffuse. It demands that quality of imagination that is utterly foreign to the Broadway crowd. I am even willing to go so far as to say it will bore the majority and intrigue none but the very few.” He must have been among the latter, for he concludes that he was “carried away.”[13] Heywood Broun wrote, with some disappointment, “Lord Dunsany filled us with a poignant expectation of horror in his new play The Laughter of the Gods until he piled the suspense above the line of patience. . . . It is a pity that Lord Dunsany has not infused his new play with the same pace which keeps every emotion racing in The Gods of the Mountain. It is a tragedy of the unequal struggle between man and the fate which used him as its sport.”[14] George Jean Nathan disliked the acting, sets, and music of The Gods of the Mountain, but added “It is a tribute to Dunsany and his play that [it] retains a surprising measure of its intrinsic force.”[15] Alan Dale was “bored to extinction” by a prior Dunsany play, but liked The Laughter of the Gods for “episodes of satire, sardonic humor, something one wasn’t

forced to twist into significance.”[16] Variety, presumably already “the Bible of Show Business,” took the dollars-andcents view. The critic found The Laughter of the Gods a “clever satire, well-written, but with no popular appeal. It will do for a novelty in one of the ‘freak’ playhouses that seem to appeal to New York’s ‘Smart Set.’ The evening’s entertainment as a whole is inane.”[17] Even Edward Hale Bierstadt, author of the adulatory 1917 biography, had second thoughts. In 1919 he wrote that Dunsany had been accused of repeating himself, that “while he has created one thing of surpassing beauty [i.e., his mythology] he is today a man hemmed within the circle of his own proclivity.” He bemoans a lessening of the elemental humanity. The plays have come to resemble one another in plot, character and action, and such writing must become “tedious.” In the same article, however, he quotes from a communication from Dunsany, with much annoyance at Stuart Walker. The playwright blames the failure of the co-bill of The Tents of The Arabs and Walker’s The Book of Job on the latter. To the argument that his play is only “quite good to read,” he says that “to say that of a play is as though you said of a dinner that the menu looked all right. Plays are to see, and dinners are to eat.” He still hopes to see his “plays put on by somebody, lest I give up writing plays and spend my time shooting big game, which is an occupation that amuses me just as much.” Bierstadt, however, fears Dunsany must “widen the scope of his activity, or be content to work over the same field until the soul, now exhausted, refuses to yield even so much as one blossom.”[18] He was answered by Margaret McElroy. “Bierstadt seems to have fallen somewhat from his first high state of admiration for the author’s work. And in his fall he has sought to pull Dunsany down too.” She adds that the playwright does indeed display understanding for humanity, and to “the tremendous subject of man in his relation to the universe, man’s reaction to an unknown power, call it fate or the gods, or God, that marks the zenith of his achievement.”[19] In October 1919, still high in public esteem and reception of his theatre, the dashing Irish peer visited America and engaged in a speaking tour. He was interviewed by numerous New York newspapers—the Herald, Evening Globe, Tribune, World, American—and a charming article about him appeared in the New York Times. He conversed freely but refused to discuss “the Irish question,” saying he was a poet, not a politician. He is described as strolling on Grand Street on the teeming Lower East Side, a tall figure in evening clothes. He enjoyed “being a lion” and saw some of his plays staged at the Neighborhood Playhouse, where he graciously signed programs with his characteristic signature, a wide brushstroked “Dunsany.” The crowds, many of whom were immigrants who very likely did not know who he was and were unable even to speak his language, realized he was a celebrity and enjoyed him as well.[20] In Boston, a lecture tour stop, one of Dunsany’s audience, sitting in the first row, breathless in awe of his idol, whose fiction his own

had resembled even before he had read any by the Irish fantasist, was H. P. Lovecraft. This extensive sampling of opinion demonstrates Dunsany’s successful introduction to New York, but, ironically, and at that to a playwright whose forte was irony, this fabulous early success was to be the brief high-water mark of his entire theatrical career. He would not be forgotten, as volumes of his plays continued to appear in print, in England and America as well, with one notable exception, before actual stage productions. The books usually proved popular enough for several editions, although some of the plays would never be performed. When he tried a new tack, combining straight drawing-room comedy plays with fantasy and even outrageous satire, in Seven Modern Comedies (1928), the audience which apparently no longer came to see him in the playhouse still ran his book into multiple printings. Finally, in 1937 he published Plays for Earth and Air, the last of his nine play-books. There were revivals, in festivals or by small companies, as we shall see below, and even a production on Broadway, but less frequently as his star waned. Dunsany, a man of wit, taste, and modest wealth, as he had long since testily told Bierstadt, was apparently content. He had always been a renowned fictionist, with several superb early novels and many beautiful short stories, written in the same vein as his early plays. He continued to write collections of sardonic stories and occasional novels of varying success, and enjoyed friendships with such literary peers as Shaw, Chesterton, and Yeats. He had little sympathy for Irish Home Rule, and certainly less for independence; the unpopularity of such “loyalist” positions may have contributed to his decline as a stage figure. The often phantasmagorical, even magical nature of his plots may have confused audiences as to some hidden motive the author of prior tales of the marvelous had. Dunsany insisted, however, that he was merely telling stories, that allegory was not his intention, when critics attempted to interpret his fantastic plays. In a letter, he wrote: “I have nothing to do with allegories. . . . Now when I write of Babylon, there are people who cannot see that I write it for love of Babylon’s ways, and they think I’m thinking of London still and our beastly Parliament. . . . I am not trying to teach anyone anything.”[21] It is easy to see why misunderstanding arose. At a time when the naturalism of Ibsen was becoming foremost in the theatre, plays about deposed kings reduced to beggary, exotic gods with mysterious high priests, strange Arab messengers, some bearing jewels of unusual power, by which lives are fantastically altered—these are elements which, if not outright wild adventure, might well be hidden and enigmatic allusions to the human condition. Dunsany himself reveals the creative impulse behind his writing and certainly his early plays: Something must be wrong with an age whose drama deserts romance; and a cause that soonest occurs to one is the alarming spread of advertisement, its

frightful vulgarity, and its whole-hearted devotion to the snaring of money. . . . Romance is so inseparable from life that all we need to obtain romantic drama is for the dramatist to find any age and and country where life is not too thickly veiled and cloaked with puzzles and conventions, in fact to find a people that is not in the agonies of self consciousness. For myself I think that it is simpler to imagine such a people, as it saves the trouble of reading to find a romantic age, or the trouble of making a journey to lands where there is no press. . . . The kind of drama that we most need to-day seems to me to be the kind that will build new worlds for the fancy, for the spirit as much as the body needs a change of scene.[22] Dunsany’s protest was not double-edged. Nevertheless, his plays often do reflect in general upon the human condition, in even the most nonrealistic circumstances. It will be useful to discuss representative plays, from the early to the late writings. His very first play is a good example of the early oeuvre, both as colorful fantasy and, despite the author’s statement, a rather bold expression of the human condition. The Glittering Gate, written and first staged in 1909, did not entirely satisfy him; nevertheless it reads well, with a neatly ironic ending. Its two characters are two justdeceased thieves, who find themselves in a “lonely place . . . strewn with large black rocks and uncorked beer-bottles.” Behind is a golden door, the Gate of Heaven, and below is “an abyss hung with stars.” They are unable to enter. They muse over old friends, mothers, relations they might find beyond the gate, and when one discovers he has his old jimmy, they break the door open. It reveals only emptiness. In dismay they realize “there ain’t no heaven!” A great laugh echoes in the void, growing louder. Bitterly, one thief cries, “that’s like them! That’s very like them! Yes, they’d do that!” And, as the Curtain falls, the laughter resounds. It is clear that such a story, well beyond its imagery, is a most significant comment on Life, and what Dunsany saw as its meaninglessness. An excellent argument might also be made that this play, which is so very susceptible to gorgeous staging, is inherently related to the work of a later fellow-Irishman who saw man in an uncaring universe, and on the barest of theatrical stages. What might the imperious nobleman have thought if his work could be seen as proto-Samuel Beckett! His next play, King Argimēnēs and the Unknown Warrior, written and staged at the Abbey Theatre in 1911, a two-act play, although in length more like two scenes of a one-act play, establishes his use of imaginative names and settings, which would so strongly preoccupy and characterize his writing that some readers and theatregoers would accept nothing else. Today, his stagecraft may appear ingenuous, but perhaps the inability of an audience to accept pure fancy is due less to a weakness in Dunsany than to that “self-consciousness” he decried. Nevertheless, it is an imperfect play, dependent upon a deus ex machina mechanism, something which Dunsany employs elsewhere as well. Prior to his resumption of power, King Argimēnēs, reduced in defeat to hunger and slavery, is glad enough when he has bones to eat, and even ravenous for more.

Later, with the discovery of a great sword, he destroys his late successor’s idol and resumes power. The play does achieve emotional impact in conclusion. He momentarily forgets his new majesty when a servant of the just-deposed king appears. He is the “servant of the King’s dog,” he says, and states that the dog is dead. Impulsively King Argimēnēs and his men “savagely and hungrily” exclaim, “Bones!” It is a very human response of men who have known hunger and forget for a moment their recovered stature. Then, in an equally human gesture, the king recovers his dignity. “Let him be buried with the late king!” he proclaims. Dunsany understands the human mind. The servant of Argimēnēs, still unable to forget the hunger he had known, protests, “Majesty!” at the curtain. The Gods of the Mountain, written in 1911 and staged first in London, followed, a short play in three acts, and was an unqualified success. It was staged afterward in Buffalo, N.Y., and then Rochester, but, perhaps because it was the second of two plays on the program, concluding nearly at midnight, it was not a success. This was, however, redeemed in New York City, where it would become one of the Dunsany plays whose success we have measured. Indeed, as will be noted below, it was still being praised nearly half a century later by a major American critic. Here are all the basic elements of Dunsanian romance, an imaginary land, unknowable gods, exquisite language, together with a satisfactory and consistent plot, good characterization, and a powerful climax. Outside the wall of the city of Kongros, three beggars, Oogno, Thahn, and Ulf, are lamenting their hunger and poverty. Agmar, a legendary beggar even among his fellows, arrives with his servant, Slag, and an idea of how they might attain all they desire. They will pretend, together with two other beggars, to be the seven gods of the town, seven green jade idols on the mountain of Marma. Agmar obtains pieces of green cloth, which they will wear beneath their rags, to pretend they are the gods themselves in disguise. His own inherent dignity and the compliance of his cohorts enable him to convince the gullible townspeople that they are indeed “the gods of the mountain” come down, incarnate. They are treated with reverence, given thrones, and are enjoying their newly gained opulence. When they learn the jade gods have vanished from their mountain thrones, this appears to verify them as the gods indeed. Agmar, however, worries, and his fears are justified when the great stone gods enter the chamber of the beggar-gods. They point at each beggar in turn. When the citizenry enter the chamber, they discover that the seven have turned to stone. Dunsany offers the final irony, and it is indeed a worthy commentary on humankind. The people abase themselves, foreheads to the floor. “We have doubted them,” they whisper, “they have turned to stone because we have doubted them. . . . They were the true gods. . . . They were the true gods.” The play was internationally successful. In fact, as late as 1925, at the opening of the new, government-subsidized New Art Theatre in Rome, together with a play by Luigi Pirandello, Dunsany’s play was staged before Premier Mussolini, just recovered from an illness. He is reported as having “leaned from the balcony, intensely watching the actors, frequently smiling broadly, applauding . . . most vigorously.”[23] In a follow-

up article, the Italian critics were reported as “acknowledging [Dunsany’s] merits generously. ‘Mystifying and fabulous, lyrical and skeptical, puerile and cynical, you hear the mocking laughter of the author, who laughs at his own invention and at human credulity in general. Its beauty is in the power of its simple and sinewy design, in the pithy humanity of its details, above all, in the profound echoes which it rouses again and again from regions of mystery, full of secret summons.’”[24] In 1950, at an American revival of the play, Brooks Atkinson wrote: “[It was] a favorite of the little theatres a quarter of a century ago. Mischievously sardonic in point of view and impeccably polished in workmanship. It is a little gem of literary satire and a reminder that Lord Dunsany deserves something better than the neglect that has overwhelmed his work for years.”[25] Dunsany himself succinctly described his play, as well as his writing philosophy: In my plays I tell very simple stories—so simple that people of this complex age, being brought up in intricacies, even fail to understand them. . . . Some beggars, being hard up, pretend to be gods. Then they get all they want. But Destiny, Nemesis, the Gods, punish them by turning them into the very idols they desire to be. . . . First of all you have a simple tale told dramatically, and along that you have hung, without any deliberate intention of mine—so far as I know—a truth, not true to London only or to New York or to one municipal party but to the experience of man . . .[26] The Golden Doom, a one-act poetic prose drama of men and gods, is essentially without conflict. It nevertheless went on a tour of Russian cities after its London opening in 1912. The final of the five plays which made of New York a Dunsanian year was The Lost Silk Hat, a romantic one-act he wrote in 1913, first played in Manchester, England, that year and wholly without gods, jade or otherwise, as if to prove he could dash off a romantic comedy of love and manners as well as any one. A “caller” is reluctant to reenter a home in which he has left his hat, and requests help from a laborer, a clerk, and a poet. Each declines but with humorous reasoning. In the end he goes back himself. We had heard one person playing a piano, presumably a young lady with whom he may have had a quarrel (Dunsany coyly and shrewdly does not say), but now we hear two at the piano. It is very engaging, and its lighthearted banter is a style to which Dunsany would not return for some years. In 1916 Dunsany returned to his accepted métier with A Night at an Inn, a oneact somewhat fashioned after The Gods of the Mountain. Clearly his work seen in New York City had left such a favorable impression that its first performance was given here. Four sailors, thieves all, have stolen a ruby eye from an idol. When the priests fail to regain it, the great idol himself comes for it. It is an effective and eerie exercise in suspence. In that same year, Dunsany’s The Queen’s Enemies also premiered in New York City. It features his love for the exotic, being set in Egypt, but has a significance

beyond gods and suspense, for the fully rounded character of the young and uncertain queen. She has invited her enemies to dinner in a temple beneath the ground, near the Nile River. Continually she expresses her fear of them, plaintive and appealing in her anxiety. She is distressed when she notes they are hesitant about accepting their food, and has their slaves taste it first. She promises to restore the lands she had taken from them, taken by her captains without her knowledge, and all else they need so that she may sleep soundly again. They reassure her there is no ill will. However, still fearful, she leaves the room and too late they discover they are locked in. She releases the Nile into the chamber, killing them. When her slave asks whether she will sleep now, she responds, “Yes, I shall sleep sweetly.” One wonders about this young queen, whether she is really a timid, frightened girl, or a devious schemer. The charm and even triumph is that the author does not reveal it. Although Bierstadt dislikes this play, the character is in its very weakness a powerful and human image. Shakespeare did no less with his Prince of Norway. Theatre lovers of our generation will be touched to learn that in 1916 a very young Cathleen Nesbitt, in later decades to be a mainstay of Broadway theatre, acted the role of the young queen. The desert is a popular domain in Lord Dunsany’s theatre. It must have appealed for its everlasting and unchanging atmosphere, so much stronger than the men who cross it. In The Tents of the Arabs, first produced in 1916 in Detroit, a king foreswears power and position for the beauty of the desert and for love. Much of the writing is in the poetic manner of The Book of Wonder and Fifty-one Tales. The king speaks to Eznarza, his beloved: King: Who is this little child that is mightier than Time? Is it Love that is mightier? Eznarza: No, not love. King: If he conquer even love then none is mightier. Eznarza: He scares Love away with weak, white hairs and with wrinkles. Poor little Love. Poor Love. Time scares him away. King: What is this child of man that can conquer Time and that is braver than Love? Eznarza: Even Memory. The Laughter of the Gods, written at the same time, is yet another instance of unseen all-powerful Fate ruling men’s lives in the “jungle cities” of Thek or Barbul-elSharnak, as perhaps Dunsany’s theatre becomes predictably exotic. However, he has not spoken his final word at all. In 1921, in London, he offered a full-length serious comedy, If, which, unlike his other plays, appeared in book form following its stage premiere. Here he posited the possibility of returning to a crucial moment in one’s life, and living the next decade over in a single night. What might not then occur? If is an amalgam of the commonplace and the extravagantly exotic. A family man, a commuter, who is annoyed when he misses his train, is later given a magic trinket in gratitude by a rug-buying Arab customer. With it, he can actually relive the

experience, and, indeed, catch his train. This plot mechanism, deftly and quickly passed over by the author, will effect a major change in his life, as action proceeds from drab London to the untrammeled and colorful desert, from the banal to the romantic, complete with sheiks, Nubians, conjurers, and other denizens of the Arabian Nights world. The hero revenges his annoyance and plunges into wildly adventurous, satirical, and yet ingratiating folderol. Finally, he returns to his home and his sweet, if uncolorful wife, wretched, his life misspent, wasted, and apparently lost, when a fortuitous accident destroys the jewel which had so altered his life. He can only shake his head in bewilderment. Had he napped? “Did you, dear?” asks his wife. “I—I thought I’d caught that train,” he says. Whether it is allegory, in which an individual, surrogate for Everyman, is given the opportunity to relive his life from one crucial moment, or simply a wildly imaginative and entertaining story, If is silly fun. However, on yet another level, it can be considered Shavian, an unexpected element we shall consider shortly. The production in New York City was at the Little Theatre on Broadway itself, in October 1927, produced and performed by The Actors-Managers, the new name for the old Neighborhood Playhouse troupe on Grand Street in downtown Manhattan, which had premiered Dunsany a dozen years before with such great success. Perhaps they hoped for that magic again. Initially, Brooks Atkinson, critic for the New York Times, was unimpressed. “Lord Dunsany has tinted it with the strange, dark fantasy that distinguishes all his work. It is pleasant in tone and imaginative in fable; but it is too tenuous for all that. . . . One surrenders more willingly to the idea of If than to its expression behind the footlights. . . . In spite of its pleasantness, [it] inclines toward meagerness of creative invention.”[27] Several days later, he discussed it again, with greater freedom than the haste of a review allowed. Significantly, he compares Dunsany with his great contemporary, Bernard Shaw. He finds him “less prepossessing; he lacks the brittleness of intellect essential to comic iconoclasm.” Nevertheless, the critic’s subsequent précis of the play does at least indicate how the hero, at wit’s end to control his Persian demesne, assorted Arabs, and even a traveling Englishwoman, is related to a characteristic harried Shavian hero, whether Jack Tanner of Man and Superman, or Dick Dudgeon of The Devil’s Disciple. In the midst of fantasy, the essentially provincial and unflappable attitude of the British mind remains intact and deadpan, enhancing the comic aspects of the exaggeration. Dunsany, the quintessential fantasist, whose script even offers an evocative and lovely poem between the second and third acts of the book, betrays a fine sense of humor and the absurd. Thus, Hussein, a desert Arab, who is described as “not unlike Bluebeard,” seeks gold from John Beal, the hero. After bringing his gods Beal’s gold, he explains, “I shall be free of my debt before all gods.” Beal tells him, “But not before me. I am English. And we are greater than gods.” His brother Archie, who has appeared, complete with bowler in the desert, asks, “What’s that, Johnny?” Beal responds, “He won’t pay, but

I told him we’re English and that they’re greater than all his bronze gods.” When he exclaims in horror to Miralda, the Englishwoman, that the desert priests “knife these people in the throat, boys and girls, and then acolytes lift them up and the blood runs down,” she merely says, “I think it is best to leave religion to the priests. They understand that kind of thing.” Later, when Beal seeks a chaperone for Miralda, he asks her if she won’t mind their being black. She answers, “No, I shan’t mind. They can’t be worse than white ones.” Two enormous Nubians enter, with peacock fans and scimitars. Beal is disturbed. “Men may not guard a lady’s door.” The two, Bazzalol and Thoothobaba, smile “ingratiatingly” and bow. “We are not men,” they say. And, the playwright adds, in a script note, six and a half years pass before the next scene. Atkinson continues his latter discussion: “In design it represents Dunsany again giving the lie to time and space by winging his way on the magic carpet from the tight little island to an unmapped spot in the mountains of Persia. . . . Dunsany’s gift for imaginative flights of fancy—a rare element in this soft-coal civilization—does not fail him in the current comedy.” However, he concludes, “being more akin to poet than ironist, Dunsany’s wit seems brighter on the pages of the text than it does on the lips of actors. Alas, Dunsany is too much the gentleman to wear the jester’s motley comfortably, and If emerges as a thin, trickling garden party diversion.”[28] * * * If is indeed not a Man and Superman, but it is close to such a play as Shaw’s The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet, nothing less than a Western by Shaw with a cowboy hero who worries that he might be accused of sentiment even as he is waiting to be hung as a horse thief. As described above, If, and Dunsany, have the courage to risk the accusation of similar illogic, naïveté, or downright foolishness. Dunsany does not follow the rules of dramatic caution, safely ensconced in a drawing room, but part of the humor lies in the efforts of his heroes to do just that. Perhaps, beneath his evening wear, the Irish peer did wear jester’s motley. The critic might well have noted that even the greatest early naturalistic playwright, Henrik Ibsen, experimented with an expressionistic and poetic drama not unlike If. His Peer Gynt, while it lacks humor, freely employs fantasy and color for his ends; perhaps significantly, it also is rarely performed. As if to confirm his ability to write drawing-room and Shavian comedy, in 1928 Dunsany published Seven Modern Comedies, all one-acts. Several are fantasy; one is a farcical satire of both Russian tragedy and Communism; others, however, are unabashed comedies of manner. The modern heroine of Atalanta in Wimbledon, Marjorie Dawk, like the fabled athlete, is unready for marriage and is only willing to marry if someone defeats her in a sport. The sport is not Wimbledon’s famous tennis but the more humble ping-pong. It is a trifle, but a winning one. The Journey of the Soul is an amusing confection about a theatrical company performing a pompous play of that name. In The Hopeless Passion of Mr. Bunyon, a meek store-worker is hopelessly in love with a mannequin. When he discovers it is a real woman, to the

shop-manager’s consternation, they walk off together. The manager vows to buy a real wax figure the next time. The story is a pleasant precursor to John Collier’s “Evening Primrose,” about individuals who pretend to be mannequins by day and live in the shop at night. A final play, The Jest of Hāhālābā, concerns a magical ability to foretell the future, but its predictions are disbelieved. Many later fantasy and science fiction tales are prefigured in this amiable little play. Typical of the small regional productions was a festival in Starkville, Miss., which offered revivals of A Night at an Inn along with Ferenc Molnar and two other playwrights. An unnamed critic found the Dunsany “a hard pill to swallow,”[29] not the less inasmuch as the cockney accents of the actors soon verged into their native Southern. No doubt, other, unrecorded performances of this and others of Dunsany’s one-acts have been offered by small companies. Several of his later full-length plays received performances, however. Written in his maturity (he was born in 1878), Lord Adrian, published in 1933, was staged in London at the Gate Theatre, in 1937. In it, Dunsany is expressing his love of nature, as well as his detestation of what man had done to the earth. Reverting again to a handy deus ex machina, he rejuvenates an elderly duke by injection of monkey glands (a popular notion of the period). He marries but the resultant son eventually reverts to his animal blood and is killed. It was described by an unnamed critic on the London Times as an opportunity to satirize one of the more fatuous practices of today, rejuvenation. “The play is constructed with great dexterity, but [is] less satisfying as satire than as fantasy . . . with a curious poverty of invention . . . what would seem in a less experienced playwright the prolixity of a novice.”[30] While the satire may have been less of the “practice” than of man’s mishandling of natural resources and lack of sympathy for nature, the play is mechanical and predictable. At an age somewhat less than that of Shaw when he was able to produce his masterpiece, Saint Joan, Dunsany’s play was limp. It did nothing to restore his career. However, he had not lost his interest in playwriting, for in 1937 he published another collection of one-act plays, Plays for Earth and Air. Unlike earlier collections, there was no American edition. However, the book was unique in that for the only time Dunsany adapted three of his short stories into plays. They were Golden Dragon City, which had appeared as “The Wonderful Window” in The Book of Wonder (1912), The Bureau du Change, from “The Bureau d’Echange de Maux” in The Last Book of Wonder (1916), and The Use of Man, from an otherwise uncollected tale with the same title in Harper’s Bazaar, August 1931. The Times Index offers no reviews of these or any of the other seven plays in the collection; however, a number of them were indeed performed, and this explains Dunsany’s title: four of the plays at the time of printing were “for earth,” i.e., the stage; six were written for radio. Inevitably one of the former, the author explains in a preface, was also done “on the air” and one of the latter on both; two remained unperformed. The introduction of his art to radio resulted in a new approach by Dunsany. In his preface he presciently states, in 1937, that “Probably the future of plays for the air

lies with television. At present every character has to be slightly exaggerated, so that the audience shall have no doubt as to who is speaking; even each voice has to be rather unusual, so that it cannot be mistaken for any other voice in the cast. When the audience can see each actor, none of these things will be necessary.” And, sounding very much like the pay-television prophets of decades later, he concludes, “Radio plays may even compete with the theatres then; or rather the arm-chair and the fire from which such plays may be watched will compete with the best seat of any theatre in the world.” Dunsany’s adaptations are no mere slavish print-to-script. They are truly independently conceived playlets. The Use of Man remains quite similar in plot, but for the radio version, where in fact costume was of no concern, Dunsany prescribed fanciful and suggestive dress, at least in description, as though for television. It was, of course, a technique to justify animal creatures with human voices, but how elegantly he describes them! The animals are being called upon to see whether they will justify the continuance of Man upon the earth, when he can offer no such justification for himself. The Dog alone is enthusiastic for him. One after another, the animals find no use for Man. The Pig is a “gentleman with fierce moustaches.” The “very aristocratic gentleman, holding his head up” is the Stag. “The gentleman in the gold trousers” is the Bee, who also speaks “in a musical, poetical voice.” The Indian Elephant is “the large gentleman in the frock coat” while another with “a very high forehead” is the African elephant. In the end, introduced with sounds of a “silver trumpet,” the Mosquito alone supports man. Ironically, his use for man is that “he is my food . . . my lovely food.” The sole man who has represented mankind, appropriately chastened, now has second thoughts about hunting and killing animals. The Bureau de Change goes further. Whereas the story, in which the customers of a Satanic storekeeper in an obscure shop exchange “evils” (toothache, seasickness, fear of heights, etc.) are unnamed and abstracted, they are fully and individually realized with names and characteristics in the play. At the ending of the story the narrator has exchanged an evil, but the play concludes differently, as he seeks no new evil at all. “What?” asks Le Patron, the devious shopkeeper, “No business at all for my trouble?” Jerry, the protagonist, wiser and more cautious now after watching the others, heads for the door. “No, not tonight, thank you,” he says, and we hear the door close. The adaptation of “The Wonderful Window” into a radio play, the broadest of all, is perhaps indicative of the author’s attitude toward the medium. The original story is a magical and pure early Dunsanian fantasy of exotic beauty seen only though a glass pane placed on a wall and the subsequent pain of its loss. The play, with the same materials, is transformed to a comic account in modern London. Bill, the very ordinary hero, his plain-Jane girlfriend, and his landlady, suspicious of such mysterious Arabs as sold Bill the window, speak commonplace speeches, and view with suspicion the “Golden Dragon City” seen through the window. Although innocent, funny, and likeable, the play reads like a good-natured parody of Dunsany’s earlier phase. At the end, the window smashed, the exotic world glimpsed through it gone forever, the hero

says, “it’s all gone.” His girlfriend echoes, “All gone, Golden Dragon City.” And his practical landlady says, not without some satisfaction, “Well, I should never have known what to have done with it.” These later plays indicate the author’s richly comic potential, seeing people as lovable and foolish, and performed half a century later, should suffer no diminution through time and change. There would be one final performance of a major serious Dunsany play. His story of the world-conquering hero Alexander was written in 1912, but appeared in book form, a full-length play, along with three “small” plays, in 1925. It was staged in London in 1938, and the New York Times quoted an unnamed critic of the Daily Telegraph who quickly dismissed it. “There is nothing heroic or tragic about this Alexander,” he wrote, “who, as the play progresses, becomes less and less the giant that the author proclaims him. . . . With all its color and pageantry and all the artistic integrity that has gone into its writing, the play is thin and unsatisfying.”[31] A week later, A. V. Cookman, quoted from London, noted, however, that “the dialogue throughout is quietly persuasive [with] tragic irony.”[32] In retrospect, the play appears far stronger than either of these writers would grant. A modern reading suggests that its failure owed more to a weak production despite the “color and pageantry,” than the play itself. Alexander is portrayed as human, naive even, with fallibilities, too ready to succumb to flattery, or to oblige a friend, at his own cost. He remains, however, consistent and credible. He dismisses his adviser, the god Apollo, convinced by the sophistry of his false advisers that he is himself a god. This is a hero with flaws. Yet his aims are bold. Although the play sacrifices tension by having no battle or even preparation for battle, he is ambitious. In Dunsany’s poetic summation of the hero’s ambition, Alexander looks wistfully at the stars. “There was a time when every battle won, when every new horizon of the earth was joy and triumph. Now I have seen the stars. . . . They are so many: great multitudes that rise and wheel and set and know not Alexander.” His Alexander would conquer the stars! There are still the ends of the earth and he remains the leader. “The world is still unconquered,” he says, “but I have sent Niarchos down its coasts to search it out. Then we will conquer it all.” His adviser asks, “All? ’Tis a large world, Alexander.” Undaunted, he responds, “A large world, yes. And full of little men. Have larger dreams, Perdiccas. The world’s small enough. There’s room for many of them in my dreams.” He is asked in astonishment, “Many worlds?” He is firm. “Yes, many worlds. And were there more, why, I would conquer more.” This Alexander would conquer his weaknesses too. The Queen of the Amazons alone is honest with him, and he hints that a marriage between them could be powerful. She rejects it, saying she cannot marry, and suggests he pursue “the lovely art of war.” They parry in words, the known conqueror, the intensely proud woman, and it is not vapid dialogue. At last he goes off to conquer India, but in time he sickens and dies. Here too may lie a weakness, for he dies at the end of Act III, so that Act IV must be anticlimax. It is nevertheless

moving. The Queen returns to Babylon to claim from his general “one of the wonders of the world.” He assumes it is the ruined hanging gardens. She interrupts him. “Give up to me,” she says, “the body of Alexander. . . . He was scarce like to one of the sons of men, but like to the sons of men he is now dead.” Dunsany lived another twenty years, and would no longer be occupied with playwriting. His plays were perhaps anachronisms in his own time, bucking the tide of naturalism. Poetic, fantastic, without profanity, sex or obscenity, with no sensation, no overt violence. They as often had wit as they had beauty. If his full-length plays appear naively innocent or only period pieces in our own era, appropriate staging might overcome this. The theatre is continually rediscovering itself in this manner, and the surprising success of what were considered lesser pieces by Shaw and Wilde could bear dividends with the Irish peer. His short plays might also bear revival, and not merely as delightful curios of a neglected past. Cheezo is an excellent satire of greed and cupidity, in the person of a manufacturer of products which sell by virtue of potent advertising rather than quality. Its clergy and nouveau riche alike are worthy of a Wilde. If Shakespeare Lived Today is as delightfully diffident and amusing as a Barrie with his sentiment put aside. The Pumpkin is a hilarious send-up, a straightfaced reductio ad absurdum of dimly brained farmers who know a little but not enough of science, fearing the end of the world from a large pumpkin. The boundaries of the stage are limitless. Dunsany’s fantasies, once jewels of the theatre, together with his dramas and comedies, can and should still charm. They deserve to find a place in repertory for a discerning and appreciative audience.

THE PLAYS OF LORD DUNSANY Five Plays. London: Grant Richards, 1914. Boston: Little, Brown, 1916. [Contains: The Gods of the Mountain; The Golden Doom; King Argimēnēs and the Unknown Warrior; The Glittering Gate; The Lost Silk Hat.] Plays of Gods and Men. Dublin: Talbot Press, 1917. Boston: John W. Luce & Co., 1917. [Contains: The Laughter of the Gods; The Queen’s Enemies; The Tents of the Arabs; A Night at an Inn.] If. London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1921. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1922. Plays of Near and Far. London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1922. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1923. [Contains: The Compromise of the King of the Golden Isles; The Flight of the Queen; Cheezo; A Good Bargain; If Shakespeare Lived Today; Fame and the Poet.] Alexander and Three Small Plays. London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1925. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1926. [Contains: Alexander; The Old King’s Tale; The Evil Kettle; The Amusements of Khan Kharuda.] Seven Modern Comedies. London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1928. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1929. [Contains: Atalanta in Wimbledon; The Raffle; The Journey of the Soul; In Holy Russia; His Sainted Grandmother; The Hopeless Passion of Mr. Bunyon; The Jest of Hāhālābā.]

The Old Folk of the Centuries. London: Elkin Mathews & Marrott, 1930. Lord Adrian. Waltham Saint Lawrence: Golden Cockerel Press, 1933. Plays for Earth and Air. London: William Heinemann, 1937. [Contains: Fame Comes Late; A Matter of Honour; Mr. Sliggen’s Hour; The Pumpkin; The Use of Man; The Bureau de Change; The Seventh Symphony; Golden Dragon City; Time’s Joke; Atmospherics.] Many of the plays appeared as well in acting editions, individually. The titles above are all out of print, but are not scarce in various reprint editions. This essay is a complete revision from a version which appeared in Ibid 22 (1978). I wish to express my appreciation for his assistance to S. T. Joshi.

NOTES 1. Christian Science Monitor, December 10, 1912, reprinting an unnamed British critic and newspaper. 2. Smart Set, July 1917. 3. Edward Hale Bierstadt, Dunsany the Dramatist (Boston: Little, Brown, 1917), 9. 4. S. T. Joshi and Darrell Schweitzer, Lord Dunsany: A Bibliography (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1993), vii. 5. The scrapbook is in the collection of The New York Public Library of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, New York. A second scrapbook of the era, which only peripherally concerns Dunsany’s work, is the R. Locke collection. The pages are good stiff board, but the clippings, probably pasted on belatedly, are in generally poor condition. They resemble the Dead Sea Scroll remnants, and if not quite as significant are interesting for themselves. They also contain numerous large photographs of actors in costume, and are in good condition. 6. Christian Science Monitor, December 27, 1916. Critic unattributed. 7. March 1917. The clipping, in Walker’s scrapbook, bears no further identification and the French language name is written across it by hand in ink. 8. Columbus Dispatch, February 4, 1917. Unattributed, syndicated. 9. New York Globe and Commercial Advertiser, February 5, 1919. No attribution. 10. John Corbin in the New York Times, January 16, 1919. On January 26, he wrote a lengthy article, in which he added that Dunsany “commanded profound admiration.” 11. Clayton Hamilton, writing in Vogue, February 1919. 12. Frank Wright Tuttle, writing in Vanity Fair, March 1919. 13. Burns Mantle writing in the Evening Mail, January 16, 1919. 14. Heywood Broun, writing in the New York Tribune, January 16, 1919. 15. George Jean Nathan, quoted from syndication by the St. Paul [MN] Press, March 23, 1919. 16. Alan Dale writing in the New York American, January 18, 1919. 17. Jolo writing in Variety, January 24, 1919. 18. Edward Hale Bierstadt writing in Theatre Arts Magazine, July 1919.

19. Margaret McElroy writing in Drama, November 1919. 20. The unsigned article appeared in the New York Times Magazine, October 26, 1919. 21. Letter to Mrs. Emma Garrett Boyd, cited in Bierstadt, Dunsany the Dramatist, 134–36. 22. “Romance and the Modern Stage,” National Review (July 1911); cited in Bierstadt, 116. 23. The New York Times Theater Reviews (New York: The New York Times and Arno Press, 1970). This quotation is from the New York Times, April 4, 1925. All quotations from the New York Times are from photo-reprints in The New York Times Theatre Reviews volumes, which are in two series, the first commencing with reviews from 1870 to 1919, plus an index volume, and a second series with reviews from 1920 through 1970, indexed in one volume. Plays are reviewed in volumes each of which includes several years of reviews and articles. Later volumes are annual, each containing its own index. I have seen the index for 1870–1919 as well as a compilation of reviews of plays from 1875 to 1885, too early of course for Dunsany’s work. However, I have been unable to find the succeeding volume, 1886–1919, for which the index at least lists entries, at any library New York or elsewhere, nor at the offices of the New York Times. The reviews quoted from the scrapbooks are the actual clippings. 24. Ibid., April 26, 1925. 25. Ibid., May 25, 1950. 26. Bierstadt, Dunsany the Dramatist, 135. 27. New York Times, October 26, 1927. 28. Ibid., October 30, 1927. 29. Ibid., May 10, 1930. 30. Ibid., April 15, 1937. 31. Ibid., August 5, 1938. 32. Ibid., August 14, 1938.

