[Through his work and his charismatic personality, AE was highly influential among the writers of the Irish Renaissance, a generation which sought to reduce the influence of English culture and create a national literature in Ireland. He was central to the rise of the Irish National Theater, and, with W B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, and Lady Gregory, was one of the founders of the Abbey Theater. In the following essay, which originally appeared in Irish Statesman, AE praises Dunsany's imagination and prose style in A Dreamer's Tales, The King of Elfland's Daughter, and The Charwoman's Shadow.]

When I try to make an image to symbolize to myself life in the wonderlands of Lord Dunsany's imagination, a fancy comes that over all those wonderlands a monstrous and fantastic cat is brooding and purring. It purrs as if it was happy and was certain that all the mice were within reach of its claws and not one of them could escape. That happy and melodious purring, full of lovely sound, holds an opposite within itself as all things do, and what it holds within itself is its sinister antithesis. There is no beautiful thing living in those wonderlands that can be sure of its happiness, sure that Time or the gods will not wantonly lay a claw on it. Dunsany's gods are such as Caliban imagined Setebos to be, and there is not one, but a whole pantheon, of such monstrous divinities. In our world our lives are normally gray, but we have now and then as consolation moments of beauty. In the worlds of this dreamer the normal life has the beauty of enchantment, but its accents are made by terror and death. At any moment a doom may come upon it, a god may awaken and desire its sacrifice. The contraries of that life are not, as with us, love and beauty, but agony or death.

Let us take A Dreamer's Tales, which has some of the finest imagination of this extraordinary writer. In the very first tale the loveliness of the Inner Lands is conjured up for us by a master of fantasy, and it seems to us like the beauty we would yearn to rest on after death, but there the mystery of the sea that none has ever beheld weighs heavily on all who live there, and drains the Inner Lands of their people. Nothing can restrain them—not love, not even the terrible myths invented by their priests who said of those unknown waters:—

The sea is a river heading towards Hercules, and he touches against the edge of the world and that Poltarnes looks upon him. They say that all the worlds of heaven go bobbing in this river and are swept down with the stream, and that Infinity is thick and furry with forests, through which the river in her course sweeps on with all the worlds of heaven … and whenever its thirst, glowing in space like a great sun, comes upon the beast, the tiger of the gods creeps down to the river to drink.…

Dooms such as these hang over Inner Lands and their lovely and languid people. That great cat purrs through all the dreamer's tales. In the narrative of adventure on the River Yann the cities on either side gleam amid its massy forests like pearl or onyx. They are imagined as rich and sleepy paradises, but the voyager discovers in Perdondaris a huge gate of ivory carved out of one piece, and the thought of what terrible creature let fall that tusk, and that some of its kind might come over the mountains and stamp on the palaces, creates terror in the adventurers, and they fly from that magical city. One almost comes to believe that no one even in imagination can create a completely happy beauty. When the conscious mind has projected from itself an image of all it desires, out of the inmost recesses, out of the unconscious, stalks into the dream all we would exile, death or madness, terror or mystery. The opposite of all we imagine seems to wait within ourselves to fall upon whatever we fashion. It will not be denied. It needs no conscious art to create it. While we fashion the happy, unknown to ourselves the unhappy is taking form, and it must be let appear or the tale will be dead. So I interpret to myself the psychology behind these astonishing tales and dramas fuller of mystery than any I know since Poe wrote his wild inventions. If the sinister were denied the beauty would lose its magic, and have merely the faint charm of a fairy tale. Wherever Dunsany tries for beauty only he is at his feeblest, but where he lets the contraries prowl about the worlds he has created they have a mysterious life.

