SOURCE: "The Dramas of Dunsany," in Tuesdays at Ten: A Garnering from the Tales of Thirty Years on Poets, Dramatists and Essayists, 1928. Reprint by Books for Libraries Press, 1967, pp. 13-42.

[In the following excerpt, Weygandt surveys Dunsany's dramas.]

Dunsany has given us a drama new to our literature. It is exotic, aloof, aristocratical, of a beauty so strange and full of wonder that we doubt it sometimes, and question is it beauty, or only a form of the grotesque. His earlier plays are most of them decorations in the Asiatic manner, suggesting now China, and now India, and now the oldest Persian lands. It would seem he had seen, in some previous life perhaps, gatherings of great folk in old cities like Persepolis, or cities yet older, and now lost in some jungle of Deccan or under the sands of Gobi. He has feasted his eyes on the splendors of pageants in which rode kings and queens, conquerors and conquered; he has felt all the joys of their golden moments, all the terrors of their overthrowing, all the miseries of their enslavement. As he writes of his memories of these old hours, all the poignancy is in some strange way leached out of them. Only the colors and shapes of this far yesterday have resisted the years. All else has faded. Loyalty and love, murder and sudden death only half matter. They are just motives, like the pomegranates and bells of Solomon's temple, to be arranged into patterns of a proportion and a balance that will delight us. The colors are still rich and the shapes clear enough in outline, but even they are toned down and lightened in line by the centuries. All the life they symbolize is as far off as a dream of childhood recalled some bright noonday of middle years.

The later plays are decorations too, but they carry, more and more, a burden of thought, until they almost build up an ordered protest against modernity. The beauty of the world threatened by steam, or even passing before the fellows of steam in the applied science of our day, he cannot long keep out of mind. Always modernity is an irritation to him; at times a nightmare; at other times almost an obsession. He out-Ruskins Ruskin in his belief in the necessity of beauty. Of all writers of our tongue today, Dunsany is the most insistent apostle of beauty. The beauty that is his deepest concern is the beauty of the dreams of man. The beauty that he writes of oftenest is the beauty of the countryside, perhaps because that is the beauty that is passing fastest of all forms of beauty from the England of his day. Beauty in architecture he writes of often, too, and the beauty of a life well lived.

The drama of his earliest years of play writing, 1904-1917, oftenest draws our thoughts eastward and to old time. Now it takes us, as in The Gods of the Mountain, to fabulous hours in some back country of Cathay, and now, as in The Golden Doom, to a Persia Alexander knew. Again we are on slavefields and the gardens of a king somewhere over against Babylon, but with mountains lifting like the Caucasus high and dim on the horizon. This in King Argimenes and the Unknown Warrior. It is to a desert stiller and of sand more golden, and of lure more potent than any Syria ever hid, that we are transported in The Tents of the Arabs.

The tragic minutes of The Queen's Enemies pass by a Nile that had centuries yet to flow before there could be Cleopatra. A jungle, with fringe of purple orchids and recesses tiger-haunted, is just beyond the Thek of The Laughter of the Gods, a Thek that was destroyed only short years after the fall of Troy. This city must be close to the borders of India, but further south than the Kongros of The Gods of the Mountain. Eastward of this the plays do not take us, though the idol that clumps with stony tread into A Night at an Inn and leads to death the perfect toff and his pals must have come from Buddhist coasts.

The action of The Glittering Gate takes place upon a cliff above the abysses just this side the door of Heaven, and reveals to us, when that door swings open, a night of nothingness and a few far stars. The Lost Silk Hat alone among the early plays is of a country other than the land of dreams. It never moves beyond the doorstep to a house in London and the sidewalk adjacent.

It is not, however, of The Lost Silk Hat or The Glittering Gate that you think first when you think of Dunsany. You think of his plays of this eastern land of his imagination, this indeterminate, shifting land, a composite of many old countries from Nile to Brahmapootra. And as you think of them there return to you certain stage pictures; or certain visualizations that you, reading in your room, made of their action—these first. Then the emotions that underlie the plays begin to come back, wonder and awe and horror. Then you remember what of revelation is in the plays, the burdens of their themes: heaven is what earth is; the slave can never be set free; men must suffer for success; the large effect of little things; fate cannot be foreseen; my lady has her will; memory is stronger than the years; man proposes, chance disposes.

It is only after you think of the pictures of his plays, the emotions underlying them, the ideas they present, that you think of their men and women. What his characters are is generally not so important as what happens to them. The coolness and resourcefulness of the toff of A Night at an Inn give him some body; and Agmar, the proud beggar, stands out above the other people of The Gods of the Mountain. There is more than his usual characterization in The Tents of the Arabs. The King is not just any king who would lose power to gain liberty, he is not one with a like-minded hero of "The Miracle of Purun-Bhagat," and Eznarza, the gypsy girl, is not just any gypsy girl. But, after all, none of these four is a fully developed character. Not a single one in all Dunsany is fully developed. That is why actors so love the parts. They can share in the creation of all, and some are so slight in the text that they can almost wholly "create" them. Less can be added to the little lady of The Queen's Enemies than to any character in Dunsany. She so interested him that he had, willy-nilly, to render her clearly.

Is there anything racial in this sketchiness of character in Dunsany? Think of Yeats, and you will say, "Yes!" Think of Synge with his Pegeen Mike and Martin Doul, and you will say "No!" just as surely. Is there much that is Irish in any of the writing of Dunsany? There are many marvels in his plays, and in his tales, too. Marvels are characteristic of the old cycles of Irish romance, and characteristic, too, of the humblest folktale of today. Think of this predilection of his, of his imagination, and of brave words common to Irish legend and his writings, and you will be inclined to say that Dunsany, too, is of the shanachies. But there is little else that is Irish about his art.

We know that part of the boyhood of Dunsany was spent in the County Meath, in which he was born in 1878. But we know, too, that the kind of legend he loves, the legend of court romance, was all but dead in Meath fifty years ago. The tradition in which he grew up at Dunsany Castle, and at Cheam and Eton was the tradition of the English public school. It was at Cheam, he tells us, where he had to read a great deal of the Bible, that his thought turned to the east. Cheam brought him Greek, too, and Eton more Greek, and this Greek stored his memory full of sounding names he has never forgotten. No Cambridge or Oxford followed Eton and Cheam to deepen his love of the classics. There came instead Sandhurst and the Cold-stream Guards, and then active service in the Boer War. Birth and tradition, education and travel all conspired, maybe, to keep Dunsany from the peasant drama that was coming into being in Ireland when he returned from South Africa. He was keenly aware of the work of Yeats and Synge, and appreciative of it. It was not, though, in the way of either that he began to write, but in one distinctively his own. The prose of his first book, The Gods of Pegāna (1905), owes something, no doubt, to the prose of William Morris. The country of Morris, too, though western, lies toward the frontier of the country of dream that Dunsany was trying to find. Yet the rhythm Dunsany beat out for himself in the end had in it more of the fall of Old Testament prose than of the prose of Morris. This fall of prose of Dunsany has only once in a while any resemblance to the fall of the speech of the Irish peasants. The Bible over-powered the "beautiful speaking" he must have heard about him. In this regard for the rhythm of the Bible, too, he is unlike his fellow Irish playwrights. There is little of the Bible in Yeats, or in Synge, or in any other Irish play-wright of first prominence of our day.

With Yeats and Synge, however, Dunsany is to be placed on other scores. Like them, he has never exploited anything Irish for the delectation of Englishmen, as did Lever and Lover. Like Yeats and Synge, again, Dunsany writes to please himself, to make something beautiful out of his dream of life, and not largely just to shock Englishmen, as did Wilde, and as does Shaw, and as in some of his moods, does George Moore. Wilde and Shaw are, in this attitude of theirs, just as truly parasitical as are Lever and Lover. To live to shock Englishmen is an even more pathetic revelation of dependence upon England than to play the fool so that Englishmen may laugh.

One wonders whether the Irishmen who saw the first play of Dunsany, in April, 1909, realized how it reversed the traditional order of things. The Glittering Gate presented to Irishmen the befooling of two Englishmen. They were only burglars, it is true, and they were dead, and it was the Nature of Things that befooled them, but still they were Englishmen and they were befooled. The story of the play is that the burglars break into Heaven only to find no Heaven there. Laughter, cruel and violent, greets their disappointment, very evidently laughter of the Immortals, who in the Aeschylean sense have had out their joke with Bill and Jim. There is nothing in the play to show that Dunsany realized that he was reversing the old practice of Irish playwrights of making Irishmen the butt of jibes that Englishmen may laugh at them. The play gains no added significance from the fact that its protagonists are Englishmen. Nevertheless, as I have said, he has shown Englishmen befooled, and the Abbey audience could have laughed at the predicament of the burglars had it understood the grim humor of the play.

The truth is, of course, that the concern of Dunsany is with man as the plaything of destiny, and that it does not matter at all to the play that the two men it has to do with are London cockneys. It was three years before the presentation of The Gliffering Gate, in Time and the Gods (1906), that Dunsany, interpreting things as he saw them, had shown Time as the archvillain of the world. Such an interpretation is entirely in accord with that sense of the long past and brief present so instant to one of his perspective and temperament. The Plunketts, from whom Dunsany is sprung, have been nobles in Ireland for five centuries. Dunsany himself, as a lover of all that is beautiful, is very troubled by the few days of bloom, the quick passing of youth, the early ending of all good things. It is his Eton tradition, perhaps, that makes him express his poignant realization of all this with a Greek restraint.

In form his plays are Maeterlinckian, and in their suggestion of something terrible about to happen. Some of them have a sharpness of action, however, very unlike Maeterlinck. One might call The Tents of the Arabs "static," but most of the other plays of Dunsany are dramatic enough to win even the old-timers who revere "blood and thunder." The plays of Dunsany thrill in a more immediate and intenser way than those of Maeterlinck, even if you care much less what happens to their characters.

After the manner of Maeterlinck, too, is the use by Dunsany of the sword as symbol in King Argimenes and the Unknown Warrior, his second play. This was put on at the Abbey Theatre on January 26, 1911, during the management of Nugent Monck, who designed the scenes and costumes, and attempted to give the production something of the significance its author intended.

Argimenes, Dunsany has written, "was the first play laid in the land of my spirit." It tells of an enslaved king so broken he gladly gnaws bones from his master's table. Digging one day under the whip, he uncovers in the earth the golden sword of an unknown warrior of an older age. With that finding, he finds again his old kingliness of spirit. He kills the slaveguards, leads his fellow slaves against their lord, and overthrows him. At the moment of his triumph word is brought that the dog of King Darniack is dead. Conqueror of Darniack though Argimenes be, and with his kingliness of old come back to mien and eye, he cannot help but cry out with his men savagely and hungrily, "Bones!" How true this is to life we all know. One of us has heard a man say "Sir" against his will to a man he despises, just because he had once been an underling of that man. Another of us has seen the