V

On Individual Works

Chapter 19

A Tory Young Hopeful Edward Thomas The Gods of Pegāna, by Lord Dunsany, with Illustrations in photogravure by S. Sime. London, Elkin Mathews, 6s. net. Lord Dunsany calls his book the faith of certain islands in the Central Sea, “whose waters are bounded by no shore and where no ships come”; and it is cynical of him to suppose that such happy persons should yet be infected with the wisdom of the known world. But he has really written a serious parody of the ordinary theogony and mythology. A bold and uncommon thing to do; and the result has two great merits in a high degree. In the first place, his gods are just as probable and sublime and painfully amusing as any others, and it is no easy task to rival the laborious dreams of ages. In the second place, some of the details of his creation are beautiful in themselves, and were the scheme into which they are fitted far less complete, they would be enough to attract much admiration to the book. This imaginary Olympus is neither quite consistent nor quite conceivable, and a love of beauty has sometimes driven our hardy and graceful theologian into some irrelevant pages for which we owe him much gratitude. There are many gods in Pegāna, many small gods to whom men pray, and one large god, Mana-Yood-Sushai, who made them all: When Mana-Yood-Sushai had made the gods and Skarl, Skarl made a drum, and began to beat upon it that he might drum for ever. Then because he was weary after the making of the gods, and because of the drumming of Skarl, did ManaYood-Sushai grow weary and fall asleep. And there fell a hush upon the gods when they saw that Mana rested, and there was silence in Pegāna, save for the drumming of Skarl. Skarl sitteth upon the mist before the feet of Mana-Yood-Sushai, above the gods of Pegāna, and there he beateth his drum. Some say that the Worlds and the Suns are but the echoes of the drumming of Skarl, and others say that they be dreams that arise in the mind of Mana because of the drumming of Skarl, as one may dream whose rest is troubled by sound of song; but none knoweth, for who hath heard the voice of Mana-Yood-Sushai, or who hath seen his drummer? In the end Mana will be awakened, and will wave his hand lightly, and there shall be gods no more; and even he is not master of “the thing that is neither god nor beast,” who is always turning over the pages of a book until the end, when gods and worlds and books shall cease. This is the manner of the book. Alongside of the old-fashioned theogony and creation, which are managed with

much humorous dignity, it is delightful to watch Lord Dunsany’s use of the most modern sentiments. For example, in the account of the making of the worlds, he tells us that, after the gods had made a comet “to seek” and a moon “to regard,” they said: We have made worlds and suns, and one to seek and another to regard, let us now make one to wonder. And that made Earth to wonder. There is, too, a pretty description of the River of Silence that flows from Pegāna through the sky, and of a ship in which a god sails thereon: Her timbers were olden dreams dreamed long ago, and poets’ fancies made her tall, straight masts, and her rigging was wrought out of the people’s hope. Upon her deck were rowers with dream-made oars, and the rowers were the people of men’s fancies, and princes of old story and people who had died, and people who had never been. . . . And all they that be weary of the sound of cities and very tired of clamour creep down in the night-time to Yoharneth Lahai’s ship, and going aboard it, among the dreams and fancies of old time, be down upon the deck. The god Roon, the god of going, is very fine. He makes the rivers leave the hills, and the winds to move. After men have heard his footfall, they never again know comfort and abiding. There are home gods, too—a god to stroke the cat, a god of glowing embers, and— Gabim is the god of broken things, who sitteth behind the house to lament the things that are cast away. And then he sitteth lamenting the broken things until the worlds be ended, or until someone cometh to mend the broken things. Or sometimes he sitteth by the river’s edge to lament the forgotten things that drift upon it. Many of the little details are wonderfully done; for example, the gods “drive the thunder to his pasture upon the mountain Aghrinaun”; and a prophet says that dead men go to Pegāna, and that— beside the Flowers of Pegāna there shall have climbed by then until it hath reached to Pegāna the rose that clambered about the house where thou wast born. There has been no such big and delicate fancy as this book for many years.

Chapter 20

Sleep’s Painted Scene William Rose Benét Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley. By Lord Dunsany. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1922. Here for the first time we have the author of “A Dreamer’s Tales” and “The Sword of Welleran” in a long sustained story. The story is given us in Twelve Chronicles, instead of chapters. Through it wander Don Rodriguez and his servant Morano, a new Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, lacking Cervantes’s great theme and deep social satire. In brief, fantastically poetic prose, in plays queer and startling, Dunsany has already revealed to us a gift unique in his day and generation. In this longer effort are high lights that charm and dazzle, and yet the last quarter of the book drags a little. Most memorable to me is the fourth chronicle, “How He Came to the Mountains of the Sun,” and the sixth, “How He Sang to His Mandolin and What Came of His Singing.” The first of these involves a dizzy flight of imagination, carried off with great gusto; the second is delicious in its unfolding of the lengths to which Morano carried his conception, of loyalty. One likes Morano’s conception of loyalty even better than Don Rodriguez’s conception of fair play. These two chronicles, of the dozen, may be taken as exemplifying Lord Dunsany’s greatest gifts, that of bizarre invention and that of deep humor which assumes a gravity it does not feel. His philosophy has always seemed to be that nothing in the world of actuality is of much interest in comparison with the astounding things that happen in the world around the corner, the world of dream, the world into which the most workaday mind may stumble in a mad moment. Dunsany has said shrewd things about life, he has spoken in not a few memorable parables, but he prefers above all things simply to blow his dreams like bubbles and admire their iridescence. For certain moods, when one wants no more of the world, there is no writer like him. He demands nothing of the reader but a mood receptive to the narcotizing fumes of fantasy. The picaresque progress of Don Rodriguez through a Spain that is only the Spain of the improbable castles we build of delight and desire need not be followed here with the assiduity of the henchmen of Messrs. Thos. Cook & Son. The reviewer will not be your cicerone. The author himself is that more properly. “Don Rodriguez” is a book written in an accomplished style and the style is half of the story. Certainly no bald statement of the reviewer’s could convey the poppied atmosphere that is created. Dunsany is a master at sending a cold chill down the spine in a brief sentence. He is also a master at elfish asides. All I shall tell you about the story, therefore, is that Don Rodriguez was in search of wars, being a Spanish grandee of haughty pride and keen temper. He was, furthermore, the soul of romance. So he carried both a sword and a mandolin. The war he found reminds me inevitably of the

knights’ battle in “Through the Looking Glass.” It is a peculiar phenomenon, the appearance of a Dunsany in an age of such materialism as ours. It is heartening to all poets, however, to have witnessed his appearance and to continue to witness the unflagging flight of his peculiar fancy. To the stage of our day his plays have brought a new charm, a wholly original bizarrerie; to the literature of our day his prose has added a truer poetry than much of the poetry that has been written. Being a poet primarily, in whatever form he happens to cast his thought, he has failed somewhat at sustaining one long story through over three hundred pages. For he was never an epic poet, never even an epic poet of Fairyland. His best vehicle is the short play, his next best the short excursion—which cannot exactly be called a story—in prose. In the present long narrative the brilliance of the dyes fades somewhat from his moth-winged fancy before he is through. Nevertheless, there are enough delightful things in this volume to make it a book worth buying. And there is a distinction in tone that makes anything Dunsany writes worth putting up on the favorite shelf. He is a genius in his own particular vein.

Chapter 21

The Archetypes of Romance and The King of Elfland’s Daughter Faye Ringel The Gothic novels of the late eighteenth century as well as the lighter fantastic fiction of William Morris and George MacDonald in the nineteenth century looked for inspiration to the same source: the medieval tales of courtly love and chivalric adventure composed in the vernacular languages of Western Europe, and for this called “romances.” Lord Dunsany follows Morris and MacDonald in the process of refashioning medieval romance and traditional fairy tale into novels designed for adult readers. The King of Elfland’s Daughter, published in 1924, looks backward toward a fantastic vision of the Middle Ages and forward to the longing of man (modern and medieval) for escape to the Otherworld. The medieval romance tradition began in the twelfth century with verse narratives of the deeds of Arthur and his knights; by the fifteenth century, these narratives were written in prose. It was reading such novels of chivalry as Amadis de Gaula and its infinite sequels that sent the impoverished nobleman Alonso Quijana mad and transformed him into the knight-errant Don Quixote de la Mancha. Such an intimate relationship between the romance and its reader continues today among readers of the descendant of medieval romance—the modern fantasy novel. One of the few articles to look systematically at Dunsany’s novel, Cantrell’s “British Fairy Tradition in The King of Elfland’s Daughter,”[1] draws on the authoritative work of folklorist Katherine Briggs, whose collections were published a half century after the novel appeared; but Cantrell makes no claim that these instances of fairy folklore from throughout the British Isles were indeed Lord Dunsany’s sources. Similarly, I do not claim to have discovered a particular medieval romance antecedent for The King of Elfland’s Daughter, but rather to speak of the ways in which the novel exemplifies the mode of romance. Archetypal readings of literature, especially of romance and the fantastic, have their origin in the line of folklorists that began with the Brothers Grimm and continued through J. G. Frazer, the Cambridge School of anthropologists, and Carl Jung. In 1949, Joseph Campbell synthesized these influences and others to set forth an archetypal pattern of the life and adventures of heroes from all the world’s mythology and literature, for which he borrowed James Joyce’s term “the monomyth.”[2] The pattern of the monomyth mirrors the rites of passage enacted by many cultures to mark the coming of age of a young man. In Campbell’s formulation, the hero is summoned forth from a secure place to adventure in an unknown world; in that Otherworld, trials and triumphs await; the quest gained, the ordeal survived, the hero returns with his consciousness transformed, and “the boon that he brings restores the world.”[3] This study of The King of Elfland’s Daughter takes its organization from the pattern of the monomyth.

There is no doubting Lord Dunsany’s inclination toward tales of chivalry and deeds of errantry. According to S. T. Joshi, “The word ‘romance’ was, for Dunsany, a code word for imagination, specifically the fantastic imagination.”[4] Dunsany also employs “romance” to epitomize the appeal of ancient and medieval history, literature, and art to poets and readers alike. “Romance” for Dunsany always contrasts with modernity in general and modern warfare in particular, with an emphasis upon what has been lost. In the essay “Nowadays,” written in 1912 but republished as a chapbook after the Great War, Dunsany excoriates modern society: governments, cities, advertising, and materialism, and particularly the notion that “poetry is dead.” He says that those who subscribe to this belief “miss the meaning lurking behind common things, like elves hiding in flowers; it is to beat one’s hand all day against the gates of Fairyland, and to find that they are shut and the country empty and its kings gone hence.”[5] Here he employs the images he will return to in The King of Elfland’s Daughter when Alveric seeks in vain to return to Elfland. In the essays collected in Unhappy Far-Off Things, Dunsany describes the ruinous effects of the Great War in similar terms to those he uses in the novel to evoke the ruin left behind when Elfland had receded from the human world: Thousands of ordinary things, that never seemed as though they would ever peer at us over chasms of time, out of another age, utterly far off, irrevocably removed from our ways and days. They are gone, those times, gone like the Dinosaur, gone with bows and arrows and the old knightlier days. . . . it is not ruin but rubbish that covers the ground here and spreads its untidy flood for hundreds and hundreds of miles.[6] In The King of Elfland’s Daughter, Alveric quests through the dreary plain from which Elfland has receded like the ebbing tide; first he discovers “those little forsaken things that had been lost from his childhood. . . . Old tunes, old songs, old voices,”[7] but gradually all is replaced with featureless, menacing rocks. The memories have faded, like the “old knightlier days.” Another of Dunsany’s wartime pieces, “The Splendid Traveller,” portrays an English airman as a knightly adventurer. This was a commonplace of the period, but it shows that Dunsany had medieval romance on his mind even at the height of the Great War: “That beautiful evening . . . that adventurer coming home in the cold, happening all, happening all together, revealed . . . that we live in such a period of romance as the troubadours would have envied.”[8] It is clear that these words come from a propaganda piece, for Dunsany would never have otherwise conceded that modern civilization could be hospitable to romantic adventure or the troubadours who created the medieval romance. In his first postwar fantasy novel, Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley (1922), in many ways an homage to Don Quixote, Dunsany’s hero is introduced with the very terms Joseph Campbell would later use to define the hero’s journey: “so far

from his father’s valleys, as he stands upon the threshold of romance.”[9] Don Rodriguez is motivated to continue upon his errant adventures because, “beyond the frontier of Spain he believed there lay the dim, desired country of romance where roads were long no more and no rain fell.”[10] The relationship between that “dim, desired country of romance” and Dunsany’s primary world is difficult to determine because the very nature of the romance mode places it at two removes from the contemporary world of its writer—and its readers. It is removed by the aesthetic distance produced by any literary work, but even more so by the quality of nostalgia and yearning for a Golden Age that characterizes romance. This nostalgia seems to be an emotion not necessarily linked to specific conditions in the author’s primary world, because so many different sets of “realworld” conditions have evoked the same sort of nostalgic yearning. The romance mode has flourished in many periods of history, coexisting with modes of irony and naturalism—just as all three may be found in Lord Dunsany’s oeuvre. Rather than focusing primarily on the hero’s coming of age, though its two heroes do participate in symbolic rites of passage, bride-quest, and hunting, The King of Elfland’s Daughter concerns itself more with the contrast of the two worlds, Elfland and the human world of Erl, and the shifting twilight border between. Erl is a small, secure, sleepy kingdom, akin to William Morris’s towns and villages and J. R. R. Tolkien’s Shire of the hobbits, in which ordinary mortals live, protected from dangers and strangeness by forces they may not understand. John Clute in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy refers to such realms as “polders,” after the Low Country lands reclaimed from the sea by dykes. Dunsany’s kingdom of Erl seems entirely mundane, yet the Otherworld is close indeed: “Now the Vale of Erl is very near to the border beyond which there is none of the fields we know” (KED 10). Precisely because of that nearness, there is a willed ignorance among the inhabitants. Those who dwell on the boundaries of Elfland refuse to look eastward: they keep silent about such unearthly matters. Nevertheless, for there to be a story, there must be movement. Someone from Inside must go Out, or something from Outside must intrude, breach the dykes protecting the polder from the tides of strangeness, and summon forth the hero. The King of Elfland’s Daughter incarnates both of these movements. The young King Alveric leaves Erl and enters Elfland to seek the king’s daughter as his bride, while later, his son Orion hunts the unicorn that has strayed into what Dunsany refers to memorably as “the fields we know.” Dunsany loves both sides of the twilight border: he gives Earth and Elfland each its due. When King Alveric first crosses the boundary, like Gawain in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, he walks from fairness not into horror but into fairness: “in the place of the beauty of May were the wonders and splendours of Elfland” (KED 14). Dunsany’s Elfland is a world Outside that appears threatening only when viewed from the perspective of the human world. In this the twentieth-century romance also recalls the fourteenth-century one, for in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight the menace of the giant Bercilak dissolved when the human hero entered his domain. Bercilak’s

castle and household, though set in avowed opposition to King Arthur’s court, are beautiful, warm, and secure while Gawain dwells within their world. The King of Elfland’s Daughter deals with the effects of crossing the twilight barrier into that Otherworld; once he has crossed, the hero is changed irreparably, yet he seems to be unaware of this because he is within the governance of that Otherworld. There was perhaps less mystery here than on our side of the boundary of twilight; for nothing lurked or seemed to lurk behind great boles of oak . . . nothing haunted deep woods; whatever might possibly lurk was clearly there to be seen, whatever strangeness might be was spread in full sight of the traveler, whatever might haunt deep woods lived here in the open day. (KED 15) Having been summoned, and having left the secure Center, the hero’s path is a series of adventures—encounters with nature and wild beasts, with the equally dangerous “eternal feminine,” with helpers, guardians, and adversaries. The iconic adventure of the hero is monster-slaying. Unlike the knights-errant of the Arthurian romances, the heroes of The King of Elfland’s Daughter never encounter and overcome adversaries in human form: the lunatics are able to restrain their former King Alveric, and the King of Elfland himself proceeds only by indirection, withdrawing the borders of Elfland from the determined wanderers. Contemporary reputation is the main spur to action for the heroes of medieval romance: Lord Dunsany’s heroes seem more inner-directed—they are lured by the very existence of the Otherworld, like Orion who hears Tennyson’s horns of Elfland faintly blowing at sunset each day. True, King Alveric is launched on his quest by—of all unlikely calls to adventure!—the request of an exceedingly mundane Parliament that longs to be ruled by a magical lord. But his true heroic quest, to win back Lirazel by finding and reentering Elfland, comes from within his own heart. Perhaps the most famous role of the hero in world mythology is that of monsterslayer. Named for the mighty hunter of Greek myth whose prowess earned him a place in the heavens, Orion fits this archetype only if we consider the unicorn to be a monster. Foreign as this concept might be to the modern reader, for the medieval audience the unicorn was a monster, in the sense of something beyond the normal, a miraculous “showing-forth” of God’s power in the world. In Dunsany’s novel, the unicorn is the emblem of faerie intruding into the mundane, evoking awe, reverence, fear—and denial on the part of the “old men without magic.” Medieval legends of the unicorn are mainly about hunting: whether tricking the unicorn with a virgin as bait, or coursing it with hounds, as Orion does in The King of Elfland’s Daughter. The early sixteenth-century tapestries depicting the Hunt of the Unicorn—including its bloody demise—hang now in The Cloisters in Manhattan. One fragment shows a hound seeming to smile as it licks the blood from the unicorn’s neck.[11] As Dunsany puts it, Orion’s hounds are enchanted and reinvigorated when allowed to feed from “the wonderful carcase” of the unicorn, with its “fabulous blood” (KED 131). Most overviews of Dunsany’s work tend to echo Darrell Schweitzer’s judgment

that the chapters devoted to hunting the unicorn are too lengthy and mar the reader’s enjoyment of the book.[12] Yet it is precisely hunting that links the otherwise unknightly heroes of this novel to the knights of medieval romance, who frequently engage in lengthy chases of magical—or unmagical—stags, boars, or other animals. The three hunts in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight consume a great proportion of that romance. In The King of Elfland’s Daughter, it is the hunter’s horn of Alveric as well as the unicorn-hunting of Orion that drive the plot and bring on the resolution. Of course, Lord Dunsany was himself a notable hunter: a great proportion of his autobiographical writings concern his hunting expeditions in Africa; closer to home he shot and rode to hounds in England and Ireland. In Patches of Sunlight he explains that hunting is the only way for those of the “civilized” world to know what remains of the natural world: “which fishermen, sportsmen, soldiers and many another will agree is a knowledge that seems only to be able to be acquired with the help of killing.”[13] The unicorn hunts, complete with trolls as whippers-in and will-o’-the-wisps lighting the night forests, are magical yet grounded in Dunsany’s lived experience. The concept of riding at adventure, to fare forth as at a lucky chance, to wander as a “knight-errant” distinguishes the mode of romance from that of tragedy or epic and the romance hero from the epic hero. Romances—medieval and neo-medieval— abound in prophecies and coincidences: Destiny reveals her hand. In The King of Elfland’s Daughter, there is a less formulaic attitude toward the reader and toward the role of Destiny. Of all Dunsany’s novels, this may be the least satiric, seeking the reader’s unironic acceptance of things unseen and of Otherworlds. Yet even in this novel, Dunsany plays with the reader’s suspension of disbelief, as when he inserts a “historical” explanation for the unicorn hunted by Orion and killed by his hounds: “This was the horn that was sent in later years as a gift from the Pope to King Francis. Benvenuto Cellini tells of it in his memoirs” (KED 133). The romance worlds of Erl and Elfland are ruled by a mad logic, by the logic of dreams, and not by an overruling personified Fate. The King of Elfland is portrayed as a passive lover of stasis, uncaring of the manipulations necessary in dealing with mortals. Alveric, the quest hero, has objects in view, yet his quest is aimless. He is pictured as a lunatic among lunatics. Although Dunsany never cites it directly, the controlling image of this part of the work is Tom O’Bedlam’s song, with its Knight of Ghosts and Shadows summoning the hero to tourney beyond the moon’s wide rim. Alveric’s purpose—like poor Tom’s—is clear to him, yet incomprehensible to the ordinary mortal. After losing his Elf-princess bride, he seeks the border of Elfland, which its king has removed away from the fields we know. “Alveric . . . never gave up the haste of one who has lost something suddenly: he had the swift movements of such, and the frantic air” (KED 65). Finally, he leaves his throne and kingdom and gathers companions for the quest. Like Tom O’Bedlam or Don Quixote, Alveric seems condemned to eternal wandering on a hopeless quest. The companions he gathers are Shakespeare’s “lunatic, lover, and poet.” Only they can see Elfland. Alveric gives no more thought to provisions or map; he lets dreams guide them. He does not second-guess his fate, nor bewail his fortune. When a few of his comrades regain

their senses and desert him, he is left with the lunatics, who dedicate themselves to thwarting Alveric’s quest for Elfland. As in the Grail quest romances, however, the son and not the father is more successful in bringing about the achievement of the quest. Dunsany does force the few practical people of the story, who both desire and fear the magic of Elfland, to discover, too late, the power of Destiny. In an ancient chronicle of received wisdom, these words appear: “Hooded, and veiled, with their night-like tresses The Fates shall bring what no prophet guesses.” And then they [the Parliament of Erl] planned no more, for either their minds were calmed by a certain awe that they seemed to find in the lines, or it may be the mead was stronger than anything written in books. (KED 115) Here Dunsany seems to be satirizing the oracular pronouncements that appear so often in the mode of romance. It is the Parliament’s heedless toying with mystery —it wishes for a little magic, not too much—that sends Alveric on his initial quest for an elfin bride. And because the Elders of Erl act in ignorance, as does Alveric, this romance remains one of the best examples of the geste of an uncontrolled hero, adrift from past or future history. Reputations and renown are real factors in medieval romances; they are not abstractions to be awarded only after the hero’s death, although this conception of fame is not absent. All authors of this mode—medieval and modern—play with this concept of reputation, because it is through their pen that the hero’s renown is brought to the inhabitants of the primary world. Lord Dunsany shows us this process at work within his story, as his authorial perspective alternates between his secondary world and our primary one. He comments in this metafictional passage on the mechanism of fame in folklore. And the talk of Alveric’s quest spread through the land and overtook his wanderings, till all men that he passed by knew his story; . . . There were jests about them and songs. And the songs outlasted the jests. At last they became a legend, which haunted those farms for ever: they were spoken of when men told of hopeless quests, and held up to laughter or glory, whichever men had to give. (KED 120) In Dunsany’s human world, as in ours, the questers are by definition madmen, and only the triumph of Elfland ends their derision by sane, practical folk. To fulfill his destiny, the hero must leave the Center and—if he is lucky and successful—return. Only in Elfland can calm be bought without struggle; for human heroes, strife is essential. The hero cannot remain forever on Calypso’s isle or live with the Lotos-eaters. Lord Dunsany captures that lure of Elvish calm in this picture of the King who has won back his daughter: And the Elf King stirred not, nor changed; but held to that moment in which he

had found content; and laid its influence over all his dominions for the good and welfare of Elfland; for he had what all our troubled world with all its changes seeks, and finds so rarely, and must at once cast it away. He had found content and held it. (KED 104) The quest achieved, the encounter with Otherness faced and survived, Fate and Fortune satisfied, there is left only the hero’s Return, the end of the road and the story. In medieval romance and most modern fantasy, three patterns shape the ending: 1) the hero returns to and redeems his original society; 2) the hero does not return, for reasons comic or tragic; 3) the hero returns, having redeemed his society, but is so transformed that he cannot stay. To these, Lord Dunsany adds another: the Otherworld occupies and transforms the original Center, and the position and the quest of the hero become nearly irrelevant. This sort of reversal typifies the mode of satire, and is also characteristic of the fantasy novels of James Branch Cabell, Dunsany’s contemporary. The ending of The King of Elfland’s Daughter seems to fit neither the comic nor the tragic resolution; it is instead the triumph of the Otherworld over the Primary World, a triumph brought about not by the heroes Alveric and Orion but by the King of Elfland and his daughter. Lirazel’s longing for Alveric and their son impels her father to use his last world-changing rune and cover the land of Erl with the strangeness and immortality of Elfland. The rune once used, the rest of the “real world” of the novel is strengthened against the allure and enticements of the unreal. The representative of organized religion, the Freer, is left literally isolated, a rock around whom the tides of faerie flow unabated yet without force. The Elf-King understands that his action will lead to the diminishment of his kingdom, a trope characteristic of many modern fantasies, explaining the sundering of our world from its own better nature: “And when this last potency be used and gone . . . material things will multiply . . . and we without any rune of which they go in awe shall become no more than a fable” (KED 223). When Elfland flows over Erl, it manifests itself in memory, in bittersweet nostalgia. This evocation of memory supports the elegiac tone that can be found in the greatest modern fantasy novels—Hope Mirlees’s Lud-in-the-Mist and John Crowley’s Little, Big. In Dunsany’s novel, though, despite the Elf-King’s justifiable misgivings, the ending would seem to be a happy one: . . . the elfin King . . . breathed and drew in the calm in which Elfland basks; and all his realms dreamed on in that ageless repose, of which deep green pools in summer can barely guess; and Erl dreamed too with all the rest of Elfland and so passed out of all remembrance of men. For the twelve that were of the parliament of Erl looked through the window of that inner room . . . gazing over their familiar lands, perceived that they were no longer the fields we know. (KED 241–42) The effect of the coming of Elfland upon the elders of Erl is emblematic of the

desired effect of literature upon the reader. The Russian formalist Shklovsky calls the technique “defamiliarization”—language used in a different way, to a different end, than ordinary speech, enabling literature to cause the reader to see things anew. We cannot blame Dunsany because in the century since his inspired romance, imitation, commercialization, and parody have re-familiarized the magical elements of The King of Elfland’s Daughter. Campbell’s description of the conclusion of the quest, the end of the round of the monomyth, gives us another perspective on the triumph of Elfland over Erl: The two worlds, the divine and the human, can be pictured only as distinct from each other—different as life and death, as day and night. The hero adventures out of the land we know into darkness; there he accomplishes his adventure. . . . Nevertheless . . . the two kingdoms are actually one. The realm of the gods [or the Elves] is a forgotten dimension of the world we know.[14] The two realms, whether we call them “Elfland and Erl” or “divine and human,” are contained within the consciousness of the hero and the reader of the literary work. Hero and reader alike as a result of participating in the quest hold the key to passage between the worlds of inside and out, of mind and body, of literary object and objective reality. The hero Alveric on his insane quest knows the poignancy of the loss of Elfland, knows that once it was quite close, in the very next field, and now it is gone, seemingly beyond recovery. He saw “never a sign of Elfland . . . and the desolate land remained the same, for all that he waved his sword, stony, deserted, unromantic and wide . . . and on that dreary plain he soon discovered, as sooner or later many a man must, that he had lost Elfland” (KED 70). But the story does not end here: as we have seen, Elfland is restored, and the quest ends with the triumph of magic, the victory of the Otherworld over the world of reason and logic. The horns of Elfland blow the prise, and all are joyful except for the stodgiest inhabitants and the Freer, representative of religious orthodoxy: “They had wished for magic, and now it had come. Trolls were in all the streets, goblins had entered houses, and now the nights were mad with will-o’-the-wisps; and all the air was heavy with unknown magic” (KED 235). The King of Elfland’s Daughter’s unexpected ending fulfills the most cherished fantasy of many a reader of this type of literature: one might almost call it a revenge fantasy. The ultimate contrast for humans, mirrored in the romance world’s contrast of inside and out, light and dark, is between life and death. Life lights the court while Death haunts the wood. Death is the doom of man and his spur, for it drives him to win glory during his short life. It is not difficult to see death and the fear of death as the motivation for reading fantasy, for what lies behind the quest for Elfland but a desire for immortality, and what is the archetypal quest but that for the restoration of fertility, for the fountain of youth? J. R. R. Tolkien in his essay “On Fairy-Stories” answers critics who dismiss fantasy-reading as mere escapism. He responds that fantasy is indeed about escape, as it expresses

the oldest and deepest desire, the Great Escape: the Escape from Death. Fairystories provide many examples and modes of this—which might be called the genuine escapist . . . spirit. Fairy-stories are made by men not by fairies. The Human-stories of the elves are doubtless full of the Escape from Deathlessness. [15]

With its multiple perspectives of the human Alveric, the Elf-princess Lirazel, and their bi-natured son Orion, The King of Elfland’s Daughter could have been the model for Tolkien’s formulation. Lirazel’s yearning toward the things of Earth is the very essence of what Tolkien calls “the Escape from Deathlessness.” The King of Elfland’s Daughter epitomizes the longings for a better world of the medievally oriented fantasist and moves the desires of the modern fantasy reader the furthest toward fulfillment. How many of the novel’s readers have wished for magic and longed for Elfland? Through the skill of that expert dreamer, Lord Dunsany, readers find escape and consolation; the “unhappy, far-off things” become comforting when mediated through art. And through art, we may yet apprehend Elfland: “our painters have had many a glimpse of that country, so that sometimes in pictures we see a glamour too wonderful for our fields; . . . a memory . . . that intruded from some old glimpse of the pale-blue mountains while they sat at easels painting the fields we know” (KED 15).

NOTES 1. Brent Cantrell, “British Fairy Tradition in The King of Elfland’s Daughter,” Romantist 4/5 (1982): 51–53. 2. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949; 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 30. 3. Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 245–46. Before Joseph Campbell, Lord Raglan, a near-contemporary of Dunsany’s and fellow graduate of Eton and Sandhurst, published his archetypal study, The Hero (1936), which noted the commonalities of the birth, adventures, and death of heroes in world mythology. 4. S. T. Joshi, Lord Dunsany: Master of the Anglo-Irish Imagination (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), 34. 5. Lord Dunsany, Nowadays (Boston: Four Seas Co., 1918), 22. 6. Lord Dunsany, Unhappy Far-Off Things (Boston: Little, Brown, 1919), 46–47. 7. Lord Dunsany, The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924; New York: Ballantine, 1969), 68. Hereafter cited in the text under the abbreviation KED. 8. Lord Dunsany, Tales of War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1918), 44–45. 9. Lord Dunsany, Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1922), 8. 10. Dunsany, Don Rodriguez, 202. 11. Such coincidences make it tempting to imagine that Lord Dunsany had seen these tapestries on his 1919 visit to New York, but this is impossible. Though an earlier form

of The Cloisters museum had been erected in 1914, the tapestries had not yet been acquired by John D. Rockefeller, who brought them to New York in the 1930s and bought the Cloisters to showcase them. 12. Darrell Schweitzer, Pathways to Elfland: The Writings of Lord Dunsany (Philadelphia: Owlswick Press, 1989), 81. 13. Lord Dunsany, Patches of Sunlight (1938); quoted in Joshi, Lord Dunsany, 11. 14. Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 217. 15. J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” in Tree and Leaf (1965); rpt. in The Tolkien Reader (New York: Ballantine, 1966), 67.

Chapter 22

The Influence of Don Quixote on Lord Dunsany’s Don Rodriguez Iris Fernández Muniz When Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley[1] was reissued in the 1970s in an attempt to revive fantasy classics for the new Ballantine Books imprint, the Adult Fantasy series, the work itself went quite unnoticed by readers and critics, compared to the vitality of the reception of other works by Dunsany, a reaction that hasn’t changed much since. That edition was framed by a short introduction by Lin Carter that, following the line of some of the first reviews in 1922, suggested, without exploring, the apparently obvious intertextuality with the best-known Spanish novel of all time: Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605, 1615). That introduction speaks of the setting as “ancient Spain in the heroic age of chivalry, an age that never really was, of course, save in the imagination of the romancers [. . .] one that Don Quixote might perhaps have recognized.”[2] Lord Dunsany himself never suggested nor denied that influence, perhaps because it seemed obvious from the title he had chosen. The topic has never been explored before—not by Dunsany’s scholars, nor by Cervantes’s. This brief essay humbly tries to shed some light on the twisting nature of that intertextuality. First of all, it may be convenient to provide a quick introduction to the novel and its reception. Don Rodriguez was published in early 1922. It was Dunsany’s first attempt of writing a novel, after his success with short fiction and theater. His lack of experience in a genre—S. T. Joshi states that “he was not yet comfortable” with the novel form—made it a “sort of practice novel [. . .] full of elements that do not cohere particularly well.”[3] The novel’s apparently arbitrary division into twelve chapters and its strange temporal and thematic transitions[4] make it more easily read as a collection of episodes, which shows that he “was not completely at ease with writing a novel” and that he had problems conceptualizing the differences between the short story and the novel in terms other than pure length.[5] At the time of its first edition, the novel received diverse reviews, most of which were quite negative. For the New Statesman it was “dead and dull,” full of “incoherence”;[6] the London Saturday Review claimed that “the writing of a picaresque novel requires qualities lord Dunsany does not possess [. . .] a raciness, an instinct for the crude gross earth which are lacking from these lily pages [. . .] the frequent addresses to the reader with which these narratives are strewn strip them of their last vestige of reality.”[7] Following the same line, J. W. Krutch writing for the Nation called the book “cold” and “still-born,” and explained that “even the most convinced of Lord Dunsany’s admirers will be compelled to admit that in Don Rodrigues [sic] he is not as his best.”[8] It may be interesting to note that the same critic considered that, because of his tendency toward drawing inspiration from foreign and exotic mythologies instead of Irish or

English ones (“the spirit of the people among whom he and his ancestors have lived”), he “will probably fail to leave any great impression upon literature because his work is too much pastiche and is too little rooted in any national temperament”—a prophecy that can be read with a smile today, now that Dunsany’s influence on literature is undeniable. The Spectator was more positive, even if acknowledging that “here and there the writing is amateurish,” saying the Chronicles are “not without charm,” “readable” and “pleasant.”[9] Finally, in the New York Times Book Review and Magazine, William Beebe—to whom, we should never forget, the book was originally dedicated—was the most positive of the lot, and the only one who explored intertextual connections: The first chronicle is one of the most exciting short stories I have ever read; the second establishes a relation more delightful than that of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza; the third develops a most eloquent thesis against war; the fourth excels Jules Verne; the fifth and sixth are the very essence of Spain’s Golden Age; in the seventh Robin Hood lives again, and so on.[10] Even today’s criticism isn’t very kind, and the novel tends to be ignored in comparison to the attention received by other works by Dunsany. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy calls it “modest”[11] compared to other Dunsanian works, whereas The Historical Dictionary of Fantasy just speaks of a “new chivalric romance.”[12] Returning to the issue of the Quixotism of the novel and in order to provide some context for this study, it might be useful to explain a little about the extent of Cervantes’s influence on English literature, which is considered the literature most strongly influenced by Cervantes’s works (excluding, or even including, Spanish literature); and at the same time, Cervantes is the most influential foreign author (and Don Quixote the most influential foreign book, excluding the Bible) for that literature. [13] This statement may provoke skepticism, but it can be understood if one accepts that the modern novel as a genre was fashioned in the eighteenth century in England out of Cervantean molds and then expanded to other European countries—a theory that is widely accepted by the scholarly world. In that century the novel was established as a popular genre, and ever since then its popularity has never ceased to grow, to the extent that nowadays most of what readers actually read is in the form of novel, however varied its topics and styles. It is widely acknowledged that the modern novel was fashioned in England by authors such as Daniel Defoe, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and others—all of whom acknowledged that they were heavily influenced by Cervantes—and then developed in the nineteenth century by the Romantic and realistic novelists.[14] It is important to realize, moreover, that Lord Dunsany writes his novel following a strong literary tradition, and following also a given interpretation of the novel itself— what has been called the “romantic approach to Don Quixote,”[15] in which the main character is understood as a tragic figure (close to the romantic hero) who is fighting

the evil corruption of reality that clashes with his idealized vision of the world—a reading in which the reader sympathizes with his sufferings, and in which philosophical reflections can be extracted from them. That romantic interpretation is widespread today and is the most usual reading, but it is very far from the interpretation of the novel when it was first published or even a century afterward. At that time the novel was esteemed primarily for its comedic value and considered little more than a jestbook: Even the cruelest of pranks played on Don Quixote, which we today read with compassion, were laughed at for centuries; and it is also likely, though disputable, that this is the reading Cervantes wanted. Dunsany, as we will see, created a Quixotic hero who is very close to that idealized romantic hero, a man whose ideals are above the miseries of the age in which he is forced to live. This romantic aesthetics is far from surprising as he, even though a twentieth-century man, was in his tastes and customs very much of a nineteenth-century man (picture him writing with his quill pen in his medieval castle in County Meath), and his understanding of the Middle Ages or the Far East—the customary exotic settings in his literary world—is very much based on what the Romantic, Pre-Raphaelite, or Decadent artists reflected in their works. Going back to the endless question of Cervantes’s influence in literature, the truth is that since the First Part of the novel was published in Spanish in 1605 (first English translation by Thomas Shelton in 1612) and the Second Part in 1615 (English translation by Shelton in 1620), writers of all kinds and nationalities have paid their own homage by writing works (poetry, prose, drama) in which the influence of Cervantes can be easily perceived: using characters drawn from his works, most prominently Don Quixote and Sancho Panza types (Rodriguez and Morano are a clear example of that); representing the conflict between appearance and reality; parodying a literary genre or the conventions of a society following his model; re-creating scenes from the book(s); imitating his particular sense of humor, wordplay, and witticism; reproducing the story-within-a-story narrative techniques; following closely his literary style, and so on. Some authors have even written continuations or direct imitations of the book,[16] whereas in other books the influence, if not perceptible in the title, can be perceived in the plot. Cervantean scholars have classified into two categories those novels in which that influence can be noted: “Cervantean novels” and “Quixotic novels.” Cervantean novels are those influenced by Cervantes’s literary techniques, whereas Quixotic novels are those whose main character is a Quixote, “an individual who, through excessive reading of a certain literary genre, has become a psychotic monomaniac and hence espouses the obsolete values which that genre proclaims”;[17] and that figure is often used as a means of passing (harsh) judgment on certain customs of a given society, or on the mannerisms of a given literary genre that is considered already obsolete (chivalric romances in Don Quixote, French romances in The Female Quixote, Gothic novels in Northanger Abbey, and so on). It may be argued that with his novel Dunsany is far from pretending to kill a literary genre; if anything, he is doing quite the opposite: he is resurrecting it, restoring “some of the luster to

the romance tradition that Cervantes had so brilliantly satirized,”[18] But by doing the opposite, that is, by subverting the convention of the Quixotic genre, he is in fact opening new possibilities for future Quixotic fiction, possibilities that are coherently linked with the romantic aesthetics he followed: Cervantes wanted to change his present, he wanted the obsolete literary scene of Spain to move forward and open up to new foreign literary resources, whereas Dunsany wasn’t comfortable with the aesthetics of his time and cherished older ones, wishing to revive them. As Carlson has noted, “Dunsany’s novel starts with the assumption that readers will share Cervantes’s skepticism of romance,” something clearly perceptible in the irony of the first chapters; but the book soon “seeks to gradually overcome that skepticism, restoring that tradition in a way designed to be palatable to a world-weary post-war reader [. . .], attempting to re-legitimize a specific form of fantasy in the most unpropitious of historical moments.”[19] If Cervantes really tried to terminate the fantastic chivalric romances (something that is sometimes disputed), it may be argued that what Dunsany did was to resurrect them. He was one of the forefathers of the renewed fantasy genre that would flourish in the second half of the twentieth century, and contemporary fantasy literature has many points in common with the chivalric romance Don Quixote adored, from the extensive use of magic to the quest structure and the stereotyped heroes. Prominent Dunsany scholar Darrell Schweitzer highlights the tension between reality and fantasy, with a leaning toward the latter present in Dunsany’s first novel: The story is Dunsany’s version of Don Quixote, save that Dunsany has neither the heart nor the inclination to burlesque romantic fiction with the ferocity of Cervantes. He is fully aware that life isn’t the way Rodriguez thinks it is, but seems to be gently saying, “well, wouldn’t it be nice?[20] Considering the above a definition of a Quixote, one may wonder to what extent Rodriguez is a Quixote: He is certainly not mad, and even if he is a little eccentric, his eccentricities are not inspired by any books he has read—he mentions his passion for Notes on a Cathedral, which seems to be a romantic novel, and which probably influenced his conception of love in his relationship with Serafina, but it doesn’t influence his main obsession, his search for the wars. That quest is the sole purpose in life when he is disinherited by his father (subverting the traditional inheritance laws by giving everything to the less qualified, second son), and thus left without a means of living. It is an obsession induced by the words of his father on his deathbed (“The sword to the wars, the mandolin to the balconies”),[21] which he blindly follows till the end of the book, in a kind of quixotic madness: Now there were no wars at that time so far as known in Spain, but that old lord’s eldest son, regarding those last words of his father as a commandment, determined then and there in that dim, vast chamber to gird his legacy to him and seek for the wars, wherever the wars might be, so soon as the obsequies of the

sepulture were ended.[22] Don Rodriguez’s quest for “the wars” is a vital endeavor that can be symbolically understood as looking for an ideal past that represents everything that the present moment lacks, the greatness of a heroic age already expired. The reader gets a glimpse of that time in the magic glasses at Saragossa, a moment that Dunsany uses to explore the manifold significations of war itself and what is behind it. Rodriguez comes out of that experience somehow disappointed; it is a turning point for him, even though he only later acknowledges that his dreams had long ago lost their meaning. The novel was understood at the time and also nowadays as an antibellicist criticism, and I completely agree that this passage in particular is still easily readable as such. I won’t dwell too much on its significance, as it has been brilliantly explored in a 2006 article by Carlson. Nonetheless, it is worthwhile remembering that the novel was very much of a war child, even though Dunsany didn’t start writing it until January 1921.[23] He was very depressed after the war, as were most of his contemporaries. We can easily associate his disappointment with the outcome of the war (probably changing whatever heroic ideals he may have held before, as with many of the naïve soldiers who enrolled out of idealism) with the feelings of his character Rodriguez, and the whole novel as a lengthy exploration of that change of mentality. What the magic glass of future wars reveals to Rodriguez is very much a description of the role of the machine in unknighting war itself—and to some nostalgic contemporaries, the Great War was the last war between gentlemen, and it was certainly a decisive war in the transition toward the complete mechanization of modern war. Don Rodriguez is, to a great extent, a novel exploring the tensions between illusion, delusion, and disappointment, as Don Quixote was. In John Clute and John Grant’s Encyclopedia of Fantasy, Don Quixote is associated with the so-called delusional fantasy, a genre defined as that in which the main character has an “affliction that leads people to believe they are other than who they are, or that the world is other than it is.”[24] This is certainly the case with Rodriguez, as he is from the beginning trying to behave like a warrior knight earning a castle for himself with his sword—and most importantly, believing it is possible to do so, a novelesque notion inherited from his father that is proven no longer valid (if it ever was). There are no more wars where he can prove himself, and that symbolic absence signifies a change of age and a rupture between the ideal and reality. It is in that sense that the novel is a Bildungsroman, because Rodriguez experiences a coming-of-age throughout the narrative, a maturity process that means breaking away from dreams. Nonetheless, that mature, reality-accepting phase is brief, as Dunsany fulfills his hero’s dreams in the last chapter, creating for him a castle out of magic. As we will later see, that sudden ending is what makes the narrative lean toward fantasy and away from the quixotic summit it had reached with the major disappointment. One of the most symbolic moments of a Quixotic character is the choosing of a name: that is, acknowledging the importance of bearing a name that resembles those read in the novels and that dignifies the newborn identity or alter ego of the character.

That fictional name for a fictional identity can be paralleled with our modern superheroes’ titles (or to Wilde’s bunburying).[25] It is likewise a disguise as well as an armor—something that from the psychology of identity helps the superheroes (and Quixotic heroes) keep neatly apart the two (or more) sides of their personalities, whether or not there is an actual personal identity problem (usually, if there is none at the beginning, as it is a conscious decision, there is likely to be one at the end). Don Quixote, originally named Alonso Quijano (or Quijada, Quesada, etc., as the actual family name is an ongoing comedic gag throughout the novel), spent eight days deciding which would be best for the honorable and famous knight he intended to be, after spending half the time in inventing a proper name for his horse: Four days he consumed, in inventing a name for this remarkable steed; suggesting to himself, what an impropriety it would be, if an [sic] horse of his qualities belonging to such a renowned knight, should go without some sounding and significant appellation [. . .] after having chosen, rejected, amended, tortured and revolved a world of names, in his imagination, he fixed upon Rozinante, an appellation, in his opinion, lofty, sonorous and expressive. [. . .] Having thus denominated his horse, so much to his own satisfaction, he was desirous of doing himself the like justice, and after eight days study, actually assumed the title of Don Quixote [. . .] but recollecting, that the valiant Amadis, not satisfied with that simple appellation, added to it, that of his country, and in order to dignify the place of his nativity, called himself Amadis de Gaul; he resolved, like a worthy knight, to follow such an illustrious example, and assume the name of Don Quixote de la Mancha, which, in his opinion, fully expressed his generation, and at the same time, reflected infinite honour on his fortunate country.[26] This self-fictionalization is a key moment that has been a focus of interest for those studying Cervantes or the works influenced by him. Quite interestingly, it doesn’t happen in Dunsany’s novel, because, however bombastic, “Rodriguez Trinidad Fernández, Concepción Henrique Maria” [sic] is the real name of our hero. Dunsany seems to have little notion of Spanish onomastics in choosing that name.[27] Putting aside the incongruity of the name for Spanish readers of the novel (for which it was not originally intended), it may be useful to point out that, for those same readers or other readers familiar with European medieval history and culture, the name may have a special significance not easily perceived by readers from other languages. The reason is that name can be easily linked to the most famous knight in Spanish Middle Ages, Don Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (1043–1099), best known as El Cid Campeador, a hero of the reconquest of Spain from the Moors, whose deeds were fictionalized in the oldest extant Spanish epic poem, Cantar de mio Cid (Song of My Cid).[28] Don Rodriguez’s desire to win a title, a castle, and lands for himself after his father disinherited him can be more easily connected with the mercenary motivations of the warrior knights of the El Cid period (after all, it was in the reconquest period when most noble titles, some of which are still held today, were won) than to the idyllic

motivation of poor old Don Quixote, which was to revive “the golden age of chivalry,” something that never existed except in the chivalric romances. Despite his mercenary motivations, Don Rodriguez’s behavior throughout the novel is closer to that of Don Quixote’s ideal image of a knight: He is attractive, he is gentlemanly, he is a good warrior, and above all, he is young, because age is an important factor in the formation of a Quixotic character. The prototypical Quixote is an old, somehow ridiculous figure whose age helps explain his lack of connection to reality and his fixation with the past. Nonetheless, that doesn’t mean that all Quixotic characters are old; in fact, a great number are young (as, curiously enough, many Quixotic novels fall into the category of the Bildungsroman). But one of the factors that creates the tragedy of Don Quixote in the original book is his age, because he behaves as a much younger man, which is often a source of humor: his engaging in battle (and being beaten up), the way he dresses (or goes undressed), and so on. Don Quixote’s famous nickname, the knight of the rueful countenance (actually given to him by Sancho), refers precisely to his ridiculous, pitiful appearance. He is often laughed at during his adventures, sometimes just because of his looks, and people prepare intricate pranks at his expense. Don Rodriguez is never laughed at; he is taken very seriously by the few people he encounters; the only exception may be Don Alvidar-of-the-rose-pink-Castle-in-Ebro/Pedro’s deception about the castle: He had promised a castle under the threat of death, and while traveling with Rodriguez he learned enough about his personality to make sure his lying about the castle’s whereabouts and sudden disappearance would be accepted. Rodriguez is nonetheless ridiculed by the reader for the way his actions are narrated and the ironic attitude of the narrator. We know his behavior is not fitting in Lowlight or in the war at France, and we read his advancement with increasing skepticism: he is like a lost child in a grown-up world, not really knowing what to do and pursuing blindly an ideal whose impossibility he is not intelligent enough to realize. Don Rodriguez may not be old, he may not be mad, he may not be ridiculous, but he is similar to Don Quixote in his blind faith to his ideal (the war) and to a lost cause (getting a castle by means of his heroic deeds in war). His final disappointment brings him very close to the last days of Don Quixote, after realizing that the castle he had thought he had gained was just an illusion. Joshi has interpreted the episode of the castle turning into a single farmhouse as an “underlying message about the uselessness of war and its empty rewards.”[29] I wouldn’t deny the importance of the antibellicistic symbolism in the novel, but I think that precise moment is very much linked to the idea of the Quixotic disappointment, the moment in which the elaborate delusional spell created by the main character is broken; it symbolically means accepting reality over fantasy. That breaking away from fantasy was so meaningful in Spanish literature that realism has since been the prevailing narrative mode. Don Quixote not only killed romances: He also killed the possibility of writing good fantasy for centuries—even now, fantasy is usually dismissed as an invalid genre by Spanish scholars, and has only been accepted in recent decades in the form of magic realism, which doesn’t come from the peninsula.

Morano, Rodriguez’s servant, doesn’t accept the trick of the castle as easily as Rodriguez does, and tries to convince him that Pedro and his family are lying, but Rodriguez pays no attention to his words. He may or may not have realized the truth, but his decision to distance himself honors him. If the novel had ended there, its spirit would have been much closer to the original Spanish: Alonso Quijano dies in his bed, repenting all his “foolish” adventures and disowning the actions he committed in his “madness” period. But Dunsany decided to give his hero a happily ever after, thus distancing the novel even further from the dry realism of the Quixotic narrative—and with what Schweitzer has associated with the deus ex machina device,[30] he fulfills his hero’s every wish: a castle, a beautiful wife, and a happy quiet life. Morano, Rodriguez’s sidekick and faithful servant, has a good deal in common with the typical characterization of the Sancho Panza type. He is described as a “plump and sturdy man,” of “forty years or so,” always worried about what is to be eaten next and where to rest. “Master, there be two things necessary in the wars, strategy and cooking. Now the first of these comes in use when the captains speak of their achievements and the historians write of the wars. Strategy is a learned thing, master, and the wars may not be told of without it, but while the war rageth and men be camped upon the foughten field then is the time for cooking.”[31] He is practical and witty, always ready with a new idea such as that of changing outfits to confound the Garda. He also stops the professor’s ill-intended spell when Rodriguez is paralyzed, creating the sign of the cross with Rodriguez’s sword and his frying pan combined. He uses it also as a weapon against Don Alderon when he sees Rodriguez losing the duel they are fighting for Serafina’s honor in the Sixth Chronicle. This creates a conflict between them, as Rodriguez tells him he should never interfere in a duel between knights, because it means breaking the sacred laws of chivalry: “Morano,” said Rodriguez’ better nature, “to offend the laws of Chivalry is to have against you the swords of all true men.” [. . .] “Master,” said Morano, “I will keep those laws henceforth. I may cook bacon for you when you are hungry, I may brush the dust from your cloak, I may see to your comforts. This Chivalry forbids none of that. But when I see anyone trying to kill you, master; why, kill you he must, and welcome.” “Not always,” said Rodriguez somewhat curtly, for it struck him that Morano spoke somehow too lightly of sacred things. “Not always?” asked Morano. “No,” said Rodriguez. “Master, I implore you tell me,” said Morano, “when they may kill you and when they may not, so that I may never offend again.” Rodriguez cast a swift glance at him but found his face so full of puzzled anxiety that he condescended to do what Morano had asked, and began to explain to

him the rudiments of the laws of Chivalry. “In the wars,” he said, “you may defend me whoever assails me, or if robbers or any common persons attack me, but if I arrange a meeting with a gentleman, and any knave basely interferes, then is he damned hereafter as well as accursed now; for, the laws of Chivalry being founded on true religion, the penalty for their breach is by no means confined to this world.”[32] This conversation about the laws of chivalry is almost a mirror of the conversation Don Quixote and Sancho have in the first stages of the Spanish novel, and Dunsany may well have this one in mind when writing his own: “Here,” cried Don Quixote, “here, brother Sancho Panza, we shall be able to dip our hands up to the elbows, in what is called adventure; but, take notice, altho’ thou seests me beset with the most extreme danger, thou must by no means, even so much as lay thy hand upon thy sword, with design to defend me, unless I am assaulted by vulgar and low-born antagonists, in which case, thou mayest come to my assistance; but, if they are knights, thou art by no means permitted or licenced, by the laws of chivalry, to give me the least succor, until thou thyself hast received the honour of knighthood.” “As for that matter,” replied Sancho, “your worship shall be obeyed to a tittle; for, I am a very peaceable man, and not at all fond of meddling with riots and quarrels. True indeed, in the defence of my own person, I shall not pay much regard to the said laws, seeing every one that is aggrieved, is permitted to defend himself by all the laws of God and man.” “I say nothing to the contrary,” replied Don Quixote, “but, in the affair of assisting me against knights, thou must keep thy natural impetuosity under the rein.” “That will I,” answered Sancho, “and keep your honour’s command as strictly as I keep the Lord’s day.”[33] The issue of the laws of chivalry and when Sancho or Quixote should interfere or not to defend each other is a repeated gag, and the fragment between Morano and Rodriguez surely captures the essence of the twisting nature of the agreement: If Morano hadn’t interfered, Rodriguez would have probably died, but still Rodriguez is very offended by his intervention. It is nonetheless thanks to that intervention that he becomes friends with Alderon and starts to be admitted as Serafina’s suitor (it is important that Serafina is a real and not ideal character, and that she is aware and responding to Rodriguez’s amorous intentions—she is no Dulcinea). The lively conversations between servant and master, and the nature of their relationship, are the most Quixotic elements of the whole novel. As in the original Spanish novel, through extensive contact they seem to interchange parts of their personalities (this process is usually called the Quixotization of Sancho and the Sanchification of Quixote, following the terms coined by eighteenth-century essayist Salvador de Madariaga),[34] as Rodriguez begins to be concerned about worldly matters, missing his company and his food when he tells Morano to go away after breaking the laws of

chivalry (“There was no one now either to cook his food or to believe in the schemes his ambition made. There was no one now to speak of the wars as the natural end of the journey”).[35] Morano tries to light up Rodriguez’s spirits, as Sancho tried to make Quixote get out of bed and run for new adventures, and he seems to be even more involved than Rodriguez in his quest: However, if the figure of Morano initially reinforces a sense of distance between the modern world and the world of romance (and also ridicules certain aspects of the latter), he soon comes to represent a strangely “rational” faith in the dreamworld of adventure. [. . .] Not surprisingly, then, before long Morano’s belief in Rodriguez’s quest seems stronger even than his master’s.[36] The reasons for Sancho’s accompanying Quixote are monetary, as he promised him a good reward as well as the “ínsula” (Latin for island), which is a concept borrowed from medieval romances that in the novel has similar connotations to Rodriguez’s castle—a land of his own to rule and benefit from its riches. As the novel progresses, however, they develop a strong friendship, partially because of Sancho’s open attitude—he doesn’t want to be just the quiet, helping servant that Quixote had imagined all squires should be like. Morano is perhaps closer to that image in the sense that, even though he can be outspoken, he has a strong sense of class and place. He gives Rodriguez everlasting loyalty when he receives the ring in price for having warned the young knight about the innkeeper’s murderous intentions, his previous master. He doesn’t have great ambitions (“You want your castle, master; and I, I want not always to wander roads [. . .] I look for a heap of straw in the cellar of your great castle”).[37] There are several episodes in Don Rodriguez that can be easily linked to episodes in Don Quixote. The most obvious is the magical trip to the sun concocted by the Professor of Saragossa. They really make—as it is a fantasy novel—the trip of the heavens Sancho and Alonso Quijano were tricked into believing they had done when blindfolded on top of the “magical” horse Clavileno in the House of the Dukes (in chapter 41 of the Second Part).[38] Also in Saragossa they can get a glimpse of the past and the future wars through the professor’s magical windows, a moment whose antibellicist meaning has been already pointed out. Nonetheless, that moment can be paralleled to the scene of the puppet show in the second part of Don Quixote,[39] where there is a monkey that can tell the present and the past but not the future. Also, they see a battle represented by puppets, and Quixote is compelled to intervene in it believing it is true, as Morano is excited by the vision of the war against the infidels and wants to intervene (“There now the dirty Infidel. Spare him not good knight, spare him not”).[40] They are both drawn into believing a dramatic representation (magical or pull by threads) true. Don Rodriguez releases a prisoner from la Garda [sic] Civil,[41] a character who later proves vital in the fulfillment of his dreams, as he is the King of the Shadow Valley, a title that Rodriguez will later inherit.

Don Quixote does the same to a bunch of prisoners, but he is only beaten up, and the leader of the bandits becomes a recurring foe in the novel (he steals Sancho’s donkey and tricks them in the Maese Pedro’s puppet show in the second part).[42] They travel in a strange boat in the river Ebro: Morano and Rodriguez are rowed up the Pyrenees, however unlikely that may be, and thus Rodriguez is able to reach the “wars.” Quixote and Sancho find a solitary boat that leads them to the House of the Dukes, which is also a decisive moment for them.[43] The self-piloted boat was a recursive element in romances. The number of episodes is limited because the plot is much shorter in the English novel, and this length limitation also helps explain the lack of psychological development of the characters and the scarcity of them: Morano and Rodriguez seem to be traveling in a deserted earth, or more precisely a board game where they make encounters one after another. The other characters they find are bound to specific places and events of the plot. About the style, it has been suggested by Carlson that Dunsany dominates “tonal shifts between high and low mimetic styles”; by making extensive use of his characteristic “lyrical prose style,” he combines it with satirical and humorous moments, while he states that Cervantes’s novel is “dominated by its (low-mimetic) comedic situations and dialogues.” He quotes the example of the luxurious description of the springtime landscape Rodriguez encounters when he starts his adventures (“Now the time of the year was Spring, not Spring as we know it in England, for it was but early March, but it was the time when Spring coming up out of Africa, or unknown lands to the south, first touches Spain, and multitudes of anemones come forth at her feet”),[44] and he says that “there is nothing like this kind of ecstatic, lyrical description to be found in Cervantes.”[45] I don’t completely agree with that statement, because if anything characterizes Cervantes’s writings it is his mastery of all kinds of styles within his narrative; and even if it’s true that what it is often highlighted in his style is his agile conversations, it is also true that the novel contains examples of that high mimetic style he refers to. The narrative style of Don Rodriguez is diverse, but never as diverse as Don Quixote. Dunsany’s elevated style is highly ironical, inviting the reader to make fun of his flamboyance in paragraphs such as those Carlson notes, and we can find the same intention in some excerpts of the original. For example, when Quixote also sets off there is a very similar scene: Doubtless, in future ages, when the true history of my famed exploits shall come to light, the sage author, when he recounts my first and early sally, will express himself in this manner: “Scarce had ruddy Phoebus, o’er this wide and spacious earth, display’d the golden threads of his refulgent hair; and scarce the little painted warblers with their forky tongues, in soft, mellifluous harmony, had hail’d the approach of rosy wing’d Aurora, who stealing from her jealous couch, thro’ the balconies and aerial gates of Mancha’s bright horizon, stood confess’d to wandering mortals; when lo! the illustrious knight Don Quixote de la Mancha, upspringing from the lazy down, bestrode fam’d Rozinante his unrival’d steed! and

thro’ Montiel’s ancient, well known field (which was really the case) pursu’d his way.”[46] The parody is present in both narrators’ voices. The narrator is quite intrusive in both narratives, as it feels free to comment on the episodes and the characters’ actions, often from an ironical perspective. That technique establishes a dialogue between the reader and the narrator that are both set at a level above the narrative, and it distances the reader from the characters and the narrative itself. The interpretation of the text is filtered by the narrator’s own comments, and the reader is given smaller space to create an opinion of its own; there are biasing elements. Cervantes’s narrator mentions the fictional historian Cide Hamete Benengeli as being the source from which he is taking the story. The found manuscript technique was quite common in the romances, and it was a way of legitimizing the contents in a time where the frontier between history and fiction was still blurred. One of the signs of Alonso Quijano’s madness is precisely his inability to tell the difference between historical and literary heroes. Following that tradition of the found manuscript, a recurring element in Quixotic novels, the narrator mentions the Black Books of Spain, the Golden Stories, the Book of Maidens, and Gardens of Spain as being the sources from which he extracted the story he is telling, but the information is not complete because magic interfered: After long and patient research I am still unable to give to the reader of these Chronicles the exact date of the times that they tell of. Were it merely a matter of history there could be no doubts about the period; but where magic is concerned, to however slight an extent, there must always be some element of mystery. [. . .] Moreover, magic, even in small quantities, appears to affect time. [. . .] It is the magic appearing in Chronicles III and IV that has gravely affected the date, so that all I can tell the reader with certainty of the period is that it fell in the later years of the Golden Age in Spain.[47] One of the elements that make the connection between the two novels undeniable is precisely that setting, “the Golden Age of Spain,” a setting that is shared with Dunsany’s third novel, The Charwoman’s Shadow (1926), whose main character, Ramon Alonzo, also has some Quixotic features. The Spain portrayed is unrealistic and exoticized, very much based on the romantic conception portrayed by the German and English romantic travelers of the nineteenth century. There is also the satirical point of view, perceived, for example, in the treatment of the Garda Civil (historical inaccuracy) and the narrator’s flamboyant descriptiveness. It is “an imagined Spain that is both exotic and fecund, designed to appeal to his reader’s dreams and desires.”[48] Spain’s Golden Age, as pictured in the Spanish narrative, is taken as the perfect background for the medieval-flavored fantasy Dunsany was sketching. It is a “time that never was, save in the imaginations of the romancers,” as Lin Carter pointed out.[49] There is little geographical accuracy, with few real

toponyms mentioned: Saragossa (Zaragoza), the Pyrenees, the river Ebro (which flows between Spain and France through the Pyrenees in the novel), France, Spain, the Kingdom of Aragon. There is no real equivalent to the name of Argento Harez, an obviously invented name but one that may be based on a differently spelled Spanish toponym. Of course, there is no town called Lowlight, or a Shadow Valley. Dunsany seemed to have little knowledge of that area of Spain; he was more familiar with southern Spain and especially with the British colony of Gibraltar.[50] Those northeastern areas are not usually associated with Don Quixote, because he travels mainly around La Mancha (southeast), and then goes to Barcelona, never reaching Zaragoza. (When he wrote the second part of the novel, Cervantes didn’t want his hero to go there because in the spurious Quixote of Avellaneda [1614], his imitator had created a new adventure taking place precisely in that town.)[51] But these areas have a clear association with chivalric romance, because they were frequently the setting—usually epitomized with the name of Saragossa—for medieval romances of the Matter of France (romances based on the deeds of Charlemagne and his knights; the best known is La Chanson du Roland, and there is also the 1532 novel by Ariosto, Orlando Furioso). We can also connect Don Rodriguez to the Matter of Britain romances through the character of the knight Percival/Parsifal, who was likewise a young and naïve knight embarked on a mission he didn’t really understand, whose completion signifies a coming-of-age process. But interestingly enough, there are no references whatsoever to King Arthur, who is often referenced in modern fantasy novels as well as in Don Quixote, and who is the main representative of that branch of romances. As we have seen in these past few pages, there are undeniable Cervantean and Quixotic elements in Dunsany’s novel, which basically means that there are narrative devices and plot and character similarities that highlight the existence of a more or less conscious influence of Cervantes in Dunsany’s process of writing this novel. Even though there is no explicit proof or statement that he was consciously imitating the novel, as many other writers did in the past, the multiple evidences prove that he had the novel in mind when writing his own first novel. We can also connect his intention of creating a new narrative genre of fantasy, set in a distant European past—a setting that has been the most usual in the so-called epic fantasy that has flourished since, although most prominently after Tolkien—with that influence. If as we have already mentioned, Cervantes actually intended to terminate the chivalric romances with his mock novel, it only seems natural that Dunsany would have taken the quill after Cervantes in his attempt at reviving and transforming the rich fantasy of medieval romances, and, in doing so, reverse the extinction process. It is true that his novel was never very successful, but it is also true that in the following decades, epic fantasy was widespread as a fantasy genre and had its foundations in several turnof-the-century authors, among whom Dunsany is one of the most prominent. Epic fantasy was born out of a concoction of different elements, most prominently folktales, medieval chronicles, and chivalric romances. I shall argue that in that combination we shouldn’t overlook the role of Don Quixote as a forerunner of the

future genre, as it is possible to find underlying Cervantean/Quixotic features in the epic fantasy genre itself and in certain novels written since that have never been viewed from that perspective. In the meantime, it is indisputable that Rodriguez, even though not a mad reader, is a deserving heir to Alonso Quijano’s spirit; and that Cervantes is winking at us from Dunsany’s text.

NOTES An earlier, shorter version of this paper was presented at the 8th International Conference of the Cervantists Association (CINDAC), Oviedo, Spain, 15 June 2012, under the title “Don Rodriguez (1922): Una imitación quijotesca en clave fantástica.” I’d like to thank S. T. Joshi for his support and collaboration from our first contact when this research project was starting. 1. Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley is the title of the American edition, published in October 1922, whereas the original title of the first British edition in February 1922 was The Chronicles of Rodriguez. The former is the better known, and it is the one to be used in this essay. 2. Quoted in Lin Carter and John Gregory Betancourt’s introduction of Lord Dunsany, Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley (Holicong, PA: Wildside Press, 2002), 9. 3. S. T. Joshi, Lord Dunsany: Master of the Anglo-Irish Imagination (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), 90. 4. In the “Chronology” before the novel starts, it is said that the out-of-time nature of the episodes related has do to with the “magic” involved in the plot that “appears to affect time, much as acids affect some metals, curiously changing its substance.” That foreword may be interpreted as suggesting that the novel is fragmentary and covers different disordered episodes of Rodriguez’s life, which it does not, as the temporal structure is straightforward with little vital space left to the imagination, and some of the chapters naturally follow one another without even the lapse of a few hours. 5. Darrell Schweitzer, Pathways to Elfland: The Writings of Lord Dunsany (Philadelphia: Owlswick Press, 1989), 78. 6. [Unsigned], “Manufactured Magic,” New Statesman No. 473 (6 May 1922): 130. 7. [Unsigned], “The Chronicles of Rodriguez,” Saturday Review (London) No. 3469 (22 April 1922): 423–24. 8. J. W. Krutch, “Knights Errant,” Nation No. 2992 (8 November 1922): 503–4. 9. [Unsigned], “Lord Dunsany’s New Romance,” Spectator No. 4894 (15 April 1922): 470–71. 10. William Beebe, “Lord Dunsany and Don Rodriguez,” New York Times Book Review and Magazine (1 October 1922): 3. 11. John Clute and John Grant, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (London: Orbit, 1997), 303. 12. Brian Stableford, Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature (Lanham, MD:

Scarecrow Press, 2005), 394. 13. J. A. G. Ardila, The Cervantean Heritage: Reception and Influence of Cervantes in Britain (Oxford: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2009). 14. For more on this subject, see Ardila, The Cervantean Heritage. 15. Anthony Close, The Romantic Approach to Don Quixote (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). 16. Just a few examples: The Female Quixote (Charlotte Lennox, 1752), The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves (Tobias Smollett, 1760), The Philosophical Quixote (J. Johnson, 1782), The Political Quixote (George Buxton, 1820), The Return of Don Quixote (G. K. Chesterton, 1927), Monsignor Quixote (Graham Greene, 1982). 17. Ardila, The Cervantean Heritage, 11. 18. David J. Carlson, “Lord Dunsany and the Great War: Don Rodriguez and the Rebirth of Romance,” Mythlore 25, Nos. 1–2 (Fall–Winter 2006): 93–104 (quotation on p. 96). 19. Carlson, “Lord Dunsany and the Great War,” 96. 20. Schweitzer, Pathways to Elfland, 77. 21. Lord Dunsany, Don Rodriguez, 14. 22. Dunsany, Don Rodriguez, 14. 23. Joshi, Lord Dunsany, 90. 24. Clute and Grant, Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 264. 25. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). 26. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha, translated by Tobias Smollett with an introduction by Carlos Fuentes (Bath: Bath Press, 1986), 31. I will be quoting Cervantes via Smollett’s translation (1986 reissue of the original 1756 translation) not only because it is still considered one of the best translations, combining scholarly accuracy with reading ease and playful humor (“the homage of a novelist to a novelist,” as Carlos Fuentes said in the introduction), but also because I think it is important that the foreign reader feel slightly alienated by the archaic linguistic flavor that Spanish readers feel when approaching the original. 27. The three names given before the comma are typically surnames (and thus, in Spanish you cannot apply a title of respect such as the never-capitalized “don”— roughly equivalent to “sir”—to a surname but only to a first name, and that is the reason why the character name is translated into Spanish as Don Rodrigo). Of the three after the comma, the first is a woman’s name, as is the last one (but nonetheless common as second name for a male), and the middle name is rarely spelled with “h” in Spanish. 28. El Cantar del mio Cid, anonymous (dated roughly 12th–13th century). A famous 1961 film rendition (El Cid) was directed by Anthony Mann and stars Charlton Heston in the lead role. 29. Joshi, Lord Dunsany, 92. 30. Schweitzer, Pathways to Elfland, 77. 31. Dunsany, Don Rodriguez, 29.

32. Dunsany, Don Rodriguez, 109. 33. Cervantes in Smollett’s translation (Vol. I, Book I, Chapter VIII), 65. 34. Salvador de Madariaga, quoted in many modern books. Some examples would be “La Quijotización de Sancho Panza y la Sanchificación de Don Quijote,” in Guía del lector del Quijote (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1981); or Alexa Dotras Bravo’s PhD thesis Los trabajos cervantinos de Salvador de Madariaga: historia de una idea doble: Sanchificación y Quijotización (Alcalá de Henares: Biblioteca de Estudios Cervantinos, 2008). 35. Dunsany, Don Rodriguez, 108. 36. Carlson, “Lord Dunsany and the Great War,” 99. 37. Dunsany, Don Rodriguez, 44. 38. Cervantes (II, 41) in Smollett’s translation (Vol. II, Book III, Chapter IX), 650–58. 39. Cervantes (II, 26) in Smollett’s translation (Vol. II, Book II, Chapters VIII–IX), 565–78. 40. Dunsany, Don Rodriguez, 58. 41. Throughout the novel, Dunsany refers to the Spanish paramilitary force “la Guardia Civil” (misspelled as “Garda,” perhaps influenced by the Irish “Gardai”). Nonetheless it is an anachronism, as in Don Quixote’s time that institution did not exist, though there was something closer, “La Santa Hermandad” (the holy brotherhood), which is the force mentioned in the original book (and the force mentioned in the Spanish translation consulted, Don Rodrigo, by Miguel A. López Lafuente [Madrid: Ediciones Blanco Satén, 1991]). 42. Cervantes (I, 22) in Smollett’s translation (Vol. I, Book III, Chapter VIII), 157–65. 43. Cervantes (II, 29) in Smollett’s translation (Vol. II, Book II, Chapter XII), 588–93. 44. Dunsany, Don Rodriguez, 14. 45. Carlson, “Lord Dunsany and the Great War,” 98. 46. Cervantes (I, 2) in Smollett’s translation (Vol. I, Book I, Chapter II), 33. 47. Dunsany, Don Rodriguez, 11. 48. Carlson, “Lord Dunsany and the Great War,” 98. 49. Quoted in the introduction to Dunsany, Don Rodriguez, 9. 50. Lord Dunsany, Patches of Sunlight (London: William Heinemann, 1938), 79. 51. Alonso F. de Avellaneda, Segundo tomo del ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha (1614). This spurious work was published a year before the second part of Don Quijote, and Cervantes was very aggravated with what he considered not only a crime against his intellectual offspring but also a badly written book with a simplified perspective on his beloved characters. He was then finishing his own second part (he had been writing it for almost ten years), and he revised the book and introduced several severe criticisms to Avellaneda scattered throughout the novel. Avellaneda is a pseudonym, and the real identity behind the name is still a matter of controversy.

Chapter 23

Christianity and Paganism in Two Dunsany Novels S. T. Joshi Lord Dunsany, although raised as a Protestant, was in all likelihood an atheist, and he read the iconoclast Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathrustra not long before he wrote his first book, The Gods of Pegāna (1905).[1] Although by no means being the dogged opponent of religious belief that his disciple H. P. Lovecraft was, Dunsany ultimately seems to have come to the conclusion that conventional Christianity was in league with the forces of modernism—specifically as exemplified in his greatest bête noire, mechanization—in undermining that unity with the natural world that he felt to be the only means by which human beings could justify their place in the world. Two of his novels, The Blessing of Pan (1927) and The Curse of the Wise Woman (1933), are devoted to probing the conflict between Christianity and paganism, which for Dunsany symbolized the even more significant conflict between nature and machinery. The Blessing of Pan is unusual in the corpus of Dunsany’s work by portraying an explicit conflict of two diametrically opposed religious visions of the world and of human life and society. The conflict is joined at the very outset—indeed, in the very title of the novel. In Dunsany’s work as a whole, names and titles are of supreme importance, and this is especially the case here. In a Christian society, to speak of a “blessing” is an unambiguous reference to the beneficence offered by belief in Jesus Christ; but when that “blessing” is initiated by Pan, the prototype of paganism, we are in a different world altogether. And the fact that the chief (human) protagonist of the novel, Elderick Anwrel, is identified on the first page of the novel as a “clergyman” and a “vicar” sets up the leading players in the conflict right from the start. Anwrel’s name is worth pondering. Its extreme artificiality might place it in line with many other Dunsany names that are extremely rare, if indeed they have any existence in British nomenclature at all (Jorkens and Smethers are only two wellknown examples); but here the artificiality is deliberately heightened. The fact that, as the representative of Christian culture in the small town of Wolding, he is given such a peculiar name seems designed to suggest Christianity’s lack of vital relation to the community. Dunsany also devotes a full paragraph to the artificiality of the name of his wife, Augusta, as well: “There are reasons for names like that: some gorgeous relative of other days, some splendid fancy crossing the mind of a parent, some imperious look perhaps, long ago, on the face of the child herself; there are always reasons.”[2] She sides with her husband in his strange conflict until almost the end. Contrast these names with that of Arthur Davidson, the vicar who had preceded Anwrel in Wolding and who turns out to be the ultimate instigator of the movement toward paganism in the community: the rugged simplicity of his name stands in striking contrast to that of his successor. The premise of the novel is simple. Davidson, about whom something seemed terribly wrong, seems to have infected the minds and hearts of the townspeople of

Wolding in some inexplicable manner. As Anwrel, increasingly disturbed that the tunes played by seventeen-year-old Tommy Duffin are attracting a greater and greater number of people to head up to the hills to perform pagan ceremonies, investigates his predecessor, he finds hints of the appalling truth. Davidson—as an old woman, Mrs. Tichener, tells Anwrel—was once seen “dancing” (67) at night in the vicarage. This seemingly harmless peccadillo is the symbol for a much more alarming anomaly (alarming, at any rate, from Anwrel’s perspective), for Mrs. Tichener goes on to say: “He [Davidson] had a joint, sir, below his spats as he danced” (69). Could Davidson have been a satyr, or Pan himself? But Davidson is only the trigger for the events of the novel. He had conducted the marriage ceremony of the Duffins, and it is suggested that he had infused something of his spirit into their son, Tommy. Tommy, a dull, thick-witted youth, is nothing more than a receptacle—a conduit for the insidious infusion of paganism into the village. He knows not why he made his pipe, “an instrument he made out of bulrushes or some such weeds” (6), nor does he understand fully why he plays his tune up in the hills and why it has the influence it does. Anwrel himself is attracted to it: [It was] a clear wild tune so remote from the thoughts of man that it seemed to drift from ages and out of lands with which none of our race has ever had any concern. More elfin than the blackbird, more magical than all nightingales, it thrilled the clergyman’s heart with awful longings, which he could no more tell of in words than he could have put words to that tune. (8–9) This is only one of many passages that suggest both the remote antiquity of the tune and its symbolizing the identity of paganism with unspoiled Nature. Dunsany even remarks that “plainer minds, being close to natural, even to pagan, things responded to the marvel of that enchantment with an abandonment unknown even to him [Anwrel]” (25–26). Tommy himself is said to be like “some wild creature shut into a woodman’s hut” (45). The explicitly religious nature of the tune—and, by extension, the religious overtones of the conflict the novel exhibits—is emphasized in numerous passages. One of the first to be attracted to the tune, and to Tommy, is Lily, a young woman who serves as a maid for one of the residents of Wolding. She states flatly that the pipes were “sacred” (88); and, when some young men, offended that Tommy is luring all the young women of the village up to the hills, wish to follow him and exact some kind of vengeance, she calls their behavior “outrageous and sacrilegious” (90). Anwrel, for his part, plainly declares the tune to be “heresy” (54). Later it is said: “Down in the village their thoughts went wandering awhile to far times and curious rites” (107; my emphasis). Other passages make the connection to paganism transparent: When the girls stare at the young men who wish to do Tommy harm, their glares are compared to “Medusa’s powers” (109); Tommy himself is said to be “playing [tunes] like Apollo” (127). In the end, the young men become Tommy’s followers.

The mention of rites is significant: What Tommy—and, in the end, all the other people of Wolding—wish to do is to conduct some kind of ceremony at the Old Stones, a megalithic structure near the village. It becomes apparent that some ceremony—a sacrifice—is to be held on the flat stone in the middle of the structure. Once Anwrel learns this, his attempt to curtail the villagers’ descent into paganism is only redoubled. It cannot, however, be emphasized too strongly that Anwrel is portrayed throughout the novel as a sympathetic character. Dunsany performs a striking feat here: We all know that his own sympathies lie with paganism—and the unity with nature that it entails—and yet the quest of Anwrel to halt its spread is looked upon as wholly admirable, albeit doomed to defeat. The entire novel is told from his perspective, and the repeated blows he suffers in his hopeless quest are depicted poignantly, as of a man tragically overwhelmed by an incalculably superior enemy. The fact that Anwrel is, at the very outset, himself attracted to the tune suggests his own plangently human fallibility—he is scarcely different from the villagers whose spiritual needs he seeks in his quiet and humble way to satisfy. Indeed, at one point Anwrel himself is inclined to “dance fantastic dances” (82) when he hears the tune— exactly as his predecessor, Arthur Davidson, had done. Anwrel appeals to ally after ally, only to find that they fail him. First he writes to his bishop a tentative letter outlining the situation; but lacking specificity as to the gravity of the situation, the letter only incites a bland reply by the bishop to take a week’s vacation. This comes across almost as an order, and Anwrel and his wife dutifully spend a week in the conventional vacation town of Brighton. When they return, they find nothing changed; if anything, the influence of the tune has only grown. Anwrel contemplates writing a more urgent letter, telling that Tommy Duffin “has been affected to a terrible degree by some pre-natal influence from a perfectly shocking source” (75); but he cannot bring himself to mail the letter. At only one point is our sympathy for Anwrel in danger of subsiding. He approaches Tommy’s father at one point, speaking bluntly that the matter has come down to “witchcraft” and going on to say: “You know there are laws against that still on the statute-book” (99). This raises the baneful specter of the infamous biblical passage “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Exodus 22:18), and of the witchcraft trials and hangings that stained several centuries of earlier British history. But Anwrel’s warnings are weak, and there is little likelihood that he would be able to act upon them. When, after a time, Anwrel sees nearly all the people of the village going up to the hills to follow Tommy, he collapses “in tears” (129)—and we too feel his plight keenly, the plight of a man whose own religious faith may be crumbling. Matters go from bad to worse. Anwrel decides to look up a man named Hetley, who had taken his place when Anwrel was in Brighton. Hetley had spent several days in Wolding, and he must have heard something about the tune and its baleful influence. But Anwrel is crestfallen when Hetley declares flatly: “I heard nothing” (149). Hetley is a formidable Greek scholar, but the period of his expertise is not the primitive era of Greek culture but the later, classical era: He is too scholarly, too

civilized to have sensed the paganism inherent in the tune—and, by extension, the spiritual plight of the community. His subsequent suggestion to Anwrel that he encourage the young men of the village to play more cricket (“I have always found that spiritual things follow very closely the physical” [154], he says tritely) is worse than useless. Finally, Anwrel visits the bishop in person, but nothing comes of this either. It is at this time that Anwrel explicitly states to the bishop’s chaplain that his parishioners “practise the rites of Pan instead of the Christian faith” (163). The chaplain’s response is conventional: “Dear me . . . They shouldn’t do that, of course” (163). But when Anwrel explains the matter to the bishop, the latter echoes Hetley’s recommendation of more cricket. Anwrel returns in despair to Wolding. He finds the tokens of civilization crumbling one by one: The post is no longer being delivered; the hay is not being gathered in the fields; a maid is no longer cleaning the teapot. By these simple means does Dunsany convey the collapse of the fabric of civilized life. Even Augusta seems to be wavering. And yet, the villagers are still attending church on Sunday, and Anwrel is initially encouraged when he learns that Mrs. Duffin is continuing to teach Sunday school. But his encouragement turns to horror when he discovers that she is inculcating a strange catechism that sounds like “Egg, oh, pan, pan, tone, tone, lofone, R. K. D.” (215). Dredging up the Greek he studied at Cambridge, he realizes with terror that she is teaching them a sentence (quoted in Greek in the novel) that translates to: “I, Pan, king of all the Arcadian slopes”—“the accursed blessing of Pan!” (215). At this point Dunsany addresses a point that many of his readers may have wondered about. Wolding seems to be an idyllic community that is itself in tune with the eternal rhythms of Nature. Why would Pan choose this place to make his inroad against Christianity? Once again, names are significant. Let us recall The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924): Although there seems to be a stark contrast between the “real” world of Erl with the fantasy realm of Elfland, it does not take much scholarship to realize that Erl is German for “elf”—making the distinction between Erl and Elfland problematical indeed. Much the same can be said for The Blessing of Pan. Wolding itself—an imaginary village that has no corollary in actual English topography—is derived from wold (forest, woodland), and Dunsany notes plainly that it was “not harmed at all by anything that had changed the world in the restless nineteenth century” (217). It is, indeed, precisely because this village is “unspoiled” (219) that it serves as the launching place for Pan. The young people are affected first, because the older residents are more attuned to the ways of civilized life: “the old have forgotten so much and the young have yet to learn” (120). But in the end, they go too. In one of the most dramatic episodes in The Blessing of Pan, Anwrel decides to make one last plea to the sensibilities of his parishioners in a final sermon in a Sunday service. He first attempts to write a sermon “based on Holy Writ” (221), but is unable to do so: The limitations of Christian dogma in the face of pagan opposition are transparently displayed. Finally, Anwrel resorts to an extemporaneous sermon in which he pleads with his parishioners to remember the old ways to which they had

grown accustomed: “the old ways were best . . . the faith of their fathers and of the old time before them” (227). Although his sermon seems at first to be working, he is dismayed to find that the people are leaving the church one by one. In the end only his wife, Augusta, remains; and then, shockingly, she too gets up and leaves. Later she tells him poignantly: “I stayed till you were finished” (251). To whom can Anwrel turn? During his visit to the bishop, he had stumbled upon a crazy person named Perkin. If the scholarship and rationality of Hetley, the bishop, and others are unavailing, perhaps the madness of Perkin will be of some use. He sends a telegram to Perkin, pleading with him to come and help. Perkin finally does so, showing up at the end of Anwrel’s final sermon. He declares flatly that the townspeople have exchanged one “illusion” (250) for another, and in the novel’s most critical passage he discusses the matter with Anwrel: “Why, what does one need but illusions?” answered Perkin. “They’re gone. I’ve lost them,” said the vicar. “One cannot hold them all alone.” He spread his hands to the emptiness of his room. “I’ve none to help me now.” “Plenty of friends over there,” said Perkin, pointing to Wold Hill. “Plenty of illusions.” “But,” gasped Anwrel, “but they’re the enemy’s!” “They’re yours if you want them,” said Perkin. (250) Those words are prophetic. Anwrel, almost unaware of what he is doing, fashions an ax from an old paleolith (he was in the habit of collecting them as a hobby) and goes up to the Old Stones. All the villagers are there. At dawn, he conducts the rite they have all been waiting for, sacrificing an old bull on the altar stone. At this point Dunsany makes clear the message he had been suggesting all along —the identity of paganism with a repudiation of modern mechanized civilization. For the villagers had “forsaken the ways of the nineteenth century”—adding, significantly, “and, for that matter, the ways of the last two thousand years” (261), thereby fusing civilization with Christianity. The defeat of Christianity signifies the triumph of Nature and of the ancient past: Tommy Duffin’s curious music that lured one away from the present, and that then seemed to wake up old memories that nobody guessed were there, seems to have come at a time when something sleeping within us first guessed that the way by which we were then progressing t’wards the noise of machinery and the clamour of sellers, amidst which we live today, was a wearying way, and they turned from it. And turning from it they turned away from the folk that were beginning to live as we do. (274) And yet, Dunsany cannot disguise his religious skepticism, as he states plainly that the pagan gods were themselves merely a part of “whatever might lurk in the vast space of man’s ignorance” (272). Anwrel, for his part, is now happy in his

resumed role of the villagers’ spiritual guide—but from a pagan, not a Christian, orientation. The Curse of the Wise Woman is a very different kind of novel. Here, the conflict between Christianity and paganism is only one strand of a rich tapestry that includes such other dichotomies as past vs. present, England vs. Ireland, Catholic vs. Protestant, and nature vs. civilization. But as in The Blessing of Pan, the paganism/Christianity dichotomy is virtually identical with the nature/civilization dichotomy. In the simplest terms, The Curse of the Wise Woman—Dunsany’s first “Irish” novel—is about a company, Peat Development (Ireland) Syndicate, that wishes to drain a bog near the imaginary town of Clonrue, Ireland: By compressing the peat with machinery, it can produce cheap coal. A “wise woman”—which the narrator makes plain is merely a euphemism for a “practising witch”[3] —is outraged at the plans. Summoning apparently supernatural powers, she causes an immense storm to destroy the company’s machinery and put an end to its plans. Interwoven with this relatively elementary conflict is a network of other tensions, focusing not only around the protagonist, Charles James Peridore, the son of a duke and the owner of a large estate in the area, but also his gamekeeper and “bogwatcher,” Tommy Marlin, whose mother is the wise woman. It is the Marlins who specifically embody the paganism of the novel. Marlin himself is described at the outset as one who seemed “to be somehow akin to those forces that ruled, or blew over, the bog, and that cared nothing for man” (22)—the latter description always a positive thing in Dunsany’s worldview. This deep sense of communion with nature on Marlin’s part is enhanced by his devotion to the mythical Tir-nan-Og—an otherworldly realm in Irish myth analogous to Elysium or Valhalla. And yet, because Marlin has been saturated with traditional Catholic upbringing, he believes that this devotion is a “reserved sin”—which Peridore explains as meaning “he had done something for which no parish priest could give absolution” (37). Marlin has, in effect, “preferred Tirnan-Og to Heaven” (38), and he condemns himself for it while being unable to rid himself of the belief. And because Marlin thinks of Tir-nan-Og specifically because of the bog (42), Dunsany effects a union between paganism and nature on the one hand and Christianity and civilization on the other. Peridore, for his part, is close to nature in his own way. The first half of the novel is full of scenes of hunting—Peridore learning the methods of hunting snipe and geese from Marlin, and also engaging in a long fox hunt that takes him across miles of lovely Irish countryside—in a manner that may offend modern sensibilities with its unashamed killing of defenseless animals. (The killing of the fox is justified by its predation of chickens and other livestock.) But Dunsany emphasizes the unity with nature that a hunter can achieve: “I think we sportsmen are somewhat nearer to the tides and the growth of trees and the night and the morning, and to whatever we call the plan that orders the planets, than many a man that does more useful things” (47). Moreover, this hunting makes Peridore feel closely tied to the people of his community—tenant farmers, for the most part.

Mrs. Marlin is perhaps an even more potent symbol for closeness with nature than her son. In our first introduction to her, she tells Peridore when the geese will be coming back to the area on the north wind: “‘Haven’t I seen the north wind?’ she said. ‘Aye, face to face. And few the secrets he hides from me’” (35). Dunsany even states that the bog had given Mrs. Marlin “whatever powers she had” (98). Later this suggestion is clarified: “There’s a power . . . that is hid in the heart of the bog, that is against all their plans [i.e., the plans of the development company]” (131). An explicitly religious tone enters her dispute with the development company when it is stated that, to her, it would be “sacrilege” (99) to alter the bog. Her devotion to it is enhanced when her own son, dying of liver failure from drinking too much whiskey, refuses to die in his bed (for that would, in his belief, consign him to hell) but gets up and wanders off “over the bog” (153) to Tir-nan-Og, meaning that he will be young and vibrant forever. Peridore enlists the aid of the local townspeople to hunt for his body, but the treacherousness of the bog foils their efforts. Whether the supernatural ever comes into play in this novel is a question Dunsany deliberately leaves unanswered. A local doctor, clearly educated in England, suggests that the curses that Mrs. Marlin flings at the company and its employees may be having a psychological effect on the men working there; and, to be sure, all the men from Clonrue leave off working for the company. This element underscores the England/Ireland conflict in the novel. The name of the development company suggests that it is the Irish branch of an English company, a point emphasized by one of the townspeople, who refers to it as “that English company” (179). And yet, the townspeople, although sympathetic to Mrs. Marlin and not wishing the bog to be drained—for, although they and their ancestors have been cutting peat from it since primitive times, they have done so in a manner that does not damage the essential character of the bog—feel that nothing can be done to prevent its destruction: “It’s the will of God” (206). This offhand comment suggests the degree to which conventional Christian belief has sided with the forces of civilization and even mechanization, as opposed to nature and paganism. But, in the novel’s climactic scene, Mrs. Marlin appears to summon the north wind to unleash a particularly vicious storm that destroys the company’s machinery; in the process, the bog itself moves, covering over both the machinery and Mrs. Marlin, who has died in the course of events. Did she really summon the storm, or was this merely a fortuitous coincidence? We shall never know. I have not discussed the element of political violence that underscores The Curse of the Wise Woman, for it is not central to the religious theme I am investigating. The novel is set around 1880, when the so-called Land War—a struggle between tenant farmers and landlords—was raging. Indeed, the novel’s riveting first scene depicts Peridore’s father fleeing from four men who seek to kill him for unspecified actions he has taken; although he escapes and ends up in Paris, he is later killed. This hostility is not extended to his son, who has fervently stayed out of politics. Indeed, at a crucial point in the novel, one of his father’s would-be assassins approaches him and says he can undertake certain actions to put an end to the development company’s efforts.

Peridore, knowing this would mean the killing of some workers for purposes of intimidation, reluctantly declines the man’s offer. The Catholic/Protestant dichotomy in The Curse of the Wise Woman is similarly not something that Dunsany emphasizes, and it in fact may be the most disappointing element in it because of the sketchiness of its treatment. The young Peridore, almost seventeen when the novel opens, is attracted to a neighbor, Laura Lanley, and sporadically courts her in the course of the novel. Peridore never declares his own religious affiliation, and only at the end do we learn that their budding romance is nipped in the bud because Laura is a Protestant. Both The Blessing of Pan and The Curse of the Wise Woman are written in an exquisitely simple but heartfelt prose that creates an atmosphere of poignant melancholy and sustains it to the end. In both novels, the element of fantasy or the supernatural is reduced almost to the vanishing point; but nevertheless a pervasive sense of the weird infuses both works, making them among the most ethereal of Dunsany’s novels. The religious tension that is at the core of both narratives shows how Dunsany was able to employ weirdness—even in a highly attenuated form—to convey profound messages about human life and society, and the ongoing struggles of both faith and secularism in an increasingly mechanized age.

NOTES 1. See Mark Amory, Biography of Lord Dunsany (London: Collins, 1972), 40. 2. Lord Dunsany, The Blessing of Pan (London: Putnam, 1927). Further references will occur parenthetically in the text. 3. Lord Dunsany, The Curse of the Wise Woman (1933; London: Collins, 1972), 32. Further references will occur parenthetically in the text.

Chapter 24

Dunsany’s Retreat from the Fantastic Darrell Schweitzer If we look at the whole of Dunsany’s career, the most obvious pattern that becomes visible throughout the large middle of it can only be described as a gradual withdrawal from the fantastic, a farewell to Elfland and the lands at the edge of the world, which caused H. P. Lovecraft and others of his admirers to express regrets that he had lost and could not regain his old manner. But the matter is more complicated than that. We should moderate our view of it and our disappointment. It never became an absolute rejection of fantasy. It was a retreat, to be sure, but more of a strategic withdrawal than a rout. The causes and consequences were many. Simplest explanation is that any writer, even a writer of unworldly, ethereal fantasies, must respond to real life and to the external world. The late Lin Carter used to opine that Lord Dunsany should have gone on “writing what he was good at,” that is, turning out more stories like those in The Book of Wonder or A Dreamer’s Tales forever; but this is simplistic. After a while, Dunsany was considerably less “good at” that sort of thing, and he knew it. Rather than become a stale imitation of his younger self, he went on to develop himself in other ways. Indeed, we can see his career as a whole series of reinventions and renewals, as one phase after another ran its course. The early Dunsany ends with the First World War. He was called away to war work. He spent some time in the trenches, was wounded in the Easter Rebellion in Dublin in 1916, and then got a job in the War Office in London, where his not uncongenial task was writing short pieces for newspapers and magazines, high-grade propaganda, which was later collected in Tales of War and Unhappy Far-Off Things. The war itself was traumatic for him, as it was for everyone of his generation. The casualty rates had been fantastic. It was the kind of war in which armies could lose tens of thousands of men in a single battle and accomplish nothing. Someone Dunsany’s age certainly lost many friends, even most of them. Many schools lost the entire class of 1914. Rapid social change followed, with the giddy, uncertain 1920s, the Irish war of independence and subsequent “Troubles,” the British Empire beginning to totter, and the onset of the Great Depression. On a more personal level, as Dunsany’s biographer Mark Amory aptly puts it, before the war, Dunsany and his wife had been young. Now they weren’t. The sunny days of his Edwardian youth were gone. Unsurprisingly, then, many of his subsequent works were about loss, and the inability to retrieve what is gone. His first book after the war was Tales of Three Hemispheres (1919), a catch-up volume of earlier material. “The Opal Arrow-Head,” published in 1920 but perhaps written earlier, is not Dunsany’s best, but it does allude back directly to The Last Book of Wonder (1916). It’s about a man addicted to gorgondy, the fatal brew of the gnomes. But Dunsany wrote few more stories of this type, and so this one was not actually collected until 1949, in The Man Who Ate the Phoenix. What he did in the meantime is reinvent himself, as a novelist. His first novel, The

Chronicles of Rodriguez (American title: Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley) appeared in 1922. Here we see that Dunsany is still mastering the novelistic form, as the narrative meanders, but there is no shortage of the fantastic, as the noble knight of a hero adventures (and sometimes blunders) through the Spain of the Golden Age (date unspecified, because, we are told, the presence of magic tends to obscure dates), righting wrongs and even at one point visiting a professor of magic who sends his spirit venturing onto the surface of the Sun. All ends happily, as a romance should, though with much contrivance. The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924) gives the impression that Dunsany, with great and concerted effort, has summoned every last bit of imaginative power he still possessed, even as the King of Elfland, before the story was over, has used all his magical runes to reconcile his daughter and her lost human lover. This is a veritable symphony of poetic fantasy, the most concentrated example of everything critics and readers have come to regard as “Dunsanian.” If at times the prose may be a bit overly exquisite for some tastes, The King of Elfland’s Daughter remains one of his greatest and most famous works. Even here, the theme is loss. The glorious vision of Elfland, “which may be only told of in song,” is explicitly equated with youth. When a character can no longer see the Elfin Mountains in the distance, it is explained, that is for the young. Much of the plot concerns the hero’s desperate quest to regain Elfland once he has lost it (and the princess he had married, incidentally, who reverted to her magical nature and drifted away with a flight of leaves). There is a happy ending, as the princess ultimately takes pity on him and persuades her father to expend the last of the great runes on which the realm depends. Elfland comes “racing back, as the tide over flat sand,”[1] and overwhelms the “real” world, at least the part our hero lives in; but we still have a sense that this is a precarious thing, that this little bubble of the fantastic may one day burst, and certainly Elfland has been diminished by the effort. In The Charwoman’s Shadow (1926) we have a clear case of what critic John Clute calls “thinning.” The magic goes away. This is a theme of loss and maturity. The novel is a semi-sequel to Don Rodriguez, set in Spain, about a young man who is tricked into selling his shadow to a magician. Many fantastic adventures follow, but ultimately the magician, in order to avoid damnation, along with all pagan and magical things, must withdraw to the Land Beyond the Moon’s Rising, never to return. Thus the Golden Age, poignantly, ends. This develops further in The Blessing of Pan (1927). Here a clergyman is troubled by strange, ethereal music that comes wafting down from the hills, inducing respectable rural folk to indulge in pagan rites. By the time the book is over, the vicar has succumbed too. Magic wins but still remains mostly invisible, at the periphery of human experience. In subsequent novels, it withdraws, ultimately, altogether. The Curse of the Wise Woman (1933) is Dunsany’s first novel actually set in Ireland. It is filled with vivid descriptions of nature and clearly conveys Dunsany’s love of the land, and of the outdoors. Many of the details are semiautobiographical. The “fantastic” element is

that of the wise woman of the title, who curses a development company determined to ruin the local peat bog for commercial reasons. Although Tir-nan-Og, the Celtic afterworld, glimmers faintly in the distance (at least in the imagination of the characters) and the wise woman’s curse seems to bring about the desired end when a great, sloshing avalanche of peat destroys the development work, there is actually no overt fantastic or supernatural element in the novel at all. The characters believe the magic is real. The reader is left wishing the magic were real. But it is pretty clear that it is not. In Rory and Bran (1936), another tale of Ireland, the magic is clearly the delusion of the rather simpleminded hero. His “stone of the sea” for all its alleged mystical powers is just a peace of old, tide-worn glass. In Up in the Hills (1936) the fantastic element is thrown away at the outset. The opening promises something far better than the novel actually delivers. A newly independent African country, to prove that it has arrived as a modern nation, sends an archeological expedition to Ireland, very much as Western nations might send an expedition to some wild and backward place. Excavations begin at an ancient site, but the local witches are so concerned about disturbing the dead that they begin to hurl curses. With all these curses flying fast and furiously, the young hero decides it will be safer to take to the hills, lest he get hit in the supernatural crossfire. The rest of the book has nothing to do with witches or curses, but might be described as Tom Sawyer Meets the Sinn Fein and jokingly suggests that the Irish “Troubles” were nothing more than a bunch of rambunctious boys playing games, which would seem to trivialize the very real bitterness and suffering caused by the civil war that followed Irish independence in the early 1920s, and the subsequent sectarian violence. This is a well-written book, with a very witty opening; but time has not been kind to it, and in any case, the vision of Elfland has certainly been lost. Nor has it been recovered in My Talks with Dean Spanley (1936), which actually has a supernatural element (the Dean, under the influence of a rare wine, can remember his previous incarnation as a dog), but this is largely treated as a joke, like an extended Jorkens story, and the book is more about dogs and nature than it is about magic. The reincarnation element is little more than a device for long (and admittedly excellent) passages from a canine point of view. The Story of Mona Sheehy (1939) would seem to put paid to Elfland and the fantastic once and for all. The lady of the title is believed by Irish peasants to be the daughter of the queen of the Fairies, but a priest, on page 1, states very succinctly, “I never saw a more mortal child.” Later on in the book Dunsany seems to reveal his own thinking: “But the question is how to chase with our fancies the rainbow. A man may say, ‘The rainbow is undoubtedly there, touching that hedge.’ But it is elsewhere to someone else, and elsewhere to the same man when he goes to the hedge. Let’s chase no more rainbows.”[2] This is pretty astonishing, and disappointing coming from the author of A Dreamer’s Tales. It would seem that Dunsany, as old age approached (he was sixtyone in 1939), had lost his ideals. He had ceased to dream. In his earlier fictions, he made it clear that seeking after impossibly beautiful goals could lead one to a bad

end (think of “Carcassonne” or “The Sorrow of Search”), but in the old days the reason was different. The beautiful and the fantastic were definitely there, as were the Gods of Pegāna themselves, looming mistily over the edge of the world and out of reach, not because they were illusions, but because mankind proved to play too small a role in the overall cosmic scheme of things. Yet all perception of beauty, all romance, must come from such strivings. By the time he’s gotten to The Story of Mona Sheehy, Dunsany is saying, “It’s not there. Forget it.” He went even further in an article called “The Fantastic Dreams,” published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1949. Just before the Second World War he met a young man who aspired to write fantastic stories. He discouraged him: . . . the advice I gave him was this: “Don’t write fantastic tales. There may be as much beauty in them as in anything you can get from life around you; but readers, as far as I know them, will judge your stories and their trueness to life from the life they know themselves. Therefore let the surface of the world you write of always be the pavement. More people live upon pavement than in the fields; and if you put your story there they will say that it is true to life. The ideal way to judge a story is to look out the window from which the author is looking, and to see the view of the world that he has to show you. But that is not how you will be judged, for the reader will look out his own window, and if your story describes nothing he sees from that window, he will say it is untrue to life. Remember that. . . . Write of the world you see in the company of the greatest number of people and leave fantasy alone, whatever you dream.”[3] One is tempted to say that this is an appalling surrender to popular taste. True, interest in fantasy was at a very low ebb when he was writing this, and something like The King of Elfland’s Daughter published in the late 1940s simply would not have been understood by most critics or readers, if it managed to get published at all; but is Dunsany actually saying that one must surrender any individual aesthetic vision one has to pander to the lowest common denominator? Was he advising the young man to write some cheap, formulaic best seller instead? That sure doesn’t sound like the Dunsany who wrote “Artist and Tradesman” back in 1918, a manifesto of art for art’s sake, in which he argued that sincerity and beauty are what matter, and that the artist, rather than the literary tradesman (i.e., a hack), rules the centuries. For an answer, we need to read the rest of “The Fantastic Dreams” carefully. He further tells us that in 1940, as the war raged, Dunsany met the same man again, who had a haggard look about him. What was the matter? It was that his most fantastic and terrible dreams were coming true. After the war, Dunsany met him one more time. The man no longer seemed as troubled. He had come to realize that his “fantastic dreams” had become mere history with the rise and fall of Nazi Germany, the coming of the atomic age, and so forth. He still considered becoming a writer. Should he write? He had one last dream. Dunsany realized he had no business discouraging the fellow, and told him, yes, he should, and seek publication. But the

man said he couldn’t do that because readers were “so fond of their cities” that he would never tell them what he saw in the future. In other words, the last “fantastic dream” was the collapse of civilization and possibly the extinction of mankind. Dunsany could be saying, a bit more creditably, that the pressing urgencies of the real world, and the fact that we now have the power to exterminate ourselves (something he had remarked on in A Glimpse from a Watch Tower, 1946) seem to make fantasies of the King of Elfland’s Daughter sort a trifle irrelevant. But did Dunsany follow his own advice? Did he write only what he saw out his window? We will note that he was no great success as a realist. Up in the Hills contains numerous absurd situations, less believable than fantasy. His wartime novel, Guerrilla (1944), was admittedly written in a hurry for a contest, but it is not, to put things mildly, one of the great novels of World War II. It lacks the hard edge of realism. The lead character’s transformation from schoolboy to warrior (the story is about resistance against the Nazis in Greece) is blandly told, too easy, without any pain. Dunsany’s short fiction from between the two world wars is very mixed. His major creation of the period is the clubman, Joseph Jorkens, a tall-tale teller who, when plied with whiskey, will expound on the extraordinary adventures of his youth, which include encounters with witches, mermaids, walking trees, and even a flight to Mars in a biplane (although this last happened to someone else and is merely related by Jorkens). Mr. Jorkens, we are told, is a liar, but the fun of the stories is that they can never be disproved. They are more than just fibs. They might be true. As Joshi notes in Lord Dunsany: Master of the Anglo-Irish Imagination, as the Jorkens series progressed, the number of overtly fantastic stories decreased. Some of the earliest ones, notably “The King of Sarahb” (in The Travel Tales of Joseph Jorkens, 1931), almost recapture the spirit of his earliest work. Later on, indeed, some of them become jokes; in “The Correct Kit,” Jorkens escapes being eaten by African cannibals by proving to them that they are not, by the white man’s standards, properly attired for dinner. They are in evening dress, but the bows on their collars and shoes are reversed. Dunsany was a writer who could write anything, right off the cuff, fluently and competently, whether or not it was actually worth the trouble of writing. He could make any notion into a Jorkens story. As a result, some of them are very slight indeed. Some of them cross genres. A very late one, “Not Guilty,” is a memorably gruesome mystery story. But there are fantastic ones, to the end, and, significantly, ones that express his later concerns, such as “The Gods of Clay” (in Jorkens Borrows Another Whiskey, 1954), in which intolerance leads to nuclear war and destroys the planet we now see in fragments as the asteroids. “The Warning” (in The Fourth Book of Jorkens, 1947) is told only when Jorkens is very drunk, and he had it from a lunatic, but it’s about machines conspiring to overthrow mankind. Quite a few of the later Jorkens stories that are fantastic at all are actually science fiction, complete with mad scientists, menacing machines, and atomic doom. In The Last Book of Jorkens, compiled in the

mid-1950s but not published until 2002, we still find fantasy, including a story of witchcraft, and another about an illiterate peasant who, when possessed by an angel, plays heavenly music on an organ. Among previously unpublished Jorkens stories that seem to postdate even this, we find “A Meeting of Spirits,” in which Jorkens tries to conduct the ultimate “dinner party,” having a medium conjure up for him the ghosts of Horace, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Beethoven. Other short fiction from the period between the wars runs the whole range from “The Return” (first published 1935; in The Man Who Ate the Phoenix, 1949), a superb ghost story, from the point of view of the ghost. “The Mad Ghost” is another out-and-out supernatural story, combining ghosts and Irish political violence, written from an outline provided in a letter from Rudyard Kipling. But there are also a lot of stories about deluded people or liars. “The Widow Flynn’s Apple Tree” (in Phoenix) concerns a boy who is found asleep beneath an apple tree with an apple-laden branch in hand. He excuses himself with a fantastic tale of how he was magically turned into a goose by the widow (a witch), then back into a boy while still airborne. Thus he fell through the tree and broke off the branch. What distinguishes this story is the power of its description, which depicts the animal’s point of view as well as anything Dunsany ever wrote. Is he lying? We are never told. The story is so good that we would like to believe the boy. This is also a way Dunsany will sometimes address the subject of the fantastic: it may not be true, but we wish it were. Also to be considered in this context is The Strange Journeys of Colonel Polders (1950), which is arguably a novel, but little more than a series of episodes, as the colonel offends a Hindu holy man, doubting reincarnation, so that the Indian transforms him into a series of animals. There is no indication that this is not actually happening. By contrast, the title story “The Man Who Ate the Phoenix” is one of several about simple-minded Irish peasants who delude themselves into believing in the fantastic. Paddy has shot a pheasant, which he thinks is a phoenix. He has been told by his doctor to avoid alcohol, because he has no tolerance for it. Yet his mother cooks the bird in sherry, and when he eats it, he has a series of hallucinatory encounters with a ghost, a banshee, the walking dead, and so forth. It is made very clear that none of these are real. Perhaps the nastiest story of this sort is “Helping the Fairies” (1947), in which an English farmer, living in Ireland, digs up a thornbush on his land. This, the Irish are convinced, will have dire consequences, because thornbushes are sacred to the Fairies. But nothing happens. The Englishman continues to prosper. It is a scandal. It might suggest that the Fairies are powerless or, worse yet, don’t exist. At last, to uphold the reputation of the Fairies, the Irish “help” them by murdering the Englishman. Stories like this (and there are many more) are certainly anti-fantastic, but, of course, Dunsany did not write such stories exclusively. He could still use a ghost story to tell of longing and vanished youth, as in “Autumn Cricket” (1952); or for a comedy of the modern age vs. the traditional supernatural, as in “The Ghosts of the Heaviside Layer” (1955), in which a haunted house is cleansed by a psychic vacuum cleaner of

the sort the Ghostbusters might have used decades later. “The Ghost of the Valley” (1955) is more serious in tone. The ghost, which personifies nature, is destroyed by air pollution. Not explicitly fantastic, but very serious in tone, and startlingly moving at times is “The Story of Tse Gah” (1947), which is about a boy chosen by priests in an Oriental land (vaguely resembling Tibet) to be the latest incarnation of a god. He leads a miserable life, abused and exploited by the often-cynical priests. Then the revolution comes, and the priests are killed. The boy, who now believes he is the god, tries to call down thunder and wrath on the revolutionaries. Nothing happens, and he is left forlorn. This might be taken as another anti-fantasy, because of the dire costs of supernatural belief, but it differs from the others in that the believer is not seen as foolish, just pathetically misguided. Then there are Dunsany’s late novels to be considered. His Fellow Men (1952) is an actual mainstream novel, about a man who naively seeks tolerance by agreeing to everyone’s creed. This lands him in hot water quickly, and after various adventures he converts to Ba’hai faith, which tolerates all others. The conclusion the character (and Dunsany apparently) comes to is that everyone needs his own special illusion, to make him feel he has the one true way. Nobody, after all, wants to be told his religion is no better than any other, which may be why, in the real world, the Ba’hai sect remains very small. Dunsany’s other two late novels, aside from His Fellow Men and The Strange Journeys of Colonel Polders, are science fiction. The Last Revolution (1951) extends “The Warning.” The machines do revolt after a scientist invents one that can think. The book has its admirers—the late L. Sprague de Camp was prominent among them —but it seems old-fashioned and a trifle out of touch, both with the development of science fiction and with science itself. The resolution, that the scientist should just put aside things of science, hardly convinces or provides any real answer for the problems of technology. But that, or any other quality or lack of quality the novel may have, is not the point in the present discussion. That Dunsany should, late in life, write a science fiction novel shows that, indeed, he never took the advice he gave to that young man before World War II. He did not cease writing fantastic dreams. If Elfland and Pegāna faded away, as do the bright memories of one’s youth, the first thing he did was turn that very fading away into the subject matter of a whole series of novels, from The King of Elfland’s Daughter through The Story of Mona Sheehy. He then did indeed write some anti-fantasies, such as “The Man Who Ate the Phoenix,” in which literal belief in the supernatural is shown to be foolish. But, after no great success with realism, he managed to adapt the fantastic mode to new purposes and address new and urgent concerns. In his last novel, The Pleasures of a Futuroscope (written in 1955, but not published until 2003) seems literally to look out the window of that fellow who refused to write what he saw at the end of “The Fantastic Dreams.” The novel concerns an elderly gentleman, allegedly a journalist but pretty clearly based on Dunsany himself, whose view from his window very much resembles that from the window of Dunsany’s

study in his house in Kent. Only this character is extolling the “amusement value” of a futuroscope, which enables him to peer forward through time. He sees precisely what Dunsany and the would-be writer in “The Fantastic Dreams” most feared. There is an enormous flash on the northern horizon in the direction of London. Then civilization is gone. He then follows the adventures of a neo-Stone Age family as one of their women is carried off by a completely savage Wild Man, and the sweetheart of another family member is abducted by the Gypsies. The Gypsies, incidentally, are seen as the one group that has survived the holocaust more or less intact. They too are in harmony with nature, if “tainted” by their occasional use of metal. Ultimately this is not so much about neo-primitive adventures as it is about how the old man in the present, looking through the futuroscope, gains a new perspective on the future and of mankind’s place in it. That place is small. Here we flash back all the way to such stories as “Where the Tides Ebb and Flow” and “In Zaccarath” in A Dreamer’s Tales (1910). This is the handwriting on the wall. After man and all his works have passed away, nature remains and will triumph. Dunsany had been telling us that all along. What he managed to do, in his middle and late periods, was not to abandon fantasy, but to step back from it for a while, then use it to pick up threads that had been in his work from the very beginning, achieving a remarkable thematic unity in a career that extended over six decades.

NOTES 1. Lord Dunsany, The King of Elfland’s Daughter (London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1924), 149. 2. Lord Dunsany, The Story of Mona Sheehy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1940), 229. 3. Lord Dunsany, The Ghosts of the Heaviside Layer and Other Fantasms (Philadelphia: Owlswick Press, 1980), 123.

VI

On Influences

Chapter 25

From Gods to Giants Susan Bassnett Theatrical Parallels Between Lord Dunsany and Luigi Pirandello On the 4th of April 1925 the Teatro d’Arte di Roma opened with a performance of two plays—La sagra del signore della nave by Pirandello and a short Irish play, The Gods of the Mountain, by a little-known writer, Edward, Lord Dunsany. Although Dunsany remains virtually unknown in British theatre history, he nevertheless wrote a play that so caught the imagination of Pirandello that he decided to stage it as part of the opening night’s performance, an opening night that was surely one of the most significant moments of his theatrical career. Pirandello was not alone in finding The Gods of the Mountain a striking theatrical tour de force. A Russian version of the play had already been performed at the Moscow Arts Theatre, marking Dunsany’s international debut. But initially the fate of the play had been in some doubt; it opened at the Haymarket Theatre in London on 1st June 1911, after Herbert Trench had been dubious about the staging of a short play (it lasted only 45 minutes) that required such complex designing and a great many lighting changes. Despite Trench’s initial doubts, the play was a success and ran for three months. It was first published in 1914 and in 1916 was performed in the United States, where it was again highly successful. Encouraged by the success of The Gods of the Mountain, Yeats and Lady Gregory put on another Dunsany play at the Court Theatre in London, and so Dunsany’s reputation as a playwright was firmly established. It is interesting to speculate on what it was about this short piece that so caught the imagination of its time, and in order to shed some light on this phenomenon the play needs to be considered in its historical context. Lord Dunsany was an Anglo-Irish aristocrat who enjoyed dabbling in writing. Frank Harris describes him in less than flattering terms in his Contemporary Portraits: he went to Eton and he is still suffering from that infection. Eton made him an athlete it’s said, and taught him to play cricket, but it also taught him to sneer at Women’s Suffrage and to revere the House of Lords. At Eton he lost a little of his Celtic kindly humane manners and learned “good form”; instead of prizing Celtic equality and the Kingdom of man upon earth, he came to believe in British Imperialism and the world-devouring destinies of the British Empire . . . all this imperialistic foolery I put down to his Eton training and, of course, in the last resort, to his want of brains.[1] But despite this negative assessment, Dunsany became friendly with Yeats and Lady Gregory and largely due to their encouragement began writing for the theatre.

Dunsany had already published some of his collected short stories in 1905, in which he indulged in flights of extravagant fancy, inventing strange mysterious lands peopled with exotic races. He had no interest in naturalism, nor in character study of any kind, and says himself of these early stories: “I did not feel in the least as though I were inventing but rather as though I wrote the history of lands that I had known in forgotten wanderings.”[2] The Gods of the Mountain develops the theme of the strange, unknown land that exists beyond any known legal, social or political system. The stage directions at the start of the play tell us virtually nothing; Dunsany simply says that it is “The East. Outside a city wall. Three beggars are seated upon the ground.” This is an Orient of Dunsany’s own imagination, with no other features to guide us, and this desolate place, as we soon learn, is in the throes of a moral crisis. The land has been abandoned by the gods—“the gods are drowsy”—benevolence and joy have been forgotten, song and beauty have ceased to exist. There seems to be no possibility for change in this wasteland, but with the arrival of Agmar, the stranger, the beggars are offered a chance to exploit the situation. Agmar’s plan is very simple: since the seven green gods who protect the city have disappeared, he and six other beggars will impersonate them: Each of the seven shall wear a piece of the green raiment underneath his rags. And per adventure here and there a little shall show through; and men shall say: “These seven have disguised themselves as beggars. But we know not what they be.” (Act I)[3] Disguised in this way, the beggars succeed in tricking the citizens and for a while they are able to enjoy all the advantages of being gods. Thanks to Agmar’s cunning they even manage to placate the more suspicious of the inhabitants of the city, but at the moment of triumph another stranger appears who tells them that he has seen the seven missing gods: Agmar: You say you saw us? The man: Yes, master. Not as you are now, but otherwise. We implore you, master, not to wander at evening. You are terrible in the gloaming. You are . . . Agmar: You say we appeared not as we are now. How did we appear to you? The man: Otherwise, master, otherwise. Agmar: But how did we appear to you? The man: You were all green, master, all green in the gloaming, all of rock again as you used to be in the mountains. Master, we can bear to see you in flesh like men, but when we see rock walking it is terrible, it is terrible. (Act III)[4] The play ends with an extraordinary coup de théâtre, when the seven gods arrive on stage, walking rock-figures as the man had described them who pass in front of the seven beggars and turn them into stone too. The play ends with the citizens

bringing food to their supposed gods, and finding only seven green statues in their place, lit by a strange green light. It is a curious little play, full of striking theatrical effects but in ideological terms decidedly ambiguous. Agmar comes over as a hero in the first act (this short piece is nevertheless divided into three acts) but at the end of Act II when he refuses to help a man who implores him to save his daughter’s life, Agmar seems to be lacking in human warmth and kindness and when he insists that the news of the return of the real gods is false in Act III, he appears to be overbearingly proud and loses sympathy. All the characters are portrayed negatively, they are cruel, stupid, suspicious and selfish, and once the image of Agmar as hero is destroyed, nothing positive remains. The gods abandon the people and only return when their own power is threatened, destroying the seven beggars who have dared impersonate them. There are no signs of hope from heaven or earth in this play, which offers us a nihilistic vision of existence. Compared to Yeats, for example, who also uses exotic fairy-tale lands as settings in some of his plays, Dunsany’s work is completely negative. Yeats uses fairy tale as a metaphor for the state of Ireland, just as many years later Brecht was to use a mythical orient as the setting for the Gute Mensch von Szechuan, but both Yeats and Brecht had precise political reasons for setting their plays in mysterious lands. Dunsany, on the contrary, seems to use the exotic setting simply as a theatrical gesture. Despite his friendship with Yeats, there is no glimmer of any sense of commitment in his barren, pessimistic vision. So we are left with a perplexing question; on the one hand, Pirandello can hardly have been drawn to Dunsany’s play as a vision of an alternative society, nor can he have been taken in by the very obvious techniques of writing for effect. Yet, on the other hand, Pirandello did single out this play for a uniquely important moment, so we are forced to assume that it had a significance for him that was quite special. Some suggestion as to the significance may be revealed if we focus on the striking similarity between the title of Dunsany’s play and that of Pirandello’s last, unfinished play, I giganti della montagna. Influence study as such has become somewhat disreputable in recent times, and not without good reason. (Critics who spend their time chasing round hunting for supposedly direct influences of one writer on the work of another often find themselves in literary culs de sac.) However, in compensation, the notion of intertextuality in which all texts are seen as existing in a dialectical relationship with all other texts, does offer a method of reading that can be helpful. If we consider Pirandello’s play alongside Dunsany’s, it is immediately apparent that there are a whole series of signs that connect between the two texts. Which is not to suggest that Pirandello was “influenced” by Dunsany, simply that Pirandello may well have used signs latent in Dunsany’s play when he came to write his own some years later. Whether he made conscious or unconscious use of Dunsany’s work is irrelevant; what matters is that he should have been so enormously attracted to The Gods of the Mountain in the first place, which suggests that he may well have read the text with a very particular eye.

The two plays are completely unlike one another in various respects. The Gods of the Mountain is very short, I giganti is extremely long. But despite Dunsany’s brevity, the play is divided into three acts, a curious feature since the only changes of scene required could easily be effected without any break. Act I takes place outside the city walls, Act II in the metropolitan hall of the city of Kongros, Act III in the same place with the addition of seven thrones “shaped like mountain crags.” So the decision to split the play into acts depended not so much on staging questions, but on thematic structures. In Act I we have the beggars outside the walls, the arrival of Agmar, the outlining of Agmar’s plan; in Act II we see Agmar’s cunning in action when he manages to deceive the citizens and in Act III we see the arrival of the real gods and the final catastrophe. In short, the tripartite structuring begins with an exemplification of human cunning, moves on to a demonstration of game playing and finally shows how hubris causes the downfall of even those men who seem most able to struggle against the odds. The thematic structure of Pirandello’s work follows similar patterns. In Act I we have the arrival of the Countess’s company of players in the stronghold of the Scalognati (the Accursed), that is, a group of outsiders arrive in an unknown place and propose a performance to the inhabitants. But as the play progresses, the proposals fail. The power of art is simply not sufficient to combat the forces of the mountain giants. In a final coup de théâtre equivalent to that at the end of Dunsany’s play, the giants destroy the actors’ performance and kill the leading lady. In both cases the catastrophe is caused by the arrival of a deus ex machina. So in both plays we find the theme of the stranger(s) coming from outside who convince the local inhabitants (accursed outcasts in Pirandello, beggars and outcasts in Dunsany) that they should take part in a performance, because Agmar’s idea of disguising the beggars as gods must surely be considered as theatre. Both plays therefore are metatheatrical and examine the function of playing. In Pirandello, that examination takes place through the questioning of Cotrone and the Scalognati, whilst in Dunsany the citizens are concerned about being deceived and so take it upon themselves to reveal the “truth” about the seven supposed gods. In both plays there is a fundamental question about the definition of performance and the relationship that performing has with reality. What makes the whole issue even more complex, however, is the presence of another concealed question: what the nature of reality itself might be. In the second act of I giganti, Cotrone says to the Countess: You actors embody phantoms and make them live—so they do live! We do the opposite, we turn our own bodies into phantoms and we also make them live in the same way. Phantoms . . . you don’t have to go far to find them; all you have to do is release them from within ourselves.[5] The reality of the performance of the actors and the reality of the performance of the Scalognati fuse together, the lines between the two are blurred and at the end, the illusion which seemed to be the greatest of all, i.e., the existence of giants,

becomes the reality that kills. In Dunsany’s play Agmar gives precise instructions to his companion as to how the beggars’ play must be performed: Agmar: Go you into the city before us and let there be a prophecy there which saith that the gods who are carven from green rock in the mountain shall one day arise in Marma and come here in the guise of men. Slag: Yes, master. Shall I make the prophecy myself? Or shall it be found in some old document? Agmar: Let someone have seen it once in some rare document. Let it be spoken of in the marketplace. Slag: It shall be spoken of, master. (Act 1)[6] The play devised by Agmar becomes reality, but when the real gods arrive, that reality changes yet again and the performance is annulled in the face of superhuman power. Neither Agmar, nor Ilse, the Countess, both of whom challenge the power of the gods/giants, are able to resist and both are destroyed, in a final spectacularly theatrical moment. In both plays there is a strong sense of cruelty and amorality, that is made even more striking by the absence of realist characterisation, which is replaced with striking figures who are at times almost symbolic. In both plays the characters are motivated by the will to survive and use the one means they have—the art of playing, of deceiving other people with illusions they create. Both attempt, in vain, to deceive the world of supernatural powers. I giganti, Pirandello’s last great work, poses a set of problems but offers no solution. Perhaps that lack of resolution reflects the impossibility of reconciling artistic ideals with a repressive political system such as that of fascist Italy in the 1930s. Pirandello claimed he could separate art from politics, but by the end of his life it had become increasingly obvious that such a distinction could not be maintained. Dunsany, on the contrary, had written The Gods of the Mountain at the very beginning of his theatrical career. He came from the minor aristocracy and claimed throughout his life that politics did not interest him at all. In 1934 he wrote a book for Methuen titled If I Were a Dictator, in which the only serious suggestion was a plea for the establishment of a national English theatre. But despite his claims for being apolitical, Dunsany belonged to a specific class and had been educated within that class, so that it is possible to read his works with a very clear sense of the ideological position of the writer. It would not be fair to suggest that there is a direct link between Pirandello’s play and Dunsany’s. Both writers came from different cultures, lived in different social milieus and the two plays are separated by a gap of more than twenty years. But despite the differences, there are striking similarities in structuring and themes that suggest more than pure coincidence. The process whereby any writer absorbs ideas and images from different sources in order to create a unique work of art remains a mysterious one. But it does seem likely that Pirandello found in Dunsany’s play

something that attracted him so strongly that he chose not only to stage it in 1925 but to recall it in some way when he came to create his own play about the cruelty of gods and men in a world where the belief in pure art rises above all other forms of existence towards the instant of death. What in Dunsany is nihilism, presented through material that was being handled by an inexperienced writer, became in Pirandello’s hands the subject of masterpiece. The latent signs in Dunsany’s text are translated into other signs in Pirandello’s work. While Dunsany brings on seven gigantic green creatures, taking a risk that this might be more farcical than terrifying, Pirandello hides his giants behind a screen, thus creating a theatrical “miracle” for a more sophisticated public. Dunsany’s play, short though it may be, culminates in that final moment which exposes the theatricality of the whole piece. For Pirandello, however, it was theatre rather than theatricality that counted, and in this distinction between the two writers we can see something of the shift of ideas regarding the function of theatre that took place after the Great War. Dunsany was still tied to the era of Decadentism, where creating an effect was everything and the work of art existed in order for that effect to be created. The world of the Thirties, in contrast, was a world in which the memories of the Great War were gradually receding as Europe moved inexorably towards another massive conflict, and the function of art had changed completely. For Dunsany, the aristocrat, the theatre was a hobby, and his choice of nihilism was deliberately arcane. For Pirandello, on the other hand, the theatre was life, with all the bitterness of living as material for display on the stage. Despite the similarities between the two works, despite the interests of both writers, despite the effect that Dunsany’s play seems to have had on Pirandello, the location in time and space of both plays makes it impossible for any conclusions to be reached. A reading of both texts alongside each other offers all kinds of attractive suggestions of parallelism, but the impossibility of reaching a final verdict can be left to Cotrone when he says that “the things which surround us speak and have meaning only in the melting pot into which they are thrown out of a sense of desperation.”[7]

NOTES 1. Quoted in Mark Amory, Biography of Lord Dunsany (London: Collins, 1972), 21– 22. 2. Ibid., p. 46. 3. The Gods of the Mountain in Lord Dunsany, Five Plays (London: Grant Richards, 1914), 17–18. 4. Ibid., 33–34. 5. “Voi attori date corpo ai fantasmi perchè vivano—e vivono! Noi facciamo al contrario: dei nostri corpi, fantasmi: e li facciamo egualmente vivere. I Fantasmi . . . non c’è mica bisogno d’andarli a cercare lontano: basta farli uscire da not stessi.” Maschere Nude II (Milan: Mondadori, 1958), 1341. 6. The Gods of the Mountain, 16. 7. “Le cose che ci stanno attorno parlano e hanno senso soltano nell’arbitrario in cui

per disperazione ci viene di cangiarle.” Maschere Nude II, 1340.

Chapter 26

“The Strength of Imaginative Idiom” Beatriz Vegh From Lord Dunsany’s to Faulkner’s “Carcassonne” In an essay on Faulkner’s “Carcassonne,” Noel Polk cites a number of formal and thematic sources for this short story: first, a poem by A. E. Housman as immediate source for Faulkner’s use of a traditional device in Western literature, the debate between the body and the soul; second, a poem by Gustave Nadaud “in which the fabled city of Carcassonne is treated as a symbol of an unreachable goal, of frustrated desire” and which would furnish the story’s title; third, some of Eliot’s poems that allow him to draw parallels between Faulkner’s protagonist and the Prufrock-Gerontion figure, between Eliot’s Waste Land and Faulkner’s Rincon.[1] I suggest here that Lord Dunsany’s “Carcassonne” might well be considered one more among these ancestors, equally inscribed intertextually in Faulkner’s story. Interpreting Faulkner’s statements and his praxis of writing, I suggest also that Faulkner overtly and gaily reives from writers and writings that are not canonically strong but which do have an unusual imaginative strength to offer to national literatures which are trying to articulate themselves beyond—if not outside—their national folklores. Thus the kind of “influence” that Dunsany could have exerted on Faulkner would not be the kind of influence that Harold Bloom, for instance, defines as a variety of melancholy or an anxiety-principle.[2] Dunsany’s influence on Faulkner is more like Emerson’s view that in every writer there dwells the “universalist,” and in every literary text “the appearance that one person wrote all the books.”[3] A network of linking cultural circumstances can be identified in order to fully appreciate a Dunsanian genealogy in Faulkner’s “Carcassonne.” Dunsany’s name was well known in the teens and twenties in Anglo-American literary milieux. A Dreamer’s Tales, one of his first and most successful collection of stories (it includes “Carcassonne”), appeared in 1910 in London and was reprinted in New York in 1917 by Boni and Liveright. In addition, Dunsany visited New Orleans shortly before Faulkner’s stay there in 1925, and met a number of people Faulkner also knew—the Bradfords and Sherwood Anderson among others.[4] S. T. Joshi suggests that the stylistic swerve from his early, more fantastic and dreamlike style that many critics observe in Dunsany’s writing in the 1920s results, in part at least, from Sherwood Anderson’s influence on Dunsany at that time.[5] There are also intertextual circumstances establishing genealogical and fictional links between both “Carcassonne”s. However, before commenting on a few of these intertextualities, let us give here a summary of what is going on thematically in Dunsany’s “Carcassonne.” In the Celtic kingdom of Arn, King Carmorak and his warriors defy a diviner’s prophecy according to which the Fate decrees that “[they] will never come to

Carcassonne.” For years, and led by the inspired telling, singing and playing of Arleon, the poet-harpist of Arn, they march southwards, through fantastic and ghostly twilights in deep forests, in search of this famous, fabled and bewitching city. Occasionally they forget Carcassonne and indulge in idleness, but Arleon reminds them of their quest and they resume their march. Gradually, in a hopeless wrestle with Time, the wanderers grow old and weary, and they are mysteriously killed when attempting to reach the fair city. Only the King and his poet remain alive. But Arleon’s inspiration fails, and he is forced to admit: “My King, I know no longer the way to Carcassonne.” Nevertheless, both King and poet, “side by side went down into the forest, still seeking for Carcassonne.” Thus, in Faulkner’s story, the “unflagging” riding of the skeleton’s dreamed horse(s) as well as that of the recurrent buckskin pony “with eyes like blue electricity and a mane like tangled fire, galloping up the hill and right off into the high heaven of the world” at the opening and closing of the narrative[6] may well have an Irish modernist precursor in the inexorable march of Dunsany’s Celtic King Carmorak and his “Men Who Would Not Rest . . . in their war to Fate” and “marched on still because it seemed better to march on than to think.”[7] In both “Carcassonne”s there is an omnipresent and impressive dreamlike tone. In Faulkner’s story there is, in addition, a parodic and humorous touch. It is a dreamy skeleton who does the telling (or rather the groaning, as it is stated in the text); he is groaning from a tarred paper bed—ink and sheet of paper, corporeal internalized writing—significantly turned into a pair of visionary spectacles; and he is groaning from Rincon, that is, from a corner or nook—the meaning of the Spanish word rincon —the topographical rhetorical device used by Faulkner in his tale. There is also a hallucinatory scene in Dunsany’s “Carcassonne” that may have powerfully worked upon Faulkner’s imagination not only when Faulkner wrote “Carcassonne” but also when he wrote “Crevasse,” a story that has been poetically linked by critics to his “Carcassonne.”[8] It occurs when, toward the end of Dunsany’s tale, in the Poesque nightmarish setting of a mountain top surrounded by “steep precipices,” King Carmorak makes his last and hopeless attempt to reach Carcassonne: “[he] drew up his remaining warriors in line of battle to wage their last war, and they stepped forward over the crisp bones of old, unburied armies” (92). In Faulkner’s “Crevasse,” an equally phantasmic and obstinate remainder of an army— from World War I—is trapped in the darkness of a cavern. As the party in search of a way out of the cavern and toward the light is huddled together at the foot of a cliff, . . . the sergeant moves the torch. . . . About the tunnel, sitting or leaning upright against the walls, are skeletons in dark tunics and bagging Zouave trousers, their moldering arms beside them; the captain recognizes them as Senegalese troops of the May fighting of 1915. . . .[9] The Faulkner-Dunsany connection seems here to take place on the gothic side of Faulkner’s fiction and at the same time to respond to the modernist impulse of

creating extraordinary and eccentric narrative realities in order to “make it new” according to the Poundian command. The intertextuality between the two “Carcassonne”s might also be read on other bases. In Dunsany’s fiction, along with the theme of the country over the city, the pagan over the Christian, and art over machinery as major themes, the theme of the reunification with Nature and consequent vaunting of the past over the present has been pointed out.[10] In both “Carcassonne”s the earth as a maternal figure has a privileged rhetorical place. In Dunsany’s tale it appears in the opening paragraphs, in Faulkner’s at the very end. In both texts it supplies the narratives with a supernatural, atemporal and magic dimension: Hither had come in the folk of the Weald from sheepfold and from forest . . . and they sat down wondering in that famous hall; and therein also were seated the men of Arn, the town that clustered round the King’s high house, and was all roofed with the red maternal earth. (Dunsany 83) steed and rider thunder on, thunder punily diminishing: a dying star upon the immensity of darkness and of silence within which, steadfast, fading, deepbreasted and grave of flank, muses the dark and tragic figure of the Earth, his mother. (Faulkner 900) Both narratives play on the motif of a split or fragmented individual. More specifically there is the pair composed of skeleton and galloping horse in Faulkner, of warrior king Carmorak and singer harpist Arleon in Dunsany. Both pairs may be read as figural embodiments of the intricacies converging in a unique and complex writing process. Just as the skeleton in Faulkner’s story provides his bragging but forgetful double with the word “chamfron”—indispensable for the telling of the story—so the poet Arleon in Dunsany’s tale provides his warrior king with the songs, harp playing and final silence that are crucial to formulate their hopeless but by no means desperate adventure. (In their wrestling with Time and the precariousness of human predicament, Faulkner’s and Dunsany’s protagonists are thematically close to Camus’s indefatigable and happy Sysiphus). And in both stories, skeleton and poet acknowledge and articulate their defeat in formulating audible (Faulkner) and clear (Dunsany) certainties: I want to perform something bold and tragical and austere he repeated, shaping the soundless words in the pattering silence. . . . (Faulkner 899) his clear certitude was gone, and in its place were efforts in his mind to recall old prophecies and shepherd’s songs that told of the marvellous city. . . . (Dunsany 87) Moreover, in a 1922 article published in The Mississippian, Faulkner himself had pointed out one reason for literary reiving from Irish literature. Its primarily imaginative thought and expressivity might be a model for young and big countries that are

seeking to articulate their national literature: A national literature cannot spring from folk lore . . . for America is too big and there are too many folk lores. . . . It can, however come from the strength of imaginative idiom which is understandable by all who read English. Nowhere today, saving in parts of Ireland, is the English language spoken with the same earthy strength as it is in the United States; though we are, as a nation, still inarticulate.[11] Dunsany’s tales were published in Spain by the avant-garde Madrid journal and publishing house Revista de Occidente, which published Spanish versions of “Poltarnees, Beholder of Ocean” in 1923 and “Carcassonne” and A Dreamer’s Tales in 1924, at the peak of modernism. In a study on Federico Garcia Lorca’s “Rider’s Song”—a poem whose manuscript is dated July 1924—J. A. Valente closely connects this poem to Garcia Lorca’s attentive reading of Dunsany’s “Carcasona.” Thus “Rider’s Song” may be read as a reembodiment, in Spanish, of a text—Dunsany’s— that will be in turn reembodied a few years later by Faulkner in English literature. It may act and have acted as intermediary between Dunsany’s and Faulkner’s “Carcassonne,” playing modernist and imaginative literary variations on the theme of symbolically desirable and unreachable axial cities: Rider’s Song Cordoba. Alone and far away. Black pony, big moon, and olives in my saddlebag. Well as I know the roads I’ll never reach Cordoba. On the plain, on the wind, black pony, red moon. Death is watching me from the towers of Cordoba. Oh, how long is the road! Oh, how brave is my pony! Oh, death is waiting for me before I reach Cordoba! Cordoba. Alone and far away.[12]

J. A. Valente remarks that Garcia Lorca’s poem reenacts Dunsany’s mythic Carcassonne and that his solitary rider and mysterious march rejoin and project the image of the solitary knight in search of a city beyond, also present in Dunsany’s tale. Through the Grail legend cycle “this image is one of the primordial images that

passed on from the druidic inheritance to the Christian world.”[13] As Garcia Lorca did in his poem when replacing Carcassonne by Cordoba, Faulkner rhetorically elaborates the primordial image of the knight—represented by Godefroy de Bouillon and Tancred in his text—through a new topography for the sacred quest. Coincidentally, the new location for the archetypal image in his “Carcassonne,” Rincon, is doubly akin to Cordoba; as stated in “Black Music,” it is a Spanish speaking “corner”: “I found him [Wilfred Midgleston] in Rincon, which is not large. . . . He hasn’t changed at all since the day he arrived, except that the clothes he came in have wore out and he hasn’t learned more than ten words of Spanish.”[14] This corner is, like Cordoba, a southern one; the toponymic Rincon is reived from Nostromo where Rincon is one of the cities in Conrad’s fictitious South America, and Faulkner will reuse it in his 1933 script for MGM, Mythological Latin-America Kingdom Story. [15] In their common reiving from Dunsany’s tale, Faulkner and Garcia Lorca are both inscribing eccentric—apocryphal—topographies in the map of the Grail Myth and its wandering knight. The reiving becomes thus idiosyncratic reenacting and fully creative reterritorialization of a widely shared storytelling. In one version of Prometheus’s myth, the fire stolen by the Titan from Zeus on behalf of men is hidden in a reed (Latin calamus, English calamite), the primitive tool of writing. This variation reminds us of the double bind that pervades the notion of intertextuality as literary theft. The violence of a taking away is counterpointed by a creative and shared self-appropriation in the vast and common realm of literature. What Dunsany did have and what he offered Faulkner in his fancy tales was, then, an imaginative and idiomatic strength that fitted Faulkner’s wish to be a Southern U.S. writer and, at the same time, to write books in “the very dialect of the present year”— again in Emerson’s words—whose “modernness” gives their readers “an existence as wide as man.”[16]

NOTES 1. Noel Polk, “William Faulkner’s ‘Carcassonne,’” Studies in American Fiction 12:1 (1984): 30–35. 2. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 6–8. 3. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nominalism and Realism,” Complete Essays and Other Writings (New York: Random House, 1940), 446, 439. 4. Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography (New York: Vintage, 1991), 130. 5. S. T. Joshi, Lord Dunsany: Master of the Anglo-Irish Imagination (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), 207. 6. William Faulkner, “Carcassonne,” Collected Stories (New York: Vintage, 1977), 895–96, 899. Further references occur in the text. 7. Lord Dunsany, “Carcassonne,” A Dreamer’s Tales (New York: The Modern Library, 1917), 92–93. Further references occur in the text. 8. Michel Gresset remarks that there is an interplay between both stories on account

of their place within These 13: “Crevasse” ends the first section just as “Carcassonne” ends the third, “so that the two stories stand to each other in a kind of neat symmetry.” He also points out how both stories are “essentially two facets of Faulkner’s imaginations”: the nightmarish one (“Crevasse”) and “the aerial/ideal” (“Carcassonne”). Both nightmarish and aerial facets are central in Dunsany’s “Carcassonne.” Michel Gresset, “From Vignette to Vision: The ‘Old, Fine Name of France’ or Faulkner’s ‘Western Front’ from ‘Crevasse’ to A Fable,” Faulkner, International Perspectives: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1982, ed. Doreen Fowler and Ann Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984), 97–120. See also Polk, “William Faulkner’s ‘Carcassonne,’”18. 9. Faulkner, “Crevasse,” Collected Stories, 472. 10. Joshi, Lord Dunsany, 203–04. 11. Faulkner, “American Drama: Eugene O’Neill,” William Faulkner: Early Prose and Poetry, comp. and intro. Carvel Collins (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962), 89. 12. Córdoba. / Lejana y sola. / Jaca negra, luna grande, y aceitunas en mi alforja. / Aunque sepa los caminos / nunca llegare a Cordoba. / Por el llano, por el viento, / jaca negra, luna roja. / La muerte me está mirando / desde las torres de Cordoba. / Ay qué carnino tan largo! / Ay mi jaca valerosa! / Ay qué la muerte me espera / antes de llegar a Córdoba! / Córdoba. / Lejana y solo. Federico Garcia Lorca, “Canciones (1921–1924),” Obras completas (Madrid: Aguilar, 1955) 308 (translation mine). 13. Jose Angel Valente, “Lorca y el caballero solo,” Las palabras de la tribu (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1971), 123. Valente mentions a 1513 Dürer engraving (“The Knight, Death and the Devil”) as an earlier artistic embodiment of this primordial dream. But the title, Valente observes, forgets the high and far away city—Corbenic, Montsalvat, Cordoba —that dominates Dürer’s work. 14. Faulkner, “Black Music,” Collected Stories, 799. 15. Bruce F. Kawin, Faulkner’s MGM Screenplays (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1982), 431. 16. Emerson, “Nominalism and Realism,” 439.

Chapter 27

Lovecraft’s “Dunsanian Studies” S. T. Joshi Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett became the eighteenth Lord Dunsany (pronounced Dun-SAY-ny) upon the death of his father in 1899. He could trace his lineage to the twelfth century, but few members of this Anglo-Norman line had shown much aptitude for literature. Dunsany himself did not do so in his early years, spent alternately in various homes in England and in Dunsany Castle in County Meath. He had gone to Eton and Sandhurst, had served in the Boer War, and appeared on his way to occupying an undistinguished place among the Anglo-Irish aristocracy as sportsman, hunter, and socialite. He married Beatrice Villiers, daughter of the Earl of Jersey, in 1904, the year he ran unsuccessfully for Parliament in England on the conservative ticket. Dunsany had published a mediocre poem, “Rhymes from a Suburb,” in the Pall Mall Gazette for September 1897 but otherwise gave little indication that he had any literary aspirations. But in 1904 he sat down and wrote The Gods of Pegāna. Having no literary reputation, he was forced to pay for its publication with Elkin Mathews of London. Never again, however, would Dunsany have to resort to vanity publishing. The Gods of Pegāna opens thunderously: Before there stood gods upon Olympus, or even Allah was Allah, had wrought and rested Mānā-Yood-Sushāī. There are in Pegāna—Mung and Sish and Kib, and the maker of all small gods, who is Mānā-Yood-Sushāī. Moreover, we have a faith in Roon and Slid. And it has been said of old that all things that have been were wrought by the small gods, excepting only Mānā-Yood-Sushāī, who made the gods amd hath thereafter rested. And none may pray to Mānā-Yood-Sushāī but only to the gods whom he hath made.[1] This rhythmic prose and cosmic subject matter, both self-consciously derived from the King James Bible—and, as Dunsany admits in his charming autobiography, Patches of Sunlight (1938), from recollections of Greek mythology in school[2] — introduced something unique to literature. The last decades of the nineteenth century had seen such things as the jewelled fairy tales of Oscar Wilde and the prose and verse epics of William Morris; but this was very different. Here was an entire theogony whose principal motivation was not the expression of religious fervour (Dunsany was in all likelihood an atheist) but an instantiation of Oscar Wilde’s imperishable dictum: “The artist is the creator of beautiful things.”[3] While there are a number of provocative philosophical undercurrents in The Gods of Pegāna, as in Dunsany’s work as a whole, its main function is merely the evocation of beauty— beauty of language, beauty of conception, beauty of image. Readers and critics alike

responded to this rarefied creation of exotic loveliness, with its seamless mixture of naiveté and sophistication, archaism and modernity, sly humour and brooding horror, chilling remoteness and quiet pathos. Generally favourable reviews began to appear —including one by the poet Edward Thomas—and Dunsany’s career was launched. By the time H. P. Lovecraft discovered him, Dunsany had published much of the fiction and drama that would gain him fame, even adulation, on both sides of the Atlantic: Time and the Gods (1906); The Sword of Welleran (1908); A Dreamer’s Tales (1910); The Book of Wonder (1912); Five Plays (1914); Fifty-one Tales (1915); The Last Book of Wonder (1916); Plays of Gods and Men (1917). Tales of Three Hemispheres would appear at the very end of 1919, marking the definite end of this phase of his work. By this time, however, Dunsany had achieved idolatrous fame in America, thanks in part to the editions of his work published by John W. Luce & Co. in Boston. In 1916 he became the only playwright to have five plays simultaneously produced in New York, as each of the Five Plays appeared in a different “little” theatre. His work was appearing in the most sophisticated and highbrow magazines—Vanity Fair, the Smart Set, Harper’s, and (a little later) the Golden Book. By 1919 Dunsany would probably have been considered one of the ten greatest living writers in the English-speaking world. Shaw Desmond’s article on him in the November 1923 Bookman, “Dunsany, Yeats and Shaw: Trinity of Magic,” places him ahead of two now canonical figures. It is difficult to specify in brief compass the principal characteristics of even this early work of Dunsany’s, to say nothing of the novels, tales, and plays he wrote during the remaining four decades of his career; but Dunsany himself provides a few clues as to the basic import of all his work in Patches of Sunlight, as he recounts how at an early age he saw a hare in a garden: “If ever I have written of Pan, out in the evening, as though I had really seen him, it is mostly a memory of that hare. If I thought that I was a gifted individual whose inspirations came sheer from outside earth and transcended common things, I should not write this book; but I believe that the wildest flights of the fancies of any of us have their homes with Mother Earth . . .”[4] Lovecraft would have been taken aback by this utterance, since it was precisely the apparent remoteness of Dunsany’s realm—a realm of pure fantasy with no connection with the human world—that initially captivated him; and, strangely enough, Lovecraft came to express dissatisfaction at what he thought was the “dilution” of this otherworldliness in Dunsany’s later work, when in fact his own creative writing of the 1920s and 1930s was on a largely similar path to Dunsany’s in its greater topographical realism and evocation of the natural world. But many readers can be excused for seeing the early Dunsany in this light, since the pure exoticism and lack of any significant reference to the “real” world in his early volumes appeared to signal it as virtually the creation of some nonhuman imagination. The realm of Pegāna (which is featured in The Gods of Pegāna and Time and the Gods, and in those volumes only) is wholly distinct from the “real” world; the first sentence of The Gods of Pegāna seems to refer to the temporal priority of Dunsany’s God Mānā-Yood-Sushāī to the Graeco-Roman or Islamic gods, but

beyond this citation there is no allusion to the “real” world at all. Dunsany himself, in his autobiography, remarks that his early tales were written “as though I were an inhabitant of an entirely different planet,”[5] something Lovecraft no doubt found very captivating, given his own cosmicism; but Dunsany could not keep this up for long, and already by The Sword of Welleran the real world has entered, as it would continue increasingly to do in his later writing. Indeed, it could be said that the uneasy mingling of the real and the unreal in The Sword of Welleran and A Dreamer’s Tales produces some of the most distinctive work in Dunsany’s entire canon. It should, however, not be thought that Dunsany’s early work is uniform either in import or in quality. By the time A Dreamer’s Tales was published, he seems to have reached a certain exhaustion of imagination. Most of the tales in The Book of Wonder were written around pictures drawn by Sidney H. Sime, who had illustrated most of Dunsany’s earlier volumes; and these tales show a regrettable tendency toward selfparody and ponderously owlish humour. The result is a sort of snickering sarcasm and cheap satire sadly out of keeping with the high seriousness of his early work. Lovecraft, in a late letter, put his finger directly on the problem: As he gained in age and sophistication, he lost in freshness and simplicity. He was ashamed to be uncritically naive, and began to step aside from his tales and visibly smile at them even as they unfolded. Instead of remaining what the true fantaisiste must be—a child in a child’s world of dream—he became anxious to shew that he was really an adult good-naturedly pretending to be a child in a child’s world. This hardening-up began to shew, I think, in The Book of Wonder . . .[6] Lovecraft is exactly right on the result but not, I think, on the cause: it was not, certainly, that Dunsany was “uncritically naive” in his early work, for that work clearly displays his sophisticated awareness of the symbolic function of fantasy for the conveying of philosophical conceptions; it is simply that now Dunsany no longer wished to preserve the illusion of naiveté as he had done in the Gods of Pegāna period. The Last Book of Wonder, some of which was written during the early stages of the war, is a little more in line with his earlier manner, but Tales of Three Hemispheres is easily his weakest collection, containing many ephemeral and insignificant items. It was just as well that, after a few years, Dunsany found a new direction with his early novels. An examination of Dunsany’s early tales and plays reveals many thematic and philosophical similarities with Lovecraft: cosmicism (largely restricted to The Gods of Pegāna); the exaltation of Nature; hostility to industrialism; the power of dream to transform the mundane world into a realm of gorgeously exotic beauty; the awesome role of Time in human and divine affairs; and, of course, the evocative use of language. It is scarcely to be wondered at that Lovecraft felt for a time that Dunsany had said all he had wished to say in a given literary and philosophical direction. Lovecraft could hardly have been unaware of Dunsany’s reputation. He admits to

knowing of him well before he read him in 1919, but he had passed him off as a writer of whimsical, benign fantasy of the J. M. Barrie sort. The first work he read was not Dunsany’s own first volume, The Gods of Pegāna, but A Dreamer’s Tales, which may well be his best single short story collection in its diversity of contents and its several powerful tales of horror (“Poor Old Bill,” “The Unhappy Body,” “Bethmoora”). Lovecraft admits: “The book had been recommended to me by one whose judgment I did not highly esteem . . .”[7] This person was Alice M. Hamlet, an amateur journalist residing in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and probably a member of Winifred Virginia Jackson’s informal coterie of writers. Some months later Lovecraft acknowledged Hamlet in a poem, “With a Copy of Wilde’s Fairy Tales” (July 1920): Madam, in whom benignant gods have join’d The gifts of fancy, melody, and mind; Whose kindly guidance first enrich’d my sight With great DUNSANY’S Heliconian light . . .

Lovecraft’s present of Wilde’s fairy tales was a small recompense for the realms of wonder Hamlet had opened up in introducing him to Dunsany, for Lovecraft would repeatedly say, even late in life, that Dunsany “has certainly influenced me more than any other living writer.”[8] The first paragraph of A Dreamer’s Tales “arrested me as with an electric shock, & I had not read two pages before I became a Dunsany devotee for life.”[9] Hamlet had given Lovecraft A Dreamer’s Tales in anticipation of Dunsany’s lecture at the Copley Plaza in Boston on October 20, 1919, part of his extensive American tour. Lovecraft read the book about a month or so before the visit, for he later remarks that he first encountered Dunsany in September.[10] In a letter of November 9 to Rheinhart Kleiner describing the lecture he states that “a party consisting of Miss H[amlet], her aunt, young Lee, and L. Theobald set out for the great event.”[11] I do not know who young Lee is. There must have been others whom Lovecraft met in Boston prior to the lecture; in particular, at some point he met Kleiner, and with him wrote a series of lighthearted poems that I have grouped together under the title “On Collaboration” (derived from one poem so titled). One of these, written to Verna McGeoch, runs as follows: Madam, behold with startled eyes A source of wonder and surprise; Your humble serfs are two of many Who will this night hear Ld DUNSANY!

“Wonder” presumably prefers to Dunsany’s Book of Wonder. But Kleiner clearly could not have accompanied Lovecraft and the others to the lecture, else Lovecraft would not have had to write to him about it in his letter. In any case, the group secured seats in the very front row, “not ten feet” from Dunsany; it was the closest Lovecraft would ever come to meeting one of his literary idols, since he was too diffident to meet or correspond with Machen, Blackwood, or M. R. James. Lovecraft describes Dunsany aptly: “He is of Galpinian build—6 ft. 2 in. in height, and very

slender. His face is fair and pleasing, though marred by a slight moustache. In manner he is boyish and a trifle awkward; and his smile is winning and infectious. His hair is light brown. His voice is mellow and cultivated, and very clearly British. He pronounces were as wair, etc.” After an account of his literary principles Dunsany read his magnificent short play, The Queen’s Enemies (in Plays of Gods and Men), then an exquisite parody of himself, “Why the Milkman Shudders When He Perceives the Dawn” (in The Last Book of Wonder). After the lecture “Dunsany was encircled by autograph-seekers. Egged on by her aunt, Miss Hamlet almost mustered up courage enough to ask for an autograph, but weakened at the last moment. . . . For mine own part, I did not need a signature; for I detest fawning upon the great.” Dunsany’s own account of this lecture scarcely occupies more than a few sentences in his second autobiography, While the Sirens Slept: “At Boston in a big hall called the Copley Plaza the chair was taken for me by Mr. Baker, lecturer on the drama at Harvard . . . There Mr. Ellery Sedgwick, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, entertained us in what, as I said there was one word that I would not use here again, I may call the American way.”[12] Clearly he was entirely unaware that the lanky, lantern-jawed gentleman in the front row would become his greatest disciple and a significant force in the preservation of his own work. Lovecraft very quickly acquired and read most or all of Dunsany’s published books: The Gods of Pegāna (given to him by his mother);[13] two Modern Library editions, one containing A Dreamer’s Tales and The Sword of Welleran (1917), the other containing The Book of Wonder and Time and the Gods (1918); Five Plays; Fifty-one Tales; The Last Book of Wonder; Plays of Gods and Men; Tales of Three Hemispheres; and Unhappy Far-Off Things (1919), Dunsany’s pensive reflections on the end of the war. Lovecraft’s edition of Five Plays dates to 1923, but he had probably read the contents earlier. He never seems to have acquired the nonfantastic Tales of War (1918), although he probably read it. For the rest of his life Lovecraft continued to acquire (or, at least, read) almost all of Dunsany’s new books as they came out, in spite of his dwindling enthusiasm for Dunsany’s later work. It is easy to see why a figure like Dunsany would have had an immediate appeal for Lovecraft: his yearning for the unmechanised past, his purely aesthetic creation of a gorgeously evocative ersatz mythology, and his “crystalline singing prose” (as Lovecraft would memorably characterise it in “Supernatural Horror in Literature”) made Lovecraft think that he had found a spiritual twin in the Irish fantaisiste. As late as 1923 he was still maintaining that “Dunsany is myself . . . His cosmic realm is the realm in which I live; his distant, emotionless vistas of the beauty of moonlight on quaint and ancient roofs are the vistas I know and cherish.”[14] And one must also conjecture that Dunsany’s position as an independently wealthy nobleman who wrote what he chose and paid no heed to popular expectations exercised a powerful fascination for Lovecraft: here was an “amateur” writer who had achieved tremendous popular and critical success; here was a case where the aristocracy of blood and the aristocracy of intellect were conjoined. It is, of course, the prose style of those early works that is so fatally alluring, and

it is this, more than the philosophy or themes in Dunsany’s work, that Lovecraft first attempted to mimic. There is much truth in C. L. Moore’s comment: “No one can imitate Dunsany, and probably everyone who’s ever read him has tried.”[15] Lovecraft’s first consciously Dunsanian story is “The White Ship,” which was probably written in October 1919. In early December he remarked to Kleiner: “As you infer, ‘The White Ship’ is in part influenced by my new Dunsanian studies.”[16] The phrase “in part” is interesting, and in fact quite accurate: although it strives to imitate Dunsany’s prose-poetic style, it is also in large part a philosophical allegory that reflects Lovecraft’s, not Dunsany’s, worldview. “The White Ship” tells of Basil Elton, “keeper of the North Point light,” who one day “walk[s] out over the waters . . . on a bridge of moonbeams” to a White Ship that has come from the South, captained by an aged bearded man. They sail to various fantastic realms: the Land of Zar, “where dwell all the dreams and thoughts of beauty that come to men once and then are forgotten”; the Land of Thalarion, “the City of a Thousand Wonders, wherein reside all those mysteries that man has striven in vain to fathom”; Xura, “the Land of Pleasures Unattained”; and finally Sona-Nyl, in which “there is neither time nor space, neither suffering nor death.” Although Elton spends “many aeons” there in evident contentment, he gradually finds himself yearning for the realm of Cathuria, the Land of Hope, beyond the basalt pillars of the West, which he believes to be an even more wondrous realm than Sona-Nyl. The captain warns him against pursuing Cathuria, but Elton is adamant and compels the captain to launch his ship once more. But they discover that beyond the basalt pillars of the West is only a “monstrous cataract, wherein the oceans of the world drop down to abysmal nothingness.” As their ship is destroyed, Elton finds himself on the platform of his lighthouse. The White Ship comes to him no more. The surface plot of “The White Ship” is clearly derived from Dunsany’s “Idle Days on the Yann” (in A Dreamer’s Tales). The resemblance is, however, quite superficial, for Dunsany’s delightful tale tells only of a dream-voyage by a man who boards a ship, the Bird of the River, and encounters one magical land after another; there is no significant philosophical content in these realms, and their principal function is merely an evocation of fantastic beauty. (Dunsany wrote the story in anticipation of a boat trip down the Nile.) Lovecraft’s tale is meant to be interpreted allegorically or symbolically, and as such enunciates several central tenets of his philosophical thought. The fundamental message of “The White Ship” is the folly of abandoning the Epicurean goal of ataraxia, tranquillity (interpreted as the absence of pain). Sona-Nyl is such a state, and by forsaking it Basil Elton brings upon his head a justified doom— not death, but sadness and discontent. The nonexistence of Cathuria is anticipated by the land of Thalarion: this realm embodies all those “mysteries that man has striven in vain to fathom,” and therein “walk only daemons and mad things that are no longer men”; such mysteries are not meant to be penetrated, and the hope of penetrating them (Cathuria is the Land of Hope) is both vain and foolish. Elton compounds his folly by egotism: as he approaches the basalt pillars of the West, he fancies that “there

came the notes of singer and lutanist; sweeter than the sweetest songs of Sona-Nyl, and sounding mine own praises.” It is worth pointing out that “The White Ship” is not a dream-fantasy. Both Dunsany’s early tales and Lovecraft’s Dunsanian imitations are carelessly referred to as dream-stories, but only a few by either author can be so designated. “Idle Days on the Yann” is one of them: the narrator tells his ship captain that he comes “from Ireland, which is of Europe,” feeling that this laborious circumlocution is necessary on the chance that the crew have not heard of such a place; but it is of no use: “the captain and all the sailors laughed, for they said, ‘There is no such place in all the land of dreams.’”[17] But in most of Dunsany’s stories, there is no clear distinction between dream and reality: the fantasy realm of Pegāna is the “real” world, for there is no other. We will also find that this is the case in most of Lovecraft’s tales; if anything, Lovecraft follows up dim suggestions in Dunsany that these fantastic realms have a temporal priority to the “real” world—that is, that they existed in the distant past of the known world. “Polaris” already makes this clear. In “The White Ship” we do not know where the North Point lighthouse is, but the implication is that it exists in the real world; and yet, the realms visited by the White Ship are so patently symbolic that no suggestion of their actual existence is made, or is even required by the logic of the tale. “The White Ship” was first published in the United Amateur for November 1919. Alfred Galpin, chairman of the Department of Public Criticism, gave a warm reception to the story, commending Lovecraft’s turn to fiction writing in general (“his natural trend is leading him toward more and more appropriate paths”) and the story in particular (“The lover of dream literature will find all he might long for in the carefully sustained poetry of language, the simple narration, and the profound inner harmonies of ‘The White Ship’”). Galpin concludes: “If this fickle devotion to other gods will subserve ultimately to the finding of Mr. Lovecraft’s own original voice, it will sustain a purpose which will mean something to wider fields than amateur journalism.”[18] I wish to study “The Street” (Wolverine, December 1920) here for two reasons, even though it is probably the single worst tale Lovecraft ever wrote. Firstly, it was written late in 1919, sometime after “The White Ship”;[19] and secondly, it is just possible that the tale was inspired at least indirectly by some of Dunsany’s own war parables, particularly those in Tales of War. The story is only marginally weird, and it in fact proves to be is a transparent and crude story of racism. It opens laboriously and ponderously: “There be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those who say they have not; I dare not say, myself, but I will tell of The Street.” It is clear that this Street is in New England; for the “men of strength and honour” who built it were “good, valiant men of our blood who had come from the Blessed Isles across the sea.” These were “grave men in conical hats” who had “bonneted wives and sober children” and enough “courage and goodness” to “subdue the forest and till the fields.” Two wars came; after the first, there were no more Indians, and after the second “they furled the Old Flag and put up a new Banner of Stripes and

Stars.” After this, however, things become ominous; for there are “strange puffings and shrieks” from the river, and “the air was not quite so pure as before”; but, reassuringly, “the spirit of the place had not changed.” But now come “days of evil,” a time when “many who had known The Street of old knew it no more; and many knew it, who had not known it before.” The houses fall into decay, the trees are all gone, and “cheap, ugly new buildings” go up. Another war comes, but by this time “only fear and hatred and ignorance” brood over the Street because of all the “swarthy and sinister” people who now dwell in it. There are now such unheard-of places as Petrovitch’s Bakery, the Rifkin School of Modern Economics, and the Liberty Café. There develops a rumour that the houses “contained the leaders of a vast band of terrorists,” who on a designated day are to initiate an “orgy of slaughter for the extermination of America and of all the fine old traditions which The Street had loved”; this revolution is to occur, picturesquely, on the fourth of July. But a miracle occurs: “For without warning, in one of the small hours beyond midnight, all the ravages of the years and the storms and the worms came to a tremendous climax; and after the crash there was nothing left standing in The Street save two ancient chimneys and part of a stout brick wall. Nor did anything that had been alive come alive from the ruins.” I guess this proves that streets have souls after all. Lovecraft supplies the genesis of the story in a letter: The Boston police mutiny of last year is what prompted that attempt—the magnitude and significance of such an act appalled me. Last fall it was grimly impressive to see Boston without bluecoats, and to watch the musket-bearing State Guardsmen patrolling the streets as though military occupation were in force. They went in pairs, determined-looking and khaki-clad, as if symbols of the strife that lies ahead in civilisation’s struggle with the monster of unrest and bolshevism.[20] The Boston police had gone on strike on September 8, 1919, and remained on strike well into October. No doubt it was a very disturbing event, but at this time unionisation and strikes were almost the only option available to the working class for better wages and better working conditions. I have gone into this wild, paranoid, racist fantasy in such excruciating detail to show how spectacularly awful Lovecraft can be when riding one of his hobbyhorses, in particular his stereotyped lament on the decline of New England at the hands of foreigners. “The Street” is nothing more than a prose version of such early poems as “New-England Fallen” and “On a New-England Village Seen by Moonlight”: there is the same naive glorification of the past, the same attribution of all evils to “strangers” (who seem to have ousted those hardy Anglo-Saxons with surprising ease), and, remarkably, even a gliding over of the devastating economic and social effects of the industrial revolution. Although in late 1920 he expressed a wish to see the tale published professionally,[21] he apparently did not make any such attempt, and eventually he included it among his disavowed tales; but the fact that he allowed it to

be published twice in the amateur press (first in the Wolverine and then, just over a year later, in the National Amateur for January 1922), under his own name, suggests that, at least at the time of its writing (however much before its first publication that may have been), Lovecraft was fully prepared to acknowledge this tale and its sentiments as his own. Things are very different with “The Doom That Came to Sarnath,” the next of Lovecraft’s Dunsanian imitations, written on December 3, 1919. This tale is less philosophically interesting than “The White Ship,” but it too is rather more than a mere pastiche. The narrator tells the story of the land of Mnar, where “ten thousand years ago” stood the stone city of Ib near a vast still lake. Ib was inhabited by “beings not pleasing to behold”: they were “in hue as green as the lake and the mists that rise above it . . . they had bulging eyes, pouting, flabby lips, and curious ears, and were without voice.” Many aeons later new folk came to Mnar and founded the city of Sarnath; these were the first human beings of the region, “dark shepherd folk with their fleecy flocks.” They loathed the creatures of Ib and destroyed both the town and the inhabitants, preserving only the “sea-green stone idol chiselled in the likeness of Bokrug, the water-lizard.” After this Sarnath flourished greatly, becoming the “wonder of the world and the pride of all mankind.” Every year was a festival commemorating the destruction of Ib, and the thousandth year of this festival was to be of exceptional lavishness. But during the feasting and celebrating Sarnath is overrun by “a horde of indescribable green voiceless things with bulging eyes, pouting, flabby lips, and curious ears.” Sarnath is destroyed. In this rather elementary tale of vengeance the borrowings from Dunsany are all in externals. Lovecraft thought he had come by the name Sarnath independently, but maintained that he later found it in a story by Dunsany; this is not, however, the case. He may have been thinking of Sardathrion, the city mentioned repeatedly in the title story of Dunsany’s Time and the Gods. Sarnath is also a real city in India, but Lovecraft was probably not aware of the fact. The green idol Bokrug is reminiscent of the green jade gods of Dunsany’s magnificent play The Gods of the Mountain (in Five Plays). Mention of a throne “wrought of one piece of ivory, though no man lives who knows whence so vast a piece could have come,” is an echo of a celebrated passage in “Idle Days on the Yann” (noted by Lovecraft in “Supernatural Horror in Literature”) of an ivory gate “carved out of one solid piece!”[22] The style of “The Doom That Came to Sarnath” is also only superficially Dunsanian, and in fact reveals the degree to which Lovecraft (like many others) failed to understand the true sources of Dunsany’s effectiveness as a prose-poet. The descriptions of Sarnath allow Lovecraft to unleash a lush, bejewelled style that is actually not Dunsanian in essence: “Many were the pillars of the palaces, all of tinted marble, and carven into designs of surpassing beauty. And in most of the palaces the floors were mosaics of beryl and lapis-lazuli and sardonyx and carbuncle and other choice materials, so disposed that the beholder might fancy himself walking over beds of the rarest flowers.” It never seems to have occurred to Lovecraft that Dunsany achieved his most striking effects not through dense passages like this—which are more reminiscent of Wilde’s fairy

tales—but through a staggeringly bold use of metaphor. Consider that quixotic quest by King Karnith Zo and his army to lay siege to Time: But as the feet of the foremost touched the edge of the hill Time hurled five years against them, and the years passed over their heads and the army still came on, an army of older men. But the slope seemed steeper to the King and to every man in his army, and they breathed more heavily. And Time summoned up more years, and one by one he hurled them at Karnith Zo and at all his men. And the knees of the army stiffened, and the beards grew and turned grey . . .[23] This is the sort of thing Lovecraft almost never managed in his Dunsanian imitations. But “The Doom That Came to Sarnath” has other virtues. Simple as the moral here is, it can readily be seen that Lovecraft is portraying the doom of Sarnath as well deserved on account of its citizens’ race prejudice against the inhabitants of Ib (“with their marvelling was mixed hate, for they thought it not meet that beings of such aspect should walk about the world of men at dusk”) and their greed (Sarnath was founded “at a spot where precious metals were found in the earth”). Sarnath furthermore becomes increasingly artificial in its design, aping the natural world but in fact repudiating it. Each house in Sarnath has a “crystal lakelet,” parodying the actual “vast still lake” where Sarnath had consigned the ruins of Ib. The gardens of Sarnath defy the seasons: “In summer the gardens were cooled with fresh odorous breezes skilfully wafted by fans, and in winter they were heated with concealed fires, so that in those gardens it was always spring.” All this is presented in superficial terms of praise (or, at least, wonder), but in truth it is Sarnath’s excessive wealth, its irrational hatred of Ib, and its corrupt religion, founded upon hate (for the priests of Sarnath “often performed the very ancient and very secret rite in detestation of Bokrug”), that bring about its doom. Lovecraft also makes it abundantly clear that the setting of the tale is the primitive real world, not an imaginary realm or dream world. Ib was founded “when the world was young,” but we know little of its inhabitants because man “knows but little of the very ancient living things.” At the very end we learn that “adventurous young men of yellow hair and blue eyes, who are no kin to the men of Mnar” enter the region, suggesting a racial succession of some kind. Most of Lovecraft’s Dunsanian tales will follow this pattern. “The Doom That Came to Sarnath” first appeared in the Scottish amateur journal the Scot (edited by Gavin T. McColl) for June 1920. McColl, living in Dundee, was the only Scottish member of the UAPA at this time. Several years earlier Lovecraft had written to McColl praising his journal (a portion of his letter had been published in the Scot for March 1916), and no doubt he wished to do all he could to foster transatlantic amateur activity. “The Terrible Old Man” (written on January 28, 1920) is not generally considered a Dunsanian story, and indeed it is not in the sense of being a tale set in an imaginary

or ancient realm. We are here very clearly situated in contemporary New England, but the tale nevertheless is likely derived from some of Dunsany’s work. It opens ponderously: It was the design of Angelo Ricci and Joe Czanek and Manuel Silva to call on the Terrible Old Man. This old man dwells all alone in a very ancient house on Water Street near the sea, and is reputed to be both exceedingly rich and exceedingly feeble; which forms a situation very attractive to men of the profession of Messrs. Ricci, Czanek, and Silva, for that profession was nothing less dignified than robbery. The Terrible Old Man dwells in Kingsport, a city somewhere in New England. In the “far-off days of his unremembered youth” he was a sea captain, and seems to have a vast collection of ancient Spanish gold and silver pieces. He has now become very eccentric, appearing to spend hours speaking to an array of bottles from which a small piece of lead is suspended from a string. On the night of the planned robbery Ricci and Silva enter the Terrible Old Man’s house while Czanek waits outside. Screams are heard from the house, but there is no sign of the two robbers; and Czanek wonders whether his colleagues were forced to kill the old man and make a laborious search through his house for the treasure. But then the Terrible Old Man appears at the doorway, “leaning quietly on his knotted cane and smiling hideously.” Later three unidentifiable bodies are found washed in by the tide. The heavy-handed sarcasm with which “The Terrible Old Man” is told recalls many of the tales in The Book of Wonder, which similarly deal with owlish gravity of attempted robberies which usually end badly for the perpetrators. Consider the opening of “The Probable Adventure of the Three Literary Men”: “When the nomads came to El Lola they had no more songs, and the question of stealing the golden box arose in all its magnitude. On the one hand, many had sought the golden box, the receptacle (as the Aethiopians know) of poems of fabulous value; and their doom is still the common talk of Arabia.”[24] Although this tale is still set in an imaginary realm, Dunsany had already allowed the real world to enter into his work as early as “The Highwayman” and “The Kith of the Elf-Folk” (in The Sword of Welleran). In “The Terrible Old Man” it is not clear where exactly the imaginary city of Kingsport is; it was only later, in “The Festival” (1923), that it was situated in Massachusetts and identified with the town of Marblehead. Here it is stated only that the three robbers in question “were not of Kingsport blood; they were of that new and heterogeneous alien stock which lies outside the charmed circle of New-England life and traditions.” This comment itself brings to the fore the issue of racism in this story. The remark is certainly double-edged—it can be considered as much a satire on New England Yankee social exclusiveness as an attack on foreigners—but the racist overtones cannot be ignored. Ricci, Czanek, and Silva each represent one of the three leading ethnic minorities in Providence—Italian, Polish, and Portuguese. It can scarcely be doubted that Lovecraft derived some measure of satisfaction from the

dispatching of these three criminals. Is the tale actually supernatural? There is certainly reason to think so. The Terrible Old Man may appear feeble, but he is clearly endowed with vast strength to be able to subdue two presumably young and vigorous thieves. Whence did he derive it? This is never made clear, but the suggestion is that the Terrible Old Man is not merely superhuman in strength but also preternaturally aged: the fact that he possesses only very old Spanish money implies that he may actually be hundreds of years old—especially since “no one can remember when he was young.” And then there are those bottles with the pendulums: the Terrible Old Man has given them names such as Jack, Scar-Face, and Long Tom; and when he talks to them, “the little lead pendulum within makes certain definite vibrations as if in answer.” What else can these things be but the souls of his old shipmates, whom he (or some other force) has trapped in the bottles? “The Terrible Old Man” is the shortest of Lovecraft’s horror tales (exclusive of his prose-poems), and—in spite of one critic’s attempt to read it in mythic and psychoanalytical terms[25] —really does not amount to much. It first appeared in C. W. Smith’s Tryout for July 1921. The next of Lovecraft’s “Dunsanian” tales is “The Tree,” written sometime in the first half of 1920: in chronologies of Lovecraft’s stories it is customarily listed after “The Terrible Old Man” (January 28) and before “The Cats of Ulthar” (June 14). The story concerns a contest proposed by the “Tyrant of Syracuse” between the two great sculptors, Kalos and Musides, to carve a statue of Tyché for the Tyrant’s city. The two artists are the closest of friends, but their lives are very different: whereas Musides “revelled by night amidst the urban gaieties of Tegea,” Kalos remains home in quiet contemplation. The two begin working on their respective statues; but Kalos gradually takes ill, and in spite of Musides’s constant nursing eventually dies. Musides wins the contest by default, but both he and his lovely statue are weirdly destroyed when a strange olive tree growing out of Kalos’s tomb suddenly falls upon Musides’s residence. The clear implication of the tale is that Musides, for all his supposed devotion to his friend, has poisoned Kalos and suffers supernatural revenge. Lovecraft says as much when discussing the story with the Transatlantic Circulator the following year: Regarding “The Tree”—Mr. Brown finds the climax insufficient, but I doubt if a tale of that type could possess a more obvious denouement. The climactic effect sought, is merely an emphasis—amounting to the first direct intimation—of the fact that there is something hidden behind the simple events of the tale; that the growing suspicion of Musides’ crime and recognition of Kalos’ posthumous vengeance is well founded. It is to proclaim what has hitherto been doubtful—to shew that the things of Nature see behind human hypocrisy and perceive the baseness at the heart of outward virtue. All the world deems Musides a model of fraternal piety and devotion although in truth he poisoned Kalos when he saw his laurels in peril. Did not the Tegeans build to Musides a temple? But against all

these illusions the trees whisper—the wise trees sacred to the gods—and reveal the truth to the midnight searcher as they chaunt knowingly over and over again “Oida! Oida!” This, then, is all the climax so nebulous a legend can possess. (“The Defence Remains Open!”) Lovecraft is aware that this sort of supernatural justice is not even metaphorically true to life: About the plot of “The Tree”—it was the result of some rather cynical reflection on the possible real motives which may underlie even the most splendid appearing acts of mankind. With this nucleus I developed a tale based on the Greek idea of divine justice and retribution, (a very pretty though sadly mythical idea!) with the added Oriental notion of the soul of a man passing into something else.[26] The story’s relative lack of vital connection to Dunsany’s work can be gauged by the fact that the basic plot was evolved more than a year before Lovecraft ever read Dunsany. In an August 1918 letter to Alfred Galpin, Lovecraft outlined the plot of “The Tree,” saying that it had already by that time been “long conceived but never elaborated into literary form”;[27] he postponed writing the story because he evidently felt that Galpin’s own tale “Marsh-Mad” had preempted him by using the “living tree” idea. The plot as recorded here is identical in all essential features to the story as we have it, save that at the end “the tree was found uprooted—as if the roots had voluntarily relinquished their hold upon the ground—and beneath the massive trunk lay the body of the faithful mourner—crushed to death, & with an expression of the most unutterable fear upon his countenance.” What was not included in this plot synopsis was the setting of the tale in ancient Greece; but even this feature is not likely to have been derived from Dunsany, save perhaps indirectly in the sense that many of Dunsany’s early works have a vaguely Grecian or archaic air to them. Dunsany actually used the ancient world as a setting not in any tales but in two plays: Alexander (a play about Alexander the Great written in 1912, but not published until Alexander and Three Small Plays [1925], hence not read by Lovecraft until after he had written “The Tree”) and The Queen’s Enemies (published separately in 1916 and included the next year in Plays of Gods and Men), a delightful and celebrated play about Queen Nitokris of Egypt and the hideous (but not supernatural) vengeance she carries out upon her enemies. This was, let us recall, one of the works Dunsany read during his Boston appearance. Wherever he derived the Grecian setting and atmosphere, Lovecraft pulls it off ably; his lifelong study of ancient history paid dividends in this satisfying and elegantly written little story. The names of the artists—Kalos (“handsome” or “fair”) and Musides (“son of the Muse(s)”)—are both apt, although they are not actual Greek names. Tyché means “chance” (or sometimes “fate”), and actual cults of Tyché were established in Greece sometime after 371 B.C.E. This helps to date the tale fairly

precisely: there were tyrants of Syracuse (in Sicily) from ca. 485 to ca. 467 and again from ca. 406 to 344, but the cult of Tyché clearly establishes the latter period as the temporal setting for the story. One other detail helps to establish an even more precise date: mention of a tomb for Kalos “more lovely than the tomb of Mausolus” refers to the tomb built for Mausolus, the satrap of Caria, in 353, so that “The Tree” must take place in the period 353–344, when Dionysius II was Tyrant of Syracuse.[28] “The Tree” was first published, pitiably misprinted, in the Tryout for October 1921. Lovecraft later came to despise the story, maintaining that it, along with several other tales, “might—if typed on good stock—make excellent shelf-paper but little else.”[29] The tale may be a trifle obvious, but it is an effective display of Lovecraft’s skill in handling an historical setting. “The Cats of Ulthar” (June 15, 1920), conversely, always remained one of Lovecraft’s favourites, probably because cats are the central focus of the tale. This tale owes more to Dunsany than many of his other “Dunsanian” fantasies. The narrator proposes to explain how the town of Ulthar passed its “remarkable law” that no man may kill a cat. There was once a very evil couple who hated cats and who brutally murdered any that strayed on their property. One day a caravan of “dark wanderers” comes to Ulthar, among which is the little boy Menes, owner of a tiny black kitten. When the kitten disappears, the heartbroken boy, learning of the propensities of the cat-hating couple, “prayed in a tongue no villager could understand.” That night all the cats in the town vanish, and when they return in the morning they refuse for two entire days to touch any food or drink. Later it is noticed that the couple has not been seen for days; when at last the villagers enter their house, they find two clean-picked skeletons. Here too some of the borrowings from Dunsany may be only superficial: the name of the boy Menes may be derived from King Argimēnēs of the play, King Argimēnēs and the Unknown Warrior (in Five Plays); the “dark wanderers” seem an echo of the “Wanderers . . . a weird, dark tribe” mentioned toward the end of “Idle Days on the Yann.”[30] But the entire scenario—once again a consciously elementary tale of vengeance—is likely inspired by the many similar tales in The Book of Wonder. One wonders whether Lovecraft was thinking of himself when he wrote, with unexpected poignancy, of the orphan Menes, “when one is very young, one can find great relief in the lively antics of a black kitten.” Is this a remembrance of Nigger-Man and all that that lone pet meant to Lovecraft? He had outlined the plot of the story to Kleiner as early as May 21,[31] but it would be another three weeks before he actually set it down. It first appeared in the Tryout for November 1920. It would be some months before Lovecraft produced another Dunsanian tale, but it would be both one of his best and most significant in terms of his later work. “Celephaïs” (the dieresis over the i is frequently omitted) was written in early November 1920,[32] although it did not appear in print until Sonia Greene published it in her Rainbow for May 1922. Kuranes (who has a different name in waking life) escapes the prosy world of London by dream and drugs. In this state he comes upon

the city of Celephaïs, in the Valley of Ooth-Nargai. It is a city of which he had dreamed as a child, and there “his spirit had dwelt all the eternity of an hour one summer afternoon very long ago, when he had slipt away from his nurse and let the warm sea-breeze lull him to sleep as he watched the clouds from the cliff near the village.” It is a realm of pure beauty: When he entered the city, past the bronze gates and over the onyx pavements, the merchants and camel-drivers greeted him as if he had never been away; and it was the same at the turquoise temple of Nath-Horthath, where the orchidwreathed priests told him that there is no time in Ooth-Nargai, but only perpetual youth. Then Kuranes walked through the Street of Pillars to the seaward wall, where gathered the traders and sailors, and strange men from the regions where the sea meets the sky. But Kuranes awakes in his London garret and finds that he can return to Celephaïs no more. He dreams of other wondrous lands, but his sought-for city continues to elude him. He increases his intake of drugs, runs out of money, and is turned out of his flat. Then, as he wanders aimlessly through the streets, he comes upon a cortege of knights who “rode majestically through the downs of Surrey,” seeming to gallop back in time as they do so. They leap off a precipice and drift softly down to Celephaïs, and Kuranes knows that he will be its king forever. Meanwhile, in the waking world, the tide at Innsmouth washes up the corpse of a tramp, while a “notably fat and offensive millionaire brewer” purchases Kuranes’s ancestral mansion and “enjoys the purchased atmosphere of extinct nobility.” Lovecraft indicates that the story was ultimately based upon an entry in his commonplace book (for which see below) reading simply: “Dream of flying over city.” Note that this is a pure image, and that none of the philosophical or aesthetic conceptions actually imbedded in the story are at all suggested by it. We will come upon this phenomenon repeatedly: tales are triggered by some innocuous, fragmentary image that comes to occupy a very small place—or indeed no place—in the finished tale. Another entry in the commonplace book was perhaps also an inspiration: “Man journeys into the past—or imaginative realm—leaving bodily shell behind.” But if we are to find the inspiration for “Celephaïs,” we shall not have to look far; for the tale is embarrassingly similar in conception to Dunsany’s “The Coronation of Mr. Thomas Shap” (in The Book of Wonder). There a small businessman imagines himself the King of Larkar, and as he continues to dwell obsessively on (and in) this imaginary realm his work in the real world suffers, until finally he is placed in the madhouse of Hanwell. Other, less significant details also derive from Dunsany: the oft-repeated phrase “where the sea meets the sky” echoes “where sky meets ocean” from “When the Gods Slept”[33] (in Time and the Gods) and analogous phrases in other tales. Even the small detail whereby Kuranes floats down “past dark, shapeless, undreamed dreams, faintly glowing spheres that may have been partly

dreamed dreams” is clearly derived from the opening pages of The Gods of Pegāna, where all the gods and the separate worlds are seen to be merely the dreams of Mānā-Yood-Sushāī. And yet, it is also possible that this image of horses drifting dreamily over a cliff is an echo of a fantastic-seeming but very realistic story by Ambrose Bierce, “A Horseman in the Sky” (in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians), where a man seems to see such a sight after he has shot the rider—who proves to be his own father. Nevertheless, “Celephaïs” enunciates issues of great importance to Lovecraft. It is difficult to resist an autobiographical interpretation of Kuranes as he appears at the outset: . . . he was the last of his family, and alone among the indifferent millions of London . . . His money and lands were gone, and he did not care for the ways of people about him, but preferred to dream and write of his dreams. What he wrote was laughed at by those to whom he shewed it, so that after a time he kept his writings to himself . . . Kuranes was not modern, and did not think like others who wrote. Whilst they strove to strip from life its embroidered robes of myth, and to shew in naked ugliness the foul thing that is reality, Kuranes sought for beauty alone. This is a trifle maudlin and self-pitying, but we are clearly meant to empathise with Kuranes’s psychological dissociation from his environment. That final sentence, perfectly encapsulating Lovecraft’s aesthetic at this stage of his career, is worth studying in detail later. But “Celephaïs” seeks to do more than merely create beauty; the thrust of the story is nothing less than an escape from the “groans and grating / Of abhorrent life” (as he put it in “Despair”) into a realm of pure imagination—one which, nevertheless, is derived from “the nebulous memories of childhood tales and dreams.” The man who in January 1920 wrote “Adulthood is hell”[34] had found in Lord Dunsany a model for the glorious re-creation of those memories of youth for which he would yearn his entire life. “Celephaïs” is a gorgeously evocative prose-poem that ranks close to the pinnacle of Lovecraft’s Dunsanian tales. But it will gain added importance for the contrast it provides to a much later work superficially (and only superficially) in the Dunsanian vein, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. This novel, written after Lovecraft’s New York experience, exhibits a marked, almost antipodal, alteration in Lovecraft’s aesthetic of beauty, and when Kuranes reappears in it he and his imagined realm will take on a very different cast. “The Quest of Iranon” (February 28, 1921) may be the most beautiful of all Lovecraft’s Dunsanian fantasies, although in later years he savagely condemned it as mawkish. A comment made shortly after the tale was written may be more on target: “I am picking up a new style lately—running to pathos as well as horror. The best thing I have yet done is ‘The Quest of Iranon’, whose English Loveman calls the most musical and flowing I have yet written, and whose sad plot made one prominent poet

actually weep—not at the crudity of the story, but at the sadness.”[35] The note about the “new style” presumably refers to “Celephaïs,” the only other tale of this period that could be said to mix horror and pathos. “The Quest of Iranon” is really all pathos. A youthful singer named Iranon comes to the granite city of Teloth, saying that he is seeking his far-off home of Aira, where he was a prince. The men of Teloth, who have no beauty in their lives, do not look kindly on Iranon, and force him to work with a cobbler. He meets a boy named Romnod, who similarly yearns for “the warm groves and the distant lands of beauty and song.” Romnod thinks that nearby Oonai, the city of lutes and dancing, might be Iranon’s Aira. Iranon doubts it but goes there with Romnod. It is indeed not Aira, but the two of them find welcome there for a time. Iranon wins praises for his singing and lyre playing, and Romnod learns the coarser pleasures of wine. Years pass; Iranon seems to grow no older, as he continues to hope one day to find Aira. Romnod eventually dies of drink, and Iranon leaves the town and continues his quest. He comes to “the squalid cot of an antique shepherd” and asks him about Aira. The shepherd looks at Iranon curiously and says: “O stranger, I have indeed heard the name of Aira, and the other names thou hast spoken, but they come to me from afar down the waste of long years. I heard them in my youth from the lips of a playmate, a beggar’s boy given to strange dreams, who would weave long tales about the moon and the flowers and the west wind. We used to laugh at him, for we knew him from his birth though he thought himself a King’s son.” At twilight an old, old man is seen walking calmly into the quicksand. “That night something of youth and beauty died in the elder world.” There is perhaps a certain sentimentality in this story—as well as the suggestion of social snobbery, since Iranon cannot bear the revelation that he is not a prince but only a beggar’s boy—but the fundamental message of the shattering of hope is etched with great poignancy and delicacy. In a sense, “The Quest of Iranon” is a mirror image of “Celephaïs”: whereas Kuranes dies in the real world only to escape into the world of his childhood imaginings, Iranon dies because he is unable to preserve the illusion of the reality of those imaginings. In the city of Teloth Lovecraft has devised a pungent satire of Christianity, specifically of the Protestant work ethic. When Iranon asks why he must work as a cobbler, the archon tells him: “All in Teloth must toil, . . . for that is the law.” Iranon responds: “Wherefore do ye toil; is it not that ye may live and be happy? And if ye toil only that ye may toil more, when shall happiness find you?” To this the archon states: “‘The words thou speakest are blasphemy, for the gods of Teloth have said that toil is good. Our gods have promised us a haven of light beyond death, where there shall be rest without end, and crystal coldness amidst which none shall vex his mind with thought or his eyes with beauty. . . . All here must serve, and song is folly.’” Aside from its musical language, “The Quest of Iranon” bears no influence of any specific work by Dunsany, and may be the most original of Lovecraft’s Dunsanian

imitations. It was a long time appearing in print. Lovecraft wished to use it in his own Conservative (whose last issue had appeared in July 1919), but the next issue did not appear until March 1923, and Lovecraft had by then evidently decided against using it there. It languished in manuscript until finally published in the Galleon for July–August 1935. Lovecraft’s final explicitly Dunsanian story is “The Other Gods” (August 14, 1921). The “gods of earth” have forsaken their beloved mountain Ngranek and have betaken themselves to “unknown Kadath in the cold waste where no man treads”; they have done this ever since a human being from Ulthar, Barzai the Wise, attempted to scale Mt. Ngranek and catch a glimpse of them. Barzai was much learned in the “seven cryptical books of Hsan” and the “Pnakotic Manuscripts of distant and frozen Lomar,” and knew so much of the gods that he wished to see them dancing on Mt. Ngranek. He undertakes this bold journey with his friend, Atal the priest. For days they climb the rugged mountain, and as they approach the cloud-hung summit Barzai thinks he hears the gods; he redoubles his efforts, leaving Atal far behind. He cries out: “The mists are very thin, and the moon casts shadows on the slope; the voices of earth’s gods are high and wild, and they fear the coming of Barzai the Wise, who is greater than they. . . . The moon’s light flickers, as earth’s gods dance against it; I shall see the dancing forms of the gods that leap and howl in the moonlight. . . . The light is dimmer and the gods are afraid. . . .” But his eagerness turns to horror. He thinks he actually sees the gods of earth, but instead they are “‘The other gods! The other gods! The gods of the outer hells that guard the feeble gods of earth!’” Barzai is swept up (“‘Merciful gods of earth, I am falling into the sky!’”) and is never seen again. “The Other Gods” is a textbook example of hubris, and not an especially interesting one. Dunsany had already treated the matter several times in his own work; in “The Revolt of the Home Gods” (in The Gods of Pegāna) the humble home gods Eimes, Zanes, and Segastrion declare: “We now play the game of the gods and slay men for our pleasure, and we be greater than the gods of Pegāna.”[36] But, even though they be gods, they suffer a dismal fate at the hands of the gods of Pegāna. “The Other Gods” is a little more interesting in that it establishes explicit links with other of Lovecraft’s Dunsanian tales. The mention of the Pnakotic Manuscripts ties the story to the pre-Dunsanian “Polaris”; the mention of Ulthar connects with “The Cats of Ulthar,” as does the character Atal, who had already appeared in that story as an innkeeper’s son. This sort of thing had in fact been happening all along in these tales: “The Quest of Iranon” made passing mention of Lomar (“Polaris”) and to Thraa, Ilarnek, and Kadatheron (cited in “The Doom That Came to Sarnath”). The only tales exempt from this type of interconnection are “The White Ship” (clearly an allegory), “The Tree” (set in ancient Greece), and “Celephaïs,” where the distinction between the real world of Surrey and the realm of Celephaïs (a product of Kuranes’s

imagination) is at the heart of the story. What this seems to suggest is that the Dunsanian tales (now including “Polaris”) occupy a single imagined realm; but it should be pointed out that this realm is systematically and consistently presented as being situated not in a “dream-world” (there are no dream-stories among these works except, in a special way, “Polaris” and “Celephaïs”) but in the distant past of the earth. I have already pointed out that the reference in “Polaris” to “Six and twenty thousand years” dates that story to 24,000 B.C. Other Dunsanian tales follow this pattern: Ib (in “The Doom That Came to Sarnath”) stood “when the world was young”; “The Other Gods,” by mentioning Lomar and Ulthar, incorporates the latter (and by extension the entire story “The Cats of Ulthar”) into the earth’s prehistory; and “The Quest of Iranon,” by mentioning Lomar in conjunction with the cities named in “The Doom That Came to Sarnath,” does the same (recall also the final sentence of “The Quest of Iranon”: “That night something of youth and beauty died in the elder world”). Some of this interconnectedness may have been inspired by Dunsany’s example, although even in these early tales Lovecraft carries it to far greater lengths than Dunsany ever did. The Gods of Pegāna and Time and the Gods are generally set in the realm of Pegāna, but no other of Dunsany’s works are. “Idle Days on the Yann” has two sequels, “The Shop in Go-By Street” and “The Avenger of Perdóndaris”; “The Hashish Man” is a lame sequel to “Bethmoora”; but this is all the crossreferencing that exists in Dunsany’s work. Lovecraft’s non-Dunsanian stories, from as early as “The Nameless City” (1921), similarly refer to sites and artifacts from the Dunsanian stories, and in such a way as to suggest their existence in the distant past. This whole schema, however, becomes confused and even paradoxical when Lovecraft writes The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, whose very title proclaims it to be a dream-fantasy. For now it is of interest to realise the degree to which Lovecraft’s stories are already becoming intertextually related, a phenomenon that would continue with his later stories. It is, to be sure, unusual for an author to be so self-referential, and there is certainly no doubt about the thematic or philosophical unity of all Lovecraft’s work, from fiction to essays to poetry to letters; but it does not strike me as helpful to regard all his tales as interconnected on the level of plot—which they manifestly are not—or even in their glancing and frequently insignificant borrowings of names, entities, and characters. Nevertheless, it is a singular phenomenon that will require further analysis. What, then, did Lovecraft learn from Dunsany? The answer may not be immediately evident, since it took several years for the Dunsany influence to be assimilated, and some of the most interesting and important aspects of the influence are manifested in tales that bear no superficial resemblance to Dunsany. For now, however, one lesson can be summed up in Lovecraft’s somewhat simpleminded characterisation in “Supernatural Horror in Literature”: “Beauty rather than terror is the keynote of Dunsany’s work.” Whereas, with the exceptions of “Polaris” and such non-weird ventures as “A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson,” Lovecraft’s

experiments in fiction up to 1919 had been entirely within the realm of supernatural horror, he was now able to diversify his fictional palette with tales of languorous beauty, delicacy, and pathos. To be sure, horror is present as well; but the fantastic settings of the tales, even given the assumption that they are occurring in the earth’s prehistory, causes the horror to seem more remote, less immediately threatening. In this sense a remark made as early as March 1920 may stand as Lovecraft’s most perceptive account of Dunsany’s influence on him: “The flight of imagination, and the delineation of pastoral or natural beauty, can be accomplished as well in prose as in verse—often better. It is this lesson which the inimitable Dunsany hath taught me.”[37] This comment was made in a discussion of Lovecraft’s verse writing; and it is no accident that his verse output declined dramatically after 1920. There had been a dichotomy between Lovecraft’s fictional and poetic output ever since he had resumed the writing of stories: how could tales of supernatural horror have any relation to the empty but superficially “pretty” Georgianism of his verse? With the decline of verse writing, that dichotomy disappears—or, at least, narrows—as the quest for pure beauty now finds expression in tales. Is it any wonder, then, that as early as January 1920 Lovecraft is noting that, “since all habits must be broken gradually, I am breaking the poesy habit that way”?[38] More to the point, Lovecraft learned from Dunsany how to enunciate his philosophical, aesthetic, and moral conceptions by means of fiction, beyond the simple cosmicism of “Dagon” or “Beyond the Wall of Sleep.” The relation of dream and reality—dimly probed in “Polaris”—is treated exhaustively and poignantly in “Celephaïs”; the loss of hope is etched pensively in “The White Ship” and “The Quest of Iranon”; the perfidy of false friendship is the focus of “The Tree.” Lovecraft found Time and the Gods “richly philosophical,”[39] and the whole of Dunsany’s early—and later—work offers simple, affecting parables on fundamental human issues. Lovecraft would in later years express his philosophy in increasingly complex ways as his fiction itself gained in breadth, scope, and richness. At the outset it was one particular phase of Dunsany’s philosophy—cosmicism— that most attracted Lovecraft. He would maintain hyperbolically in “Supernatural Horror in Literature” that Dunsany’s “point of view is the most truly cosmic of any held in the literature of any period,” although later he would modify this opinion considerably. What is somewhat strange, therefore, is that Lovecraft’s own imitations are—with the sole exception of “The Other Gods”—not at all cosmic in scope, and rarely involve that interplay of “gods and men” which is so striking a characteristic of Dunsany’s early work. Perhaps Lovecraft felt that this Gods of Pegāna style or subject matter was simply not to be duplicated (in this he was probably right); but what we will discover is that this cosmicism becomes exhibited in Lovecraft’s realworld stories, where the metaphysical and aesthetic implications are very different. For it will become evident that Dunsany’s influence extends far beyond Lovecraft’s “Dunsanian” fantasies. We will find many instances of influence in small and large particulars in later tales; and Lovecraft’s remarkable claim that it was Dunsany’s imagined pantheon in The Gods of Pegāna that led him to create his own

pseudomythology will have to be given consideration at the proper time. In spite of his own assertions to the contrary, Lovecraft’s “Dunsanian” fantasies are far more than mechanical pastiches of a revered master: they reveal considerable originality of conception while being only superficially derived from Dunsany. It is true that Lovecraft might never have written these tales had he not had Dunsany’s example at hand; but he was, at this early stage, an author searching for things of his own to say, and in Dunsany’s style and manner he merely found suggestive ways to say them. Interestingly, Dunsany himself came to this conclusion: when Lovecraft’s work was posthumously published in book form, Dunsany came upon it and confessed that he had “an odd interest in Lovecraft’s work because in the few tales of his I have read I found that he was writing in my style, entirely originally & without in any way borrowing from me, & yet with my style & largely my material.”[40] Lovecraft would have been grateful for the acknowledgment. For the time being, however, Dunsany, more than Poe, was Lovecraft’s “God of Fiction.” He would write an interesting, but not notably perceptive, lecture, “Lord Dunsany and His Work,” in late 1922; as early as May 1920, when “Literary Composition” was published in the United Amateur, he would single out Dunsany and Bierce as models of short story technique; and in 1921 he would complain that “Dunsany has met with nothing but coldness or lukewarm praise” (“The Defence Reopens!”). Lovecraft would, in fact, be indirectly responsible for the revival of Dunsany’s work in the 1970s: his paean to Dunsany in “Supernatural Horror in Literature” caused August Derleth to take note of his work and to sign up the Irish writer for an early Arkham House title (The Fourth Book of Jorkens, 1948), which in turn led to efforts by Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Lin Carter to resurrect Dunsany’s early work. Dunsany is still vastly underappreciated, and both the Irish and the fantasy communities appear either uninterested in or intimidated by him; but the richness and substance of his entire work, early and late, would seem to single him out for study and appreciation. A Dunsany renaissance has yet to occur, and one can only hope that it may one day do so, even if on Lovecraft’s coattails.

NOTES 1. The Gods of Pegāna (Boston: John W. Luce, 1916), 1. 2. Patches of Sunlight (London: William Heinemann, 1938), 29–30. 3. Oscar Wilde, “Preface” to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). 4. Patches of Sunlight, 9. 5. Patches of Sunlight, 135. 6. HPL to Fritz Leiber, 15 November 1936; Selected Letters (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1965–76), 5.354. 7. HPL to Clark Ashton Smith, 14 April 1929; Selected Letters 2.328. 8. HPL to Richard Ely Morse, 28 July 1932 (ms., John Hay Library, Brown University). 9. See note 7. 10. HPL to Clark Ashton Smith, 11 January 1923; Selected Letters 1.203.

11. HPL to Rheinhart Kleiner, 9 November 1919; Selected Letters 1.91. 12. While the Sirens Slept (London: Jarrolds, 1944), 21. 13. HPL to the Gallomo, April 1920; Letters to Alfred Galpin (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2003), 83. 14. HPL to Frank Belknap Long, 3 June 1923; Selected Letters 1.234. 15. C. L. Moore to HPL, 30 January 1936 (ms., John Hay Library, Brown University). 16. HPL to Rheinhart Kleiner, 3 December 1919; Selected Letters 1.93. 17. Lord Dunsany, A Dreamer’s Tales (Boston: John W. Luce, 1916), 60. 18. Alfred Galpin, “Department of Public Criticism,” United Amateur 19, no. 4 (March 1920): 84. 19. Cf. the chronology of tales included in his letter to Frank Belknap Long, 8 November 1923 (Arkham House Transcripts), where “The Street” is placed between “The White Ship” and “The Doom That Came to Sarnath.” 20. HPL to Frank Belknap Long, 19 November 1920 (Arkham House transcripts). 21. “I echo your wish that ‘The Street’ might be professionally published and widely read . . .” Ibid. 22. A Dreamer’s Tales, 78. 23. “In the Land of Time” (from Time and the Gods), The Book of Wonder (New York: Modern Library, 1918), 176. 24. The Book of Wonder, 16. 25. Carl Buchanan, “‘The Terrible Old Man’: A Myth of the Devouring Father,” Lovecraft Studies no. 29 (Fall 1993): 19–31. 26. HPL to Frank Belknap Long, 19 November 1920; Selected Letters 1.121. 27. HPL to Alfred Galpin, 29 August 1918; Letters to Alfred Galpin, 35. 28. See further my article, “‘The Tree’ and Ancient History” (Nyctalops, April 1991), in Primal Sources: Essays on H. P. Lovecraft (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2003), 162–66. 29. HPL to Wilfred B. Talman, 10 November 1936; Selected Letters 5.348. 30. A Dreamer’s Tales, 87. 31. HPL to Rheinhart Kleiner, 21 May 1920; Selected Letters 1.116–17. 32. HPL to Frank Belknap Long, 19 November 1920; Selected Letters 1.121. 33. The Book of Wonder, 117. 34. HPL to the Gallomo, April 1920; Selected Letters 1.106. 35. HPL to Rheinhart Kleiner, 23 April 1921; Selected Letters 1.128. 36. The Gods of Pegāna, 35. 37. HPL to Rheinhart Kleiner, 7 March 1920; Selected Letters 1.110. 38. HPL to Rheinhart Kleiner, 23 January 1920; Selected Letters 1.107. 39. Selected Letters 1.93 (see note 11). 40. Lord Dunsany, Letter to August Derleth (28 March 1952), quoted in Lovecraft Studies no. 14 (Spring 1987): 38.

Chapter 28

Recovering the Effects of Lord Dunsany on J. R. R. Tolkien Skye Cervone Despite the lack of attention Lord Dunsany’s work has received at the hands of critics, his fiction has been immensely important to the work of other fantasy authors. Although the impressive stylistic effects of Dunsany’s prose and its profound effect on subsequent fantasy authors is evident, Dunsany’s influence on J. R. R. Tolkien, an author who is probably better known to the casual reader of fantasy literature, has not been studied in detail. Dunsany’s influence is evident in Tolkien’s fictional and critical work. Using a phrase first employed by John Dryden, Joseph Addison defines what is required to achieve “the faery way of writing.” Both Dunsany and Tolkien masterfully achieve this mode in their works. Addison argues this form of writing is “more difficult than any other that depends on the poet’s fancy, because he has no pattern to follow in it, and must work altogether out of his own invention.”[1] The writer who embraces this tradition must rely primarily on his own imagination and cannot find a direct correspondence between this world and his created world. As Tolkien discusses, this ability to create relies on a masterful use of language, “a mythical grammar,” with the adjective being the most potent incantation.[2] The writer employing the “fairy way of writing” becomes what Tolkien calls “a sub-creator.”[3] Addison also insists that the writer should also “be very well versed in legends and fables, antiquated romances, and the traditions of nurses and old women.”[4] Addison argues that if the writer is not able to work within these areas, he is doomed to produce the false fantastic, with fairies barely distinguishable from humans. Addison places importance on tradition and old tales because there was a magic in the natural word. He states: “Our forefathers looked upon nature with more reverence and horror, before the world was enlightened by learning and philosophy, and loved to astonish themselves with the apprehensions of witchcraft, prodigies, charms, and enchantments.”[5] Natural forces and places were tinged with wonder because they could not be fully explained by science. For Addison, “the faery way of writing” embraces both tradition and the natural. Traditions are central to Dunsany’s work. The old and romantic, as well as nature’s creations, are precious treasures for him. Tolkien, too, grounds his work in tradition, legends, and romance to achieve his own unique fantastic works. Both Dunsany and Tolkien brilliantly achieve their own “faery way of writing” that fully embraces Addison’s tradition and creates realms of terror and beauty unlike any other. Dunsany and Tolkien were troubled by man’s increasing removal from nature and valued man’s return to nature. Their fictional writings contain dire warnings of the desolate world humans will find themselves in if the natural world is destroyed. Both authors find the magic in the natural world that Addison discusses. These themes—

warnings against the destruction of the natural world and the magic of nature—were of paramount importance to the work of both authors. Lord Dunsany’s depiction of the realm of Faery was metaphorically important to Tolkien’s understanding of that “Perilous Realm.”[6] As Tolkien states, “Most good ‘fairy stories’ are about the adventures of men in the Perilous Realm or upon its shadowy marches,”[7] rather than the fairies or elves themselves. It is not the fairies or elves that make the story interesting, but the effect this “Perilous Realm” has on the humans who come in contact with it. In Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter, the men of Erl wish to be ruled by “a magic lord.”[8] So the King of Erl sends his son, Alveric, on a journey to Elfland so he can “wed the King of Elfland’s daughter.”[9] Even though he is only in Elfland for a day, ten to twelve years pass in the human realm during the time it takes Alveric to bring Lirazel back to his kingdom. Naturally, since Alveric first set out on his journey much has changed in the land of Erl. On his return, Alveric discovers that his father has died long ago, and yet this news does not elicit any response from the young man. He spends no time discussing his father’s death, asking questions, or grieving. Any one, or all, of these responses are normal steps in the grieving process. Yet Alveric appears entirely unmoved and unconcerned by what should be one of the most devastating experiences in his life, illustrating his mental disconnection with the human world. Even though he has physically returned from Elfland, Alveric has left something significant behind. Immediately following his arrival in Erl, Alveric brings Lirazel to the Freer so that he can marry the elfin princess. This strange reaction is not an act of denial aimed at lessening Alveric’s grief; rather, it is an emotionless reaction that is a direct result of Alveric just returning from Elfland. The realm of Faery possesses the ability to toy with the hearts and desires of mortal beings. As Le Guin notes, “A fantasy is a journey. It is a journey into the subconscious mind, just like psychoanalysis is. Like psychoanalysis, it can be dangerous; and it will change you.”[10] The hold Elfland has on Alveric changes him profoundly, and after the town of Erl is touched by magic, it too is never the same. Alveric has little care for what has happened in his absence. His heart is entirely consumed by Lirazel and his desire to possess her as his wife. He cannot pause or react to any event that is not connected to Elfland. The events of human life pale in comparison to the hold the realm of Faery has on humans. Alveric is a man possessed with longing for Elfland and its princess, and is unable to grieve for the father whom he so aimed to please by finding Lirazel in the first place. The effects of Elfland on Alveric do not end with his cold and emotionless response to his father’s death. Looking through Lirazel’s eyes, Alveric is able to see the land of Erl in a new light. He is fully able to appreciate its own unique beauty in a way that was not possible for him before: “So glad was she, so gay, with her cries of surprise and her laughter, that there seemed thenceforth to Alveric a beauty that he had never dreamed of in buttercups, and a humor in carts that he had never thought of before.”[11] For Lirazel the land of Erl is a novel place, and this is a source of much joy for her, and Alveric also receives this joy. The effects of Elfland change how

Alveric views his world. Alveric reacts as if he has felt the ten to twelve years pass, even though he is not conscious of this passage. The land of Erl is no longer familiar to him. His heart and mind are touched by Elfland; thus, his home is nearly as foreign to him as it is to Lirazel. It is only through this new way of seeing that Alveric is able to view the everyday objects around him with a tinge of wonder. Alveric is so changed by his visit to Elfland that he is not troubled when he requests a Christian wedding, and the Freer tells him and Lirazel that “all in that land [Elfland] dwelt beyond salvation.”[12] All Alveric can understand at the time is his dire need to wed the elfin princess, so he is initially unconcerned about the Freer’s religious warning. The concept of salvation is entirely of the human world; those who live in Elfland know nothing about the laws of Christianity, so Lirazel is equally undisturbed by this news and responds with laughter. Erl is a Christian land, but Alveric is completely uninterested in his heritage and Lirazel’s salvation while the memory and hold of Elfland are fresh and all he can remember. It is not until a few years pass, and the effects of Elfland drift away, that Alveric begins to feel concern because Lirazel would never “grow familiar with earthly things, never understand the folk that dwelt in the valley, never read wise books without laughter, never care for earthly ways,”[13] and, most importantly, never practice Christianity. After a few years of attempting to be understanding, Alveric becomes angry at Lirazel’s innate nature and fights with his wife, although she has previously been the only object of his longing, a being of the Realm of Faery. After he has possessed his object of longing for a number of years, the effects of Elfland have had time to wane, and he begins to wish Lirazel were more like a mortal wife. After living in the land of humans, the effects of Elfland have lessened, and Alveric is so accustomed to living with magic that he no longer appreciates this magnificent force or recognizes its value. He no longer sees Lirazel as a being of Elfland; she simply is his wife, and he begins to feel the loss of magic, even though magic is literally right beside him. Alveric attempts to control a natural, wild, and untamable force, which is clearly a commentary on man’s attempted dominion over the natural world. Tolkien discusses the danger in “acquiring” the objects of human longing: “They have become like the things which once attracted us by their glitter, or their colour, or their shape, and we laid hands on them, and then locked them in our hoard, acquired them, and acquiring ceased to look at them.”[14] Tolkien and Dunsany both seem to suggest that possessiveness is a natural human impulse. When he had first met her, Alveric had been enraptured with all that was innate to Lirazel and her ability to change him. After living in Erl again for a number of years, he remembers what it is to be human and wishes to tame her natural spirit. Angry for the loss he feels of Elfland, Alveric is fundamentally conflicted, a conflict that almost drives him to insanity. Confused and hurt after their argument, Lirazel leaves her husband to return to Elfland and her father. Alveric becomes so upset that he decides these differences do not matter to him. He spends years of his life attempting to reach Elfland, which “is both a place

and a state of existence”[15] —a state of existence Alveric can no longer have because he no longer lives with his elfin princess. Alveric’s change of heart must be partly due to the fact that with the object of his longing removed, with his piece of Elfland entirely absent, he remembers his state of being close to Elfland; and part of him longs to regain the magic constantly receding from him. Although he does love Lirazel, the fact that she represents Elfland (and by extension, fantasy), and the ability of Elfland to toy with the hearts and desires of mortals, cannot be overlooked. Tolkien insists that the ability to produce desire is central to fantasy. He states, “If they [fairy-stories] awakened desire, satisfying it while often whetting it unbearably, they succeeded.”[16] Alveric must look for Lirazel because he is powerless to resist Elfland’s lure. Lirazel’s father is able to move Elfland at his whim, and he spends many earthly years preventing Alveric from reaching his goal. Schweitzer notes this is “a literalized, multiplex metaphor for the imagination, for the lost innocence of childhood, for everything which lies beyond our grasp.”[17] The loss of childhood also ushers a loss of childhood follies, and Alveric realizes he cannot tame or change his elfin princess. He literally must admit that she is a being of the natural world. In “On Fairy-Stories,” Tolkien contends that the realm of Faery is not primarily concerned with humans, and that humans are not concerned with those who live in Faery, until their paths cross. The King of Elfland is not concerned with humans at all until his Lirazel marries a mortal. At that point the King only becomes concerned with “the fields that are mapped and known”[18] because he wants his daughter to return home. Toward the end of the novel, his interest in the human realm continues only long enough to ensure the happiness of his daughter because of her love for Alveric. The King’s only interest in the world of humans seems to be a direct result of their paths crossing; if it were not for his daughter, the King never would have concerned himself with the world outside of Elfland. Similarly, Alveric is entirely unconcerned with Elfland until he visits there. Tolkien insists that one of the most powerful aspects of Faery is its ability to toy with humans’ physical and emotional well-being, a trait heavily at work in The King of Elfland’s Daughter. In “On Fairy-Stories,” Tolkien states of fairies and elves (for Tolkien these terms are largely interchangeable) that “at least part of the magic that they wield for the good or evil of man is power to play on desires of his body and heart.”[19] This premise is clear in many instances, but especially so when Alveric is consumed by his desire to bring Lirazel back to the human world. His relentless hunt for her consumes and almost ruins his life, and he shows “that heavy burden of years, and all the sorrow of wandering.”[20] Their son, Orion, grows up without a father, a fact Alveric never comments on or seems to regret. The responsibilities of a father never concern him. After he leaves on his hopeless quest, Alveric’s kingdom is without its ruler for years. Like Alveric’s complete disregard for the death of his father, these instances illustrate how Elfland’s pull can entirely consume the human mind. The duties that are important aspects of Alveric’s life—the role of son, father, and king— pale in comparison to the lure of Lirazel and Elfland. Forsaking his responsibilities and

health, Alveric continues his relentless quest to find Elfland. His desire knows no reason or responsibility; he is solely concerned with the object of his longing. Elfland’s “power to play on desires” of man’s “body and heart”[21] are illustrated not only by Alveric, but also by the men of Erl, who ask “to be ruled by a magic lord.” The old King of Erl knows his people “have chosen foolishly . . . and only the Dark Ones that show not their faces know all that this will bring.”[22] The men of Erl do not know or understand magic, yet they are still subject to the mystical and irresistible lure of Elfland. When magic enters the Kingdom of Erl, the men grow unhappy and want to return to their old ways of life. They go to the witch Ziroonderel and request that she give them “a goodly spell which shall be a charm against magic, so that there will be no more of it in the valley, for overmuch has come.”[23] The foolish men have exactly what they had asked their old ruler for, yet they are weary of the magic in their lives because they cannot control it, and so they fear it. Again, Dunsany alludes to the human desire to control and exert dominion over magic and, by extension, the natural world. Ziroonderel responds with scorn and denies their request. She states: I would sooner give you a spell against comfort and clothing, food, shelter, and warmth, aye and will do it, sooner than tear from these poor fields of Earth the magic that is to them an ample cloak against the chill of Space, and a gay raiment against the sneers of nothingness.[24] Magic is linked to the land, and so the men are depicted as foolish for wishing to rid themselves of it and gain control over it. Dunsany seems to be suggesting here that the Earth would not miss a town of healthy and happy humans, but that a loss of the magic that has reached it would make the Earth itself sad and diminished. At the end of the novel, magic indeed effects the end of the old ways of Erl, and the people are never able to tame and control the wild and natural force that they have invited into their world. The kingdom is never the same again, as it becomes entwined with Elfland. That was certainly never the result the people of Erl would have wanted, but the ability of Elfland to manipulate their desires impedes their ability to think about any possible ramifications of their rash request. Dunsany suggests that humans cannot appreciate magic (or nature) and will favor trying to control it, rather than value the mystery it brings into their lives. This sentiment at work in his fiction can be viewed as a comment on fantasy in general, which is often not appreciated for what it is. Dunsany was certainly disheartened about the critical reception of his fantasy work. Tolkien’s familiarity with Dunsany’s work has been noted elsewhere. In his commentary in Tales Before Tolkien, Douglas A. Anderson mentions Tolkien’s high regard for Dunsany’s The Book of Wonder and specifically the story “Chu-bu and Sheemish.” In response to a quotation about inventing language that appeared in 1967, Tolkien wrote: “If I attributed meaning to boo-hoo I should not in this case be influenced by the words containing bu in many other European languages, but by a story by Lord Dunsany . . . about two idols enshrined in the same temple: Chu-Bu and

Sheemish.”[25] The story had a profound effect on Tolkien’s imagination. He shows the lasting effects of the correct word and the ability of fantasy to create. Dunsany’s unique use of language gripped Tolkien’s imagination, who mentions the story again in a letter in 1972: “Being a cult figure in one’s own lifetime was not at all pleasant, but he felt that ‘even the nose of a very modest idol (younger than Chu-bu and not much older than Sheemish) cannot remain entirely untickled by the sweet smell of incense.”[26] Tolkien’s use of the word idol is worth discussing. Both Chu-bu and Sheemish are literally idols, but would Tolkien himself, even begrudgingly, consider himself an idol? He uses the term in a religious sense, yet his Christian beliefs would certainly problematize that statement. Or was his imagination simply sparked by Dunsany’s story, and it stuck with him? It is interesting to note here that Chu-bu and Sheemish are not originally worshipped because of any specific deeds on their part. At the end of the story, the power of the gods together initiates an earthquake, which in turn destroys their temple. Yet their followers “never guessed the truth that the thing was done in rivalry.”[27] As a devout Christian, Tolkien might have liked the end result of two pagan gods destroying their temple. Certainly, Tolkien would have appreciated Dunsany’s use of invented language to enhance the reality of his idols. Tolkien places special emphasis on the importance of Recovery. In the essay “Lord Dunsany: The Potency of Words and the Wonder of Things,” Angelee Anderson states: “Fairy-stories enable us to grasp anew the goodness of the ‘natural,’ by placing it in another context in which the pall of familiarity falls from it and its inherent beauty and wonder shine forth. Tolkien called this ability of fairy-stories ‘Recovery.’”[28] As Anderson notes, Dunsany’s fantasy “succeeds highly, first because of his gifted use of universalities.”[29] Dunsany introduces the familiar and then reinvents it in his fiction. He also shows the splendor and beauty of the human realm. In his preface, Dunsany assures readers that in the majority of The King of Elfland’s Daughter “there is no more to be shown than the face of the fields we know, and ordinary English woods and a common village and valley.”[30] Yet within his tale readers are transported “beyond the fields we know.” Dunsany takes the Europe that would be familiar to his readers and creates the unfamiliar within his fantasy. Tolkien clearly admired the ability of fantasy authors to achieve this defamiliarizing effect. Fairy stories and fantasy “open a door on Other Time, and if we pass through, though only for a moment, we stand outside our own time, outside Time itself, maybe.”[31] Dunsany’s England, like so many of his fantasy settings, is firmly planted in “Other Time.” It is not surprising that, as an author who valued the defamiliarizing effects of fantasy, Tolkien was deeply dissatisfied with the mechanization of the modern world and the ugliness it produces. He discusses his disdain for the destruction of the natural world and the growing abundance of technology and machines. He mentions his dislike of “the proximity of mass- production robot factories, and the roar of selfobtrusive mechanical traffic.”[32] For Tolkien, these intrusions are indicative of humans’ “increasing in barbarity.”[33] Dunsany believed “the evils of civilization—bred by our

increasing distance from Nature—will emerge and eventually overrun us.”[34] Tolkien goes on to say that “we are acutely conscious both of the ugliness of our works, and of their evil.”[35] He distrusted and disliked humans’ removal from nature and wished to see their return to it. He regarded man-made things as primarily ugly, especially in modern times. When referring to buildings, he states that it would be impossible to find a man-made structure that wasn’t ugly “unless it was built before our time.”[36] Tolkien illustrates this beautifully in one of the concluding chapters of The Lord of the Rings, when the Shire is desecrated and rebuilt in a desolate and modern way. Although I will not be so bold as to suggest that Tolkien gets his love of nature and distrust of modern machinery from Dunsany, he found a voice that echoed this significant outlook. Indeed, Dunsany was also highly concerned with the ugliness of technology as opposed to the grandeur of the natural world. With regard to technology, Dunsany held the “belief that our civilization has somehow gone astray.”[37] The two men shared the same pessimistic view of the destructive and mechanical tendencies they saw in their respective societies, and this view had a profound effect on their work. Tolkien was able to look at the world around him and imagine ways in which it could be improved. He was able to envision a world at peace with nature, with beings that appreciated natural wonders and did not seek to dominate and destroy them. The Shire shows Tolkien’s ideal society. Nature is valued and nurtured by the Hobbits, and for the most part they treat one another kindly. Their homes are in the ground, as close to nature as physically possible. The chapter “The Scouring of the Shire” paints a vivid portrait of Tolkien’s worst fears about the ravages of technology and the consequences of pollution, as well as what he saw as the inevitable destruction of the natural world. Tolkien’s descriptions portray the worst of what mankind can inflict on nature. When Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin return to the Shire, they see “rows of new mean houses”[38] and “the new mill in all its frowning and dirty ugliness: a great brick building straddling the stream, which it fouled with a steaming and stinking outflow.”[39] These new structures provide a sharp contrast to the beautiful Hobbit holes that once existed in the Shire. Not only have they taken the place of trees and plants, but by building above-ground homes the Hobbits have physically removed themselves from nature. These new structures are a startling example of what Tolkien was referring to in “On Fairy-Stories.” When discussing the Europe of his time, Tolkein states that “we are acutely conscious both of the ugliness of our works, and their evil.”[40] With this removal of the Hobbits from nature comes a decline in their values. When Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin first arrive, they receive a chilly welcome and are denied large amounts of food, comfortable beds, clean accommodations, and beer. These un-Hobbit-like characteristics are a direct result of the Shire’s being forced to embrace technology and remove itself from the natural world. This vision of the destruction of the Shire echoes a passage in one of Dunsany’s novels, Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley. This novel was written in 1921,

a few years after Dunsany returned from fighting in World War I. Joshi’s study carefully traces Dunsany’s negative depiction of technology. He notes Dunsany’s condemnation of machines and their effects in Don Rodriguez. Dunsany’s experience with war, like Tolkien’s, only deepened his innate dissatisfaction with man’s removal from nature and his understanding of man-made horrors. Dunsany writes in his preface to The Last Book of Wonder, five years earlier, that “my dreams are here before you amongst the following pages; and writing in a day when life is cheap, dreams seem to me all the dearer, the only things that survive.”[41] Here, Dunsany references the horrors of World War I. Similarly, Tolkien states that his love of fantasy was “quickened to full life by war.”[42] Both men saw destruction that frightened them and destruction that they never thought possible. They were both painfully aware that this horror could only be a result of the human world, and this deepened their appreciation of fantasy. Rodriguez and his companion, Morano, are in search of war to win Rodriguez a castle and a fortune. At the home of the Chair of Magic, Rodriguez and Morano are given a chance to see visions of wars past and future through two enchanted windows. In the window showing ancient wars Rodriguez sees “colour, courtesy, splendour; there was Death at least disguising himself, well cloaked, taking mincing steps, bowing, wearing a plume in his hat and a decent mask.”[43] As Joshi notes, perhaps Dunsany is guilty of romanticizing past wars here,[44] but it is important to note the contrast of the past wars to mechanized warfare: beautiful blue Rodriguez saw Man make a new ally, an ally who was only cruel and strong and had no purpose but killing, who had no pretences or prose, no mask and no manner, but was only the slave of Death and had no care but for his business. He saw it grow bigger and stronger. Heart it had none, but he saw its cold steel core scheming methodical plans and dreaming always destruction. Before it faded men and their fields and their houses. Rodriguez saw the machine.[45] Humans’ alliance with the machine is akin to an allegiance with death. The machine kills and possesses no mystery, nature, or beauty. War would lose its honor and romance due to its mechanization. The “killing machine” Rodriguez sees is likely modeled after some of the horrors Dunsany experienced during World War I. Yet it also epitomizes some of his worst fears about the destruction of the natural world and the uniquely human propensity for war, as shown in Dunsany’s short story “The Field,” which shows that “ugliness is a sin in Dunsany’s aesthetic.”[46] This sentiment is at work in Tolkien’s fiction as well. Tolkein notes that “to us evil and ugliness seem indissolubly allied.”[47] Joshi notes of the killing machine in Chronicles that “the effect on Rodriguez is traumatic.”[48] Dunsany’s main characters, like Tolkien’s, value nature’s beauty and the profound role nature plays in their happiness. Rodriguez’s feelings are comparable to the Hobbits’

feelings and reactions when they return to the Shire and see the destruction Saruman has wrought there. When Frodo, Merry, Pippin, and Sam approach Bag End and see the ravages of technology at first hand, “it was one of the saddest hours of their lives.”[49] Considering the trials the Hobbits endured during the preceding pages of the trilogy, it is of immense importance for the sight of the desecrated Shire to be one of their “saddest hours.” Indeed, “Even Sam’s vision in the Mirror [of Galadriel] had not prepared him for what they saw.”[50] After seeing the dead Party Tree, “Sam burst into tears.”[51] Sam’s reaction can be compared to Rodriguez’s reaction when “he turned from the window and wept.”[52] Their love of nature and the mental anguish at nature’s wanton destruction are integral, and in many ways define Tolkien’s main heroes as well as Dunsany’s. The effect on Tolkien’s Hobbits is nothing short of “traumatic,” just as with Dunsany’s Rodriguez. The Charwoman’s Shadow continues with the themes of Dunsany’s scorn for humans’ removal from nature and his strong desire that humans would return to nature. Joshi states that “there is a suggestion that that shadow is a metaphor for man’s closeness to Nature.”[53] Although this is a brief theme in Joshi’s study and only slightly explored, it is still an important illustration of Dunsany’s values at work. More important, however, is the fact that other people find Ramon Alonzo so repulsive because the shadow the magician gave him is so unnatural. The unnatural shadow frightens the village girls and any of the other rustic folk Ramon Alonzo encounters. Ramon Alonzo gives up his true shadow as a result of youthful impulse and pride, “For youth argues rapidly, and—in a way—clearly, from whatever premises it has, not often trying to enquire if more premises be needed.”[54] The charwoman warns Ramon Alonzo of the magician’s fees for teaching magic. She pleads with him, “Give him nothing, whatever he ask! His prices are too high, young master, too high too high.”[55] Ramon Alonzo believes that the charwoman is speaking of money, and she needs to explain to him that she means things that are much more valuable than money, which he cannot understand at this point in his young life. He questions what she means by her statement if she does not mean money, and she shows him that she has no shadow. The charwoman fully understands that she has paid a terrible price, and she tries her best to convince Ramon Alonzo, who “had never before considered the value of shadows,”[56] of this fact. Ramon Alonzo does pay some attention to the charwoman’s words: He saw now that to lose his shadow and to come to yearn for it when it were lost, and to lose the little greetings that one daily had from one’s kind, and to hear no more tattle about trivial things; to see smiles no more, nor hear one’s name called friendly; but to have the companionship of only shadowless things. [57]

Not to have a shadow is to be exiled from the natural world as well as from the human realm. Ramon Alonzo does not want this to happen, yet he also foolishly

believes this is the only price, and that a shadow is a silly thing to believe important. With the shadow as a symbol for man’s closeness to nature as Joshi notes, the townspeople shun Ramon Alonzo because of his removal from nature. This attitude of the townspeople represents an important ideal for Dunsany. Even though he is clearly warned otherwise, Ramon Alonzo impulsively believes the charwoman only misses being able to enjoy the company of others, that she is being dramatic about the magician’s prices and the importance of shadows, and that he will pay no real price by giving away his shadow. He thinks he knows better than she does, even though she is older, wiser, and more familiar with the nature of magic, and she has also known the magician much longer than he. Ramon Alonzo does not trust in the wisdom of the elder who is trying to teach him, and he pays the terrible price of having to live an unnatural life. This is one of the worst fates for a Dunsany character. The young human who is willing to live a life removed from nature is a fool, and Dunsany makes Ramon Alonzo’s foolishness clear. We also see this ideal of being in tune with nature in the work of Tolkien. Whereas Tolkien’s heroes value nature, his villains abhor and destroy it. In War and the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien, Janet Croft points out that “Saruman ‘has a mind of metal and wheels’ and a special enmity for trees.”[58] Whenever Saruman can, he destroys the trees that are unfortunate enough to cross his path. It is important to note that he does not just kill them. By having Saruman cut them down instead of killing them magically, Tolkien comments on the dominion of man over nature. Even though Saruman has magical abilities, Tolkien elects to have him employ a human method of destruction. Saruman cuts down the trees because he is so entwined with technology, and in the world of this author technology and nature cannot coexist peacefully; technology is always the driving force behind nature’s destruction. In contrast to Saruman and his human methods of killing and domination, the magic of the Elves is primarily natural magic, and they value the world and beings around them. Dunsany’s influence on Tolkien is clear in a lesser-known example as well. In the essay “Possible Echoes of Blackwood and Dunsany in Tolkien’s Fantasy,” Dale J. Nelson draws parallels between Dunsany’s “The Hoard of the Gibbelins” and Tolkien’s short story “The Mewlips.” As Nelson notes, the Gibbelins and the Mewlips are very similar creatures.[59] “The Gibbelins eat, as it is well known, nothing less good than man.[60] The Mewlips will “in a sack / Your bones they take to keep.”[61] Both creatures have rather terrifying eating habits. Nelson also points out some other similarities between the two sets of creatures and the two stories. Both sets of intimidating creatures are excessively greedy: the Gibbelins collect gold, emeralds, rubies, and sapphires, and the Mewlips sit and “count their gold.”[62] Nelson illustrates that the Gibbelins and Mewlips both sit in the dark counting their riches and wait for would-be robbers to arrive so they can be eaten. Nelson also mentions that the Gibbelins and Mewlips both live outside of “Terra Cognita,” or the fields we know, and that both tales end on a cautionary note, warning readers not to venture too far away. Nelson seems to overlook the fact that both stories point out what Dunsany and

Tolkien considered to be one of the worst aspects of humanity through the actions of these creatures. The Gibbelins and the Mewlips possess the human capacity for indiscriminate killing that both authors loathed and warned against. There are also clear similarities between this Dunsany tale and The Hobbit. The Gibbelins’ “hoard is beyond reason; avarice has no use for it,” and they possess “ridiculous wealth.”[63] Through his use of language, Dunsany places a clear value judgment on the Gibbelins’ love of money. They are greedy, and such a value system will receive no praise from Dunsany. The riches of the Gibbelins can easily be compared to the riches of Smaug, neither being the original owner of their respective treasures. The Gibbelins live in a tower, and Smaug lives in a mountain, a natural structure that serves him as a tower. Dunsany states elsewhere that “the simpler and humbler the creature the nearer it is akin to the earth and sun.”[64] We see this echoed in Tolkien, where Hobbits naturally live in the ground until the Shire is taken over. The Gibbelins cannot use their treasure and simply keep it out of greed, as does Smaug. Both the Gibbelins and Smaug sit and wait for thieves so they may consume them. Both The Hobbit and “The Hoard of the Gibbelins” can be seen as tales that warn against greed. The Gibbelins are chided by Dunsany for their greed, and so are the foolish men who try to take their treasure: Alderic . . . a man not unremembered among the makers of myth, pondered so long upon the Gibbelins’ hoard that by now he deemed it his. Alas that I should say of so perilous a venture, undertaken at dead of night by a valorous man, that its motive was sheer avarice![65] Alderic pays for his “avarice” with his life. Similarly, Thorin becomes obsessed with the Arkenstone and the treasure as a whole and dies because he refuses to share it with anyone. In addition, the Dwarves obsess over the treasure and decide it is theirs before they ever send Bilbo into Smaug’s lair, just as Alderic decided the Gibbelins’ treasure rightfully belonged to him. For both authors, greed is depicted as an obsession that ruins the characters who are consumed by it. Both suggest there are far more important parts of life than money. The similarities between Lord Dunsany and J. R. R. Tolkien are of too great an importance to be ignored. Dunsany’s fantasy work has influenced many other authors within the genre, and Tolkien was familiar with his work. The men shared a strong love of nature. Tolkien’s understanding of the realm of faery must have been influenced, in part, by Dunsany’s depiction of that realm. Dunsany’s prose style illustrates his profound value of beauty. But to limit the rationale of his unique style to simply aesthetic effects would be misguided. Dunsany influenced a generation of fantasy authors, most notably Tolkien himself, and this was mostly through his unique use of language. Dunsany used his distinctive prose style for a task that is of the utmost importance in fantasy, world building, which Tolkien identifies as the author taking on the role of sub-creator. Not only does Dunsany represent this role as the author of the story, he illustrates the sub-creator in the

character of Ziroonderel in The King of Elfland’s Daughter. Before Alveric begins his quest for the King of Elfland’s daughter, he visits the witch Ziroonderel to procure a magic sword, knowing his earthly sword will not help him in Elfland. Ziroonderel begins to make the sword magical from fire, but she cannot use an earthly fire. She must add magic to the earthly fire, and she does so with the help of a rune. “And what had been but a lonely fire in the night, with no more mystery than pertains to all such fires, flared suddenly into a thing that wanderers feared.”[66] With the addition of the correct letter, a typical fire is transformed into a magical fire, as the correct word transports a reader to a land she cannot know outside the confines of fantastic fiction. The witch’s creation of the sword mimics how Dunsany creates his fantasy. It is through his deliberately artful use of the perfect word that he is able to transport his readers into the fantasy realm. The majority of The King of Elfland’s Daughter, as with most of Dunsany’s fantastic fiction, takes place within the world we know, yet every aspect of this fiction is touched by the fantasy realm. As Ziroonderel creates magic and enables Alveric to experience his fantasy through the use of words and song, Dunsany transports his readers through the same means. When we read Dunsany we are not in a fantasy because we encounter an elfin princess, briefly visit the Realm of Faery, join Orion on a unicorn hunt, or become perturbed because a field is the sight of a future battle. We encounter and are firmly planted in the fantasy realm because buttercups are more beautiful, carts are suddenly humorous, the simple sound of pigeon wings is a roar, and a pigeon loft is a “vortex of restlessness.”[67] Dunsany allows us to view our world through his eyes, as Alveric views Erl through Lirazel’s. Both Dunsany and Tolkien were alarmed at where they saw humanity heading. The men used their fiction, in part, to illustrate to their readers that perhaps society’s priorities were not sound. Both authors suggest that humans should not seek to dominate or control the natural world, that nature is powerful and beautiful, and that it should be appreciated and left unhindered by human influence. Both authors suggest that technology-fueled war was terrifying and would end in disaster for both the human world and the natural world. An author feeling dissatisfaction with his or her time is not uncommon. However, Tolkien must have found it refreshing to find his fears and sentiments echoed in the work of a man whom he regarded so highly. Yet it is perhaps in Dunsany’s brilliant ability to achieve “Recovery” through masterful use of language that we can best see his profound effect on Tolkien’s fictional and critical worldview. As Tolkien states, “Recovery (which includes return and renewal of health) is a regaining—regaining of a clear view.”[68] In the case of Alveric, and in the case of Dunsany’s readers, this clear view is similar to how a child views the world. Children marvel at what adults find normal and mundane. Children can find value, beauty, and mystery in what adults often ignore. Tolkien insists that we need to clear our view “so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity—from possessiveness.”[69] This tendency to feel

possessive over, and take for granted, what is always beside us is the very same impulse that almost ruins Alveric’s marriage to Lirazel. As Tolkien insists we do with our world, Alveric “acquires” Lirazel, and in acquiring her he ceases to look at her for what she is: natural, wild, and magical, decidedly not human. One of the lessons we must conclude from The King of Elfland’s Daughter is the very same lesson Tolkien insists is critical to fantasy in general. There is a profound and valuable magic in the everyday, whether the everyday is originally from our realm and we no longer see its beauty, or whether it is magical in origin and eventually taken for granted because it has become all too “familiar.” Such cases, Dunsany and Tolkien remind us, must be redirected back to the land of Faery so that we can glimpse anew what we know all too well.

NOTES 1. Joseph Addison, “The Faery Way of Writing,” Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 22. 2. J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” The Tolkien Reader (New York: Ballantine, 1966), 48. 3. Tolkien, “Fairy,” 48. 4. Addison, “The Faery Way,” 22. 5. Addison, “The Faery Way,” 22–23. 6. Tolkien, “Fairy,” 38. 7. Tolkien, “Fairy,” 38. 8. Lord Dunsany, The King of Elfland’s Daughter (New York: Random House, 1999), 1. 9. Dunsany, Elfland, 2. 10. Ursula K. Le Guin, “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie,” Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader (Westport: Praeger, 2004), 153. 11. Dunsany, Elfland, 27. 12. Dunsany, Elfland, 28. 13. Dunsany, Elfland, 36. 14. Tolkien, “Fairy,” 77. 15. Darrell Schweitzer, Pathways to Elfland: The Writings of Lord Dunsany (Philadelphia: Owlswick Press, 1989), 79. 16. Tolkien, “Fairy,” 63. 17. Schweitzer, Pathways to Elfland, 79. 18. Dunsany, Elfland, 21. 19. Tolkien, “Fairy,” 37. 20. Dunsany, Elfland, 238. 21. Tolkien, “Fairy,” 37. 22. Dunsany, Elfland, 3. 23. Dunsany, Elfland, 211. 24. Dunsany, Elfland, 212.

25. Quoted in Douglas A. Anderson’s headnote to Lord Dunsany’s “Chu-bu and Sheemish,” Tales Before Tolkien (New York: Ballantine, 2003), 293. 26. Quoted in Anderson, Tales Before Tolkien, 294. 27. Lord Dunsany, “Chu-bu and Sheemish,” Tales Before Tolkien, 297. 28. Angelee Sailer Andersen, “Lord Dunsany: The Potency of Words and the Wonder of Things,” Mythlore 55 (Autumn 1998): 10–12 (quotation on p. 10). 29. Andersen, “Lord Dunsany,” 10. 30. Lord Dunsany, “Preface,” Elfland, n.p. 31. Tolkien, “Fairy,” 56. 32. Tolkien, “Fairy,” 80. 33. Tolkien, “Fairy,” 81. 34. S. T. Joshi, Lord Dunsany: Master of the Anglo-Irish Imagination (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), 174. 35. Tolkien, “Fairy,” 81. 36. Tolkien, “Fairy,” 83. 37. Joshi, Lord Dunsany, 127. 38. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (New York: Mariner, 1999), 993 (hereafter abbreviated in the notes as LotR). 39. Tolkien, LotR, 993. 40. Tolkien, “Fairy,” 83. 41. Lord Dunsany, “Preface,” Tales of Wonder (Middlesex, UK: Echo Library, 2010), 4. 42. Tolkien, “Fairy,” 65. 43. Lord Dunsany, Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley (n.p.: Valde Books, 2013), 41. 44. Joshi, Lord Dunsany, 91. 45. Dunsany, Don Rodriguez, 41. 46. Joshi, Lord Dunsany, 36. 47. Tolkien, “Fairy,” 83. 48. Joshi, Lord Dunsany, 91. 49. Tolkien, LotR, 993. 50. Tolkien, LotR, 993. 51. Tolkien, LotR, 993. 52. Dunsany, Don Rodriguez, 42. 53. Joshi, Lord Dunsany, 93. 54. Lord Dunsany, The Charwoman’s Shadow (New York: Ballantine, 1999), 100. 55. Dunsany, Charwoman, 23 56. Dunsany, Charwoman, 28. 57. Dunsany, Charwoman, 28. 58. Janet Croft, War and the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 35. 59. Dale J. Nelson, “Possible Echoes of Blackwood and Dunsany in Tolkien’s Fantasy,” Tolkien Studies 1 (2004): 177–81 (quotation on p. 177).

60. Lord Dunsany, “The Hoard of the Gibbelins,” Gods, Men, and Ghosts: The Best Supernatural Fiction of Lord Dunsany, ed. E. F. Bleiler (New York: Dover, 1972), 63. 61. J. R. R. Tolkien, “The Mewlips,” The Tolkien Reader, 233. 62. Tolkien, “Mewlips,” 232. 63. Dunsany, “Gibbelins,” 63. 64. Dunsany, Don Rodriguez, 27. 65. Dunsany, “Gibbelins,” 63. 66. Dunsany, Elfland, 5. 67. Dunsany, Elfland, 160. 68. Tolkien, “Fairy,” 77. 69. Tolkien, “Fairy,” 77.

Index A Abbey Theatre (Dublin), 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9.1-9.2 , 10 , 11 , 12 Addison, Joseph, 1.1-1.2

Æ Æ (George William Russell), 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10

A Alexander, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 Amadis de Gaula, 1

“ “Among the Neutrals”, 1

A Amory, Mark, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 Andersen, Hans Christian, 1 , 2 Anderson, Angelee Sailer, 1 Anderson, Douglas A., 1 Anderson, Sherwood, 1

“ “The Angelic Shepherd”, 1

A Arabian Nights, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 Ariosto, Ludovico, 1 Arnold, Matthew, 1.1-1.2

“ “Artist and Tradesman”, 1

A Ashtown, Lord (Frederick Trench), 1 Atalanta in Wimbledon, 1 Atkinson, Brooks, 1 , 2 , 3 Atlantic Monthly, 1

“ “Autumn Cricket”, 1 “The Avenger of Perdóndaris”, 1 , 2 , 3

A Aymé, Marcel, 1

B Barrie, J. M., 1 , 2 Barthes, Roland, 1 Baudelaire, Charles, 1 , 2

L Le Beau Monde, 1

B Beckett, Samuel, 1 Beebe, William, 1.1-1.2 Benrimo, Joseph Henry, 1 Benson, E. F., 1 Bergier, Jacques, 1

“ “Bethmoora”, 1 “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” (Lovecraft), 1

B Bible, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 Bierce, Ambrose, 1 Bierstadt, Edward Hale, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6.1-6.2 , 7 , 8

“ “Black Music” (Faulkner), 1

B Blackwood, Algernon, 1.1-1.2

“ “Blagdaross”, 1

B Blake, William, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 Bleiler, E. F., 1

T The Blessing of Pan, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 The Blind (Maeterlinck), 1

B Bookman (London), 1 Bookman (New York), 1 , 2 Book of Job, 1 , 2 , 3

T The Book of Wonder, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14.1-14.2 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18

B Borges, Jorge Luis, 1 , 2 Boston Transcript, 1 , 2 Boyd, Ernest, 1 , 2 Brecht, Bertolt, 1

“ “The Bride of the Man-Horse”, 1

B Brieux, Eugène, 1 Briggs, Katherine, 1 Brooke, Rupert, 1 , 2 Broun, Heywood, 1

“ “The Bureau d’Echange de Maux”, 1 , 2 , 3

T The Bureau de Change, 1 , 2 , 3

B Burton, Sir Richard, 1

L Les Cahiers de L’Herne, 1

C Campbell, Joseph, 1 , 2 , 3 Cannadine, David, 1

E El Cantar de mio Cid, 1

C Cantrell, Brent, 1

“ “Carcassonne”, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 “Carcassonne” (Faulkner), 1.1-1.2

C Carducci, Giosuè, 1 Carlson, David J., 1 , 2 , 3 Carroll, Lewis, 1 Carter, Lin, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

“ “The Castle of Time”, 1

C Cathleen ni Houlihan (Yeats), 1 , 2

“ “The Cats of Ulthar” (Lovecraft), 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 “Celephaïs” (Lovecraft), 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4

C Cellini, Benvenuto, 1 Cervantes, Miguel de, 1 , 2.1-2.2 Chanson de Roland, 1

T The Charwoman’s Shadow, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2

C Cheezo, 1 , 2 Chesterton, G. K., 1 , 2 Christianity, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8

T The Chronicles of Rodriguez, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7 , 8.1-8.2

“ “Chu-bu and Sheemish”, 1

T The City on Mallington Moor”, 1

C Clarke, Arthur C., 1 Clute, John, 1 , 2 , 3 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1

T The Collected Jorkens, 1 , 2

C Collier, John, 1 Collins, Michael, 1 Colum, Padraic, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6

T The Compromise of the King of the Golden Isles, 1

C Conrad, Joseph, 1 Conservative, 1

T The Contemporary Drama of Ireland (Boyd), 1

C Contemporary Portraits (Harris), 1.1-1.2 Cookman, A. V., 1 Cooper, Gladys, 1

Corbin, John, 1

“ “The Coronation of Mr. Thomas Shap”, 1 “The Correct Kit”, 1

C Craig, Gordon, 1

“ “Crevasse” (Faulkner), 1

T The Crock of Gold (Stephens), 1

C Croft, Janet, 1 Crone, Anne, 1 Crowley, Aleister, 1 Crowley, John, 1 Cuchulain of Muirthemne (Yeats), 1

T The Curse of the Wise Woman, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7.1-7.2 , 8

“ “Dagon” (Lovecraft), 1

D Daily Telegraph (London), 1 Dale, Alan, 1 David Copperfield (Dickens), 1 Davis, Thomas, 1

“ “A Deal with a Witch”, 1 , 2 , 3

D Dean Spanley (film), 1 Dear Brutus (Barrie), 1 de Camp, L. Sprague, 1 , 2

“ “The Defence Reopens!” (Lovecraft), 1

D Deirdre of the Sorrows (Synge), 1 , 2 de la Mare, Colin, 1

T The Deliverer (Gregory), 1

D De Quincey, Thomas, 1 , 2 Derleth, August, 1 Desmond, Shaw, 1

“ “Despair” (Lovecraft), 1

D de Valera, Eamon, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

T The Devil’s Disciple (Shaw), 1

D Dickens, Charles, 1 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6.1-6.2 Don Rodriguez See The Chronicles of Rodriguez

“ “The Doom That Came to Sarnath” (Lovecraft), 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3

A A Dreamer’s Tales, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18.1-18.2

T The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (Lovecraft), 1 , 2 , 3

D

Dryden, John, 1 Dumas, Alexandre, fils, 1 Dunsany, Lady (Beatrice Villiers), 1 , 2 , 3 Dunsany, Lord influence on fantasy literature, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6.1-6.2 , 7.1-7.2 influences on, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 and Ireland, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2 , 5.1-5.2 , 6.1-6.2 , 7.1-7.2 , 8.1-8.2 , 9.1-9.2 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 and Jorkens, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6.1-6.2 novels of, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2 , 5.1-5.2 , 6.1-6.2 , 7.1-7.2 , 8 , 9.1-9.2 as playwright, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6.1-6.2 , 7 , 8.1-8.2 , 9.1-9.2 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16.1-16.2 , 17.1-17.2 , 18.1-18.2 , 19.1-19.2 , 20.1-20.2 as poet, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5.1-5.2 politics of, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2 prose style of, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8.1-8.2 , 9 reputation of, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7.1-7.2 , 8 at Shoreham, Kent, 1.1-1.2 short stories of, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7.1-7.2 , 8.1-8.2 , 9.1-9.2 , 10.1-10.2 , 11.1-11.2 , 12.1-12.2 , 13.1-13.2 , 14.1-14.2 , 15 , 16 , 17.1-17.2 , 18 , 19.1-19.2 , 20.1-20.2 , 21.1-21.2 as soldier, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7.1-7.2 , 8.1-8.2 , 9.1-9.2 , 10

“ “Dunsany Castle” (Gogarty), 1.1-1.2

D Dunsany the Dramatist (Bierstadt), 1 , 2

E Eaton, Walter Pritchett, 1 Edward VIII (King of England), 1

“ “The Electric King”, 1 “Elephant Shooting”, 1

E Eliot, T. S., 1

T The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (Clute-Grant), 1 , 2 , 3

E Epicurus, 1 Ervine, St. John, 1 Euripides, 1

“ “Evening Primrose” (Collier), 1

F Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (Yeats), 1

“ “Fairy Gold”, 1.1-1.2 “The Fall of Babbulkund”, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

F Fame and the Poet, 1 , 2

“ “The Fantastic Dreams”, 1.1-1.2 , 2 “Fate and Chance”, 1.1-1.2

T The Female Quixote (Lennox), 1

“ “The Festival” (Lovecraft), 1 “The Field”, 1.1-1.2 , 2

F Fifty-one Tales, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 Fingall, Lady, 1 Five Plays, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 Ford, Ford Madox, 1 , 2

“ “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth”, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2

F Foster, John Wilson, 1 , 2

T The Fourth Book of Jorkens, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7

F Frazer, Sir James George, 1 Frazer, Toa, 1 Fuentes, Carols, 1

G Gaelic League, 1 Galleon, 1 Galpin, Alfred, 1 , 2 Garcia Lorca, Federico, 1.1-1.2 George V (King of England), 1 Georgian Poetry, 1

“ “The Ghost of the Valley”, 1 “The Ghosts of the Heaviside Layer”, 1

G Giacosa, Giuseppe, 1

I I Giganti della montagna (Pirandello), 1.1-1.2

A A Glimpse from a Watch Tower, 1 , 2

T The Glittering Gate, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11.1-11.2

G Gods, Men and Ghosts, 1

“ “The Gods of Clay”, 1

T The Gods of Pegāna, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9.1-9.2 , 10 , 11.1-11.2 , 12 ,

13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17.1-17.2 The Gods of the Mountain, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10.1-10.2 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 composition of, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 influence on Pirandello, 1 , 2.1-2.2 performance of, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 reviews of, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3

G Gogarty, Oliver St. John, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2

T The Golden Doom, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8

G Golden Dragon City, 1 , 2 , 3 Gorky, Maxim, 1 Gourmont, Remy de, 1 Grant, John, 1 Granville-Barker, Harley, 1 Greene, Sonia H., 1 Gregory, Lady, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 Gresset, Michel, 1 Grimm, Brothers, 1 , 2 , 3 Guerrilla, 1 , 2

D Der Gute Mensch von Szechuan (Brecht), 1

H Haggard, H. Rider, 1 Hamilton, Clayton, 1 , 2 Hamlet, Alice M., 1.1-1.2 Harris, Frank, 1 , 2.1-2.2

“ “The Hashish Man”, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 “The Haunting of Halahanstown”, 1 , 2 , 3

H Hauptmann, Gerhart, 1 Hazelton, George C., 1

Heaney, Seamus, 1 , 2

“ “Helping the Fairies”, 1 “The Hen”, 1

H Herotodus, 1 , 2

T The High Deeds of Finn, 1

“ “The Highwayman”, 1

T The Hill of Dreams (Machen), 1

H Himmler, Heinrich, 1 His Fellow Men, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 Historical Dictionary of Fantasy (Stableford), 1 Hitler, Adolf, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3

“ “The Hoard of the Gibbelins”, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2

T The Hobbit (Tolkien), 1.1-1.2

H Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 1 Homer, 1 Hone, J. M., 1

T The Hopeless Passion of Mr. Bunyon, 1

“ “A Horseman in the Sky” (Bierce), 1

H Houghton, Walter E., 1

“ “The House of the Sphinx”, 1

H Housman, A. E., 1

“ “How Plash-Goo Came to the Land of None’s Desire”, 1

H Hyde, Douglas, 1 , 2

I Ibsen, Henrik, 1 , 2

“ “Idle Days on the Yann”, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6.1-6.2 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11

I If, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6.1-6.2 If I Were Dictator, 1 , 2 , 3 If Shakespeare Lived Today, 1 , 2 Iliad (Homer), 1

“ “In the Land of Time”, 1

I In the Land of Time and Other Fantasy Tales, 1

T The Intruder (Maeterlinck), 1

“ “In Zaccarath”, 1

I

Irish Academy of Letters, 1 , 2 Irish Plays and Playwrights (Weygandt), 1 Irish Review, 1

J Jackson, Winifred Virginia, 1 Jacobs, W. W., 1 James, M. R., 1

“ “Jarton’s Disease”, 1 , 2

J Jerram, C. S., 1

T The Jest of Hāhālābā, 1

J Joan of Arc, 1

“ “The Jorkens Family Emeralds”, 1

J Jorkens Borrows Another Whiskey, 1

“ “Jorkens Consults a Prophet”, 1 , 2.1-2.2

J Jorkens Has a Large Whiskey, 1

“ “Jorkens in Witch Wood”, 1 , 2

J Jorkens Remembers Africa, 1

“

“Jorkens’ Ride”, 1

J Joshi, S. T., 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13

A A Journey, 1

T The Journey of the Soul, 1

J Joyce, James, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 Jung, Carl, 1

K Kafka, Franz, 1 Keats, John, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

“ “The Khamseen”, 1

K King Argimēnēs and the Unknown Warrior, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16.1-16.2 , 17

T The King of Elfland’s Daughter, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8.1-8.2 , 9 , 10.1-10.2 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14.1-14.2 , 15 , 16.1-16.2 , 17

“ “The King of Sarahb”, 1

K Kingston, Gertrude, 1 Kipling, Rudyard, 1 , 2

“ “The Kith of the Elf-Folk”, 1

K Kleiner, Rheinhart, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 Krutch, Joseph Wood, 1

“ “Kubla Khan” (Coleridge), 1 , 2 “The Lady of Shalott” (Tennyson), 1

L La Fontaine, Jean de, 1

T The Land of Heart’s Desire (Yeats), 1 The Last Book of Jorkens, 1 , 2 The Last Book of Wonder, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 The Last Revolution, 1 , 2 The Laughter of the Gods, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6.1-6.2 , 7

L Lavin, Mary, 1 Law, Andrew Bonar, 1 Lawrence, D. H., 1 Ledwidge, Francis, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 Le Guin, Ursula K., 1 , 2 , 3 Lever, Charles, 1 Lévy, Maurice, 1 Lewis, C. S., 1 , 2 , 3 Lewisohn, Ludwig, 1 Liddell, Alice, 1 Little, Big (Crowley), 1 Littlefield, Hazel, 1 , 2

T The Little Tales of Smethers, 1

L Longford, Lord, 1

“ “The Long Porter’s Tale”, 1

L Lord Adrian, 1.1-1.2

“ “Lord Dunsany and His Work” (Lovecraft), 1

L Lord Dunsany: Master of the Anglo-Irish Imagination (Joshi), 1 , 2

T The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien), 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 The Lost Silk Hat, 1 , 2 , 3

L Lovecraft, H. P., 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6.1-6.2 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13.1-13.2 Loveman, Samuel, 1 Lud-in-the-Mist (Mirlees), 1

M MacDonald, George, 1 , 2 Machen, Arthur, 1.1-1.2

“ “The Mad Ghost”, 1

M Maeterlinck, Maurice, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 Man and Superman (Shaw), 1 , 2 Mandeville, Sir John, 1 Manlove, C. N., 1 Mantle, Burns, 1

“ “The Man Who Ate the Phoenix”, 1 , 2

T The Man Who Ate the Phoenix, 1

“ “Marsh-Mad” (Galpin), 1

M Martyn, Edward, 1 , 2 Marx, Karl, 1 Maume, Patrick, 1 McColl, Gavin T., 1 McElroy, Margaret, 1 McGeoch, Verna, 1

“ “A Meeting of Spirits”, 1

M Melville, Herman, 1 Mencken, H. L., 1 , 2

“ “The Mewlips” (Tolkien), 1.1-1.2

M Mid-Channel (Pinero), 1 Midgleston, Wilfred, 1

“ “A Miracle”, 1

M Mirage Water, 1.1-1.2 Mirlees, Hope, 1

“ “Miss Cubbidge and the Dragon of Romance”, 1 , 2

M Mississippian, 1 Mogu the Wanderer (Colum), 1 Molnar, Ferenc, 1

“ “The Monkey’s Paw” (Jacobs), 1

M

Moorcock, Michael, 1 Moore, C. L., 1 Moore, George, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 Morris, William, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6

“ “Mrs. Jorkens”, 1

T The Murderers, 1

M Mussolini, Benito, 1 My Ireland, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9

“ “A Mystery of the East”, 1.1-1.2

M My Talks with Dean Spanley, 1 , 2 , 3 Mythlore, 1 Mythological Latin-American Kingdom Story (Faulkner), 1

“ “The Nameless City” (Lovecraft), 1

N Napoleon Bonaparte, 1 Nathan, George Jean, 1 , 2 , 3 Nation, 1 National Amateur, 1

“ “The Neapolitan Ice”, 1

N Nelson, Dale J., 1 , 2 Nesbitt, Cathleen, 1

“ “New-England Fallen” (Lovecraft), 1

N New Statesman, 1 New York Dramatic Mirror, 1 New York Times, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 New York Times Book Review and Magazine, 1.1-1.2

“ “A Nice Lot of Diamonds”, 1

N Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1 , 2 , 3

A A Night at an Inn, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 A Night in Avignon (Rice), 1

N Night Lodging (Gorky), 1 Northanger Abbey (Austen), 1

“ “Nowadays”, 1 , 2

O O’Bedlam, Tom, 1 O’Connell, Daniel, 1 Odyssey (Homer), 1

“ “Of the Gods of Averon”, 1

O O’Grady, Standish, 1

“ “On a New-England Village Seen by Moonlight” (Lovecraft), 1 “On Collaboration” (Lovecraft), 1.1-1.2 “On Fairy-Stories” (Tolkien), 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 “On the Other Side of the Sun”, 1.1-1.2

O Orlando Furioso (Ariosto), 1 Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Cannadine), 1 Orwell, George, 1

“ “The Other Gods” (Lovecraft), 1.1-1.2 “Ozymandias” (Shelley), 1 , 2

P Patches of Sunlight, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 Paul-Dublois, Louis, 1 Peake, Mervyn, 1 Peer Gynt (Ibsen), 1 Pelléas et Mélisande (Maeterlinck), 1 , 2 Penzoldt, Peter, 1 , 2 Percy, Maxwell, 1

T The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde), 1.1-1.2

P Pinero, Arthur Wing, 1 , 2 , 3 Pirandello, Luigi, 1 , 2.1-2.2 Playfair, Nigel, 1 Plays for Earth and Air, 1 , 2.1-2.2 Plays of Gods and Men, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 Plays of Near and Far, 1 , 2.1-2.2

T The Pleasures of a Futuroscope, 1

P Plunkett, Sir Horace, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 Plunkett, John, 1 Plunkett, Randal (19th Lord Dunsany), 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 Plunkett, Sheila (Lady Dunsany), 1 , 2

“ “Polaris” (Lovecraft), 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

P Poe, Edgar Allan, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10

“ “Poltarnees, Beholder of Ocean”, 1 , 2

T The Princess Maleine (Maeterlinck), 1

“ “The Probable Adventure of the Three Literary Men”, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4

P Pugin, E. W., 1

T The Pumpkin, 1 The Queen’s Enemies, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10.1-10.2 , 11 , 12

“ “The Quest of Iranon” (Lovecraft), 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4

Q Quixote of Avellaneda, 1

R Raglan, Lord, 1 Rainbow, 1 Redmond, John, 1

“ “A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson” (Lovecraft), 1 “The Return”, 1 , 2

R Revista de Occidente, 1

“ “The Revolt of the Home Gods”, 1

“Rhymes from a Suburb”, 1

R Rice, Cale Young, 1

“ “Rider’s Song” (Garcia Lorca), 1.1-1.2

R Riders to the Sea (Synge), 1

“ “The Road”, 1 “Romance and the Modern Stage”, 1

R Rory and Bran, 1 , 2 Rowley, Albert James, 1 Ruskin, John, 1 Russell, George William See Æ

“ “The Sacred City of Krakovlitz”, 1

L La Sagra del signore della nove (Pirandello), 1

S Saint Joan (Shaw), 1 Salvador de Madariaga, 1 Saturday Review (London), 1 , 2 , 3 Scarborough, Dorothy, 1 Schweitzer, Darrell, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 Scot, 1

“ “The Secret of the Sphinx”, 1 , 2

T The Secret Rose (Yeats), 1

S Sedgwick, Ellery, 1 Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsany, 1 Seven Modern Comedies, 1 , 2 Seventeen (Tarkington), 1

T The Shadow of the Glen (Synge), 1

S Shakespeare, William, 1 , 2 , 3 Sharp, William, 1 Shaw, George Bernard, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1 , 2 Shelton, Thomas, 1 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 1

T The Shewing-Up of Blanco Bosnet (Shaw), 1

S Shklovsky, Victor, 1

“ “Shooting an Elephant” (Orwell), 1 “A Shop in Go-By Street”, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 “The Sign”, 1 , 2.1-2.2

S Sime, Sidney H., 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8

T The Sirens Wake, 1

S Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 1 , 2 Smart Set, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 Smith, C. W., 1 Smollett, Tobias, 1 Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, 1 Sophocles, 1

“ “The Sorrow of Search”, 1

S Spectator, 1

“ “The Splendid Traveller”, 1

S Squire, Sir John, 1 Stephens, James, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 1 , 2 Sting (Percy), 1

“ “A Story of Land and Sea”, 1

T The Story of Mona Sheehy, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4

“ “The Story of Tse Gah”, 1

T The Strange Journeys of Colonel Polders, 1 , 2 , 3

“ “Strategy at the Billiards Club”, 1 “The Street” (Lovecraft), 1.1-1.2

S Supernatural Horror in Literature (Lovecraft), 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6

T The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (Scarborough), 1

“ “The Sword of Welleran”, 1

T

The Sword of Welleran, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6

L Les Sylphides (Chopin-Glazunov), 1

S Synge, J. M., 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13

“ “A Tale of London”, 1 , 2 , 3

T Tales Before Tolkien (Anderson), 1 Tales of Three Hemispheres, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 Tales of War, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 Tales of Wonder See The Last Book of Wonder Tarkington, Booth, 1 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 1 , 2 The Tents of the Arabs, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7.1-7.2

“ “The Terrible Old Man” (Lovecraft), 1.1-1.2

T They Walk Again (de la Mare), 1

“ “Thirteen at Table”, 1

T Thomas, Edward, 1 , 2 , 3

“ “The Three Infernal Jokes”, 1.1-1.2 “The Three Sailors’ Gambit”, 1

T Through the Looking-Glass (Carroll), 1 , 2 Thus Spake Zarathustra (Nietzsche), 1 Time and the Gods, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12

Times (London), 1 Tolkien, J. R. R., 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6.1-6.2 , 7.1-7.2 , 8.1-8.2 , 9 , 10.1-10.2 , 11.1-11.2 Toomey, James, 1 Transatlantic Circulator, 1.1-1.2 The Travel Tales of Mr. Joseph Jorkens, 1 , 2

“ “The Tree” (Lovecraft), 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3

T Trench, Frederick See Ashtown, Lord Trench, Herbert, 1 Truchaud, François, 1 Tryout, 1 , 2 , 3

“ “The Two Bottles of Relish”, 1

T Tuttle, Frank Wright, 1

“ “Ulalume” (Poe), 1

U Ulysses (Joyce), 1 Unhappy Far-Off Things, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 United Amateur, 1 United Amateur Press Association, 1 Up in the Hills, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4

T The Use of Man, 1 , 2 , 3

V Valente, J. A., 1 , 2 Vanne, Marda, 1 Variety, 1

Virgil, 1 Vivar, Don Rodrigo Diaz de (El Cid), 1 Voltaire (François Marie Arouet), 1

W Walker, Stuart, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7 War and the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien (Croft), 1

“ “The Warning”, 1

W Waugh, Evelyn, 1

T The Well at the World’s End (Morris), 1 , 2

W Wentz, W. Y. Evans, 1 West, Rebecca, 1 Weygandt, Cornelius, 1

“ “When the Gods Slept”, 1 “Where the Tides Ebb and Flow”, 1 , 2

W While the Sirens Slept, 1

“ “The White Ship” (Lovecraft), 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 “Why the Milkman Shudders When He Perceives the Dawn”, 1 “The Widow Flynn’s Apple Tree”, 1

W Wilde, Lady, 1 Wilde, Oscar, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6.1-6.2 , 7

“ “With a Copy of Wilde’s Fairy Tales” (Lovecraft), 1.1-1.2

W Wolverine, 1

A A Woman’s Revenge (Jerram), 1

“ “The Wonderful Window”, 1 , 2

T The Wood Beyond the World (Morris), 1 The Year, 1

Y Yeats, W. B. and Dunsany, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13.1-13.2 , 14 , 15 and Ireland, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 as playwright, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 as poet, 1 , 2

T The Yellow Jacket (Hazelton-Benrimo), 1

Z Zelazny, Roger, 1