I think he has made the happiest compromise between the sinister and the beautiful in the long story, The King of Elfland's Daughter, which has mysteries and perils, but hardly any lurking devilry. It is a highly sustained piece of fantasy, written in a prose whose melody never fails and never tires. It compares well, I think, with any of William Morris's prose romances, for their defect is that they are almost altogether literature in one dimension. They are on the flat, like wall paper or tapestry, even though the figures worked upon it have unending comeliness. The invention of an Elfland that can, by the magic of its king, come close to our world or be inconceivably remote, gives a richness to Dunsany's romance, so that it may be said to be two-dimensional, though not in his tale any more than in Morris's romances do recognizable human entities move about. His people loom before us like a dance of animated and lovely shadows and grotesques, but we follow their adventures with excitement, and that means that in some way they are symbolic of our own spiritual adventures. We have all known that fading of Elfland from just beyond the familiar woods and lakes and hills which comes after childhood, and how inconceivably remote Elfland seems once it has gone from us, and what purifications and sacrifices and labors of the soul we must endure if we are to regain the child vision we have lost. The fading away of Elfland from the vision of Alveric in the tale, and his years of search for it, do not appear to us unreal as we read, for have we not, most of us, lost vision of the enchanted land? And though some have sought to regain it, how few they are who have won it back so that it glows again beyond the familiar fence! The King of Elfland's Daughter is the most purely beautiful thing Lord Dunsany has written. There may be better or more exciting things in some of the short tales, but nowhere else has he had such a long run on that Pegasus of his that carries him east of the East and west of the West—not curving round the world, as he once said to me, but going on straight into regions that the makers of the Arabian tales of enchantment knew, or which lay in neighboring kingdoms of romance.

His last book, The Charwoman's Shadow, is less beautiful and more ingenious. The invention does not flag, but is not quite so happy. Still we follow with unfatigued curiosity the adventures of Ramon Alonzo—he is nominally a Spaniard, but his country is really west of the West. He is sent by his father to an old magician to get gold, but the old magician wants payment, and the payment he asks from Ramon is his shadow. He has a box full of shadows, including the shadow of the charwoman. Ramon sells his shadow on condition that he gets an artificial shadow. But this, carefully measured at midday, does not lengthen in the evening, and the people discover that he has sold the real shadow to the magician, and there are endless adventures before his shadow and the charwoman's are regained, and the charwoman becomes the lovely girl she was before her shadow was taken from her. It is not too ingenious for a fairy tale, but it is too ingenious for poetic beauty. Dunsany is as individual in his imagination as any of the Anglo-Irish writers, for the characteristic of all is a salt of personality that one discovers in them ere one has turned over a page of their books. Shaw, Moore, Synge, Yeats, Stephens, or Joyce could hardly write a sentence that would not betray them, and Dunsany is as personal as any of these. Ireland neglects its geniuses. None of them writes badly enough to be popular with his uncultivated countrymen, who snarl at reputations made beyond the seas. O'Casey is, perhaps, the only Irish writer of genius who has achieved a real popularity in his own country, and he has done this by revealing the Irish mob to itself, and it listens and looks at itself in the mirror and shouts at itself. It does not yet know that romance or beauty is part of its nature, and it has yet to become self-conscious of this, and then the others will come to their own.

I have talked round and round about Dunsany's tales and have not said anything about his dramatic genius, the power he has of holding us in a horrified suspense while the creatures of his imagination, the beggars in The Gods of the Mountain, the burglars in The Glittering Gate, the sailors in A Night at an Inn, meet their doom at the will of his mysterious and sinister deities. Every now and then Dunsany makes me believe he had it in him to be a considerable poet, and his imagination becomes noble as in that tale of Death and Odysseus, where Death said to the immortals:—

'I am going to frighten Odysseus,' and drawing about him his gray traveler's cloak, went out through the windy door with his jowl turned earthwards. And he came soon to Ithaca and the hall that Athene knew, and opened the door and saw there famous Odysseus, with his white locks, bending close over the fire, trying to warm his hands. The wind through the open door blew bitterly on Odysseus. And Death came up behind him and suddenly shouted, and Odysseus went on warming his pale hands. Then Death came close and began to mouth at him. And after a while Odysseus turned and spoke. And, Well, old servant,' he said, 'have your masters been king to you since I made you work for me round Ilion?' And Death for some while stood mute, for he thought of the laughter of Love. Then, 'Come now,' said Odysseus, 'lend me your shoulder,' and he leaning heavily on that bony joint, they went together through the open door.

So nobly and with such disdain would we all die if we could, and because a poet has imagined it so we too may come to look with gay courage upon the mystery when the time comes for it to make a mouth at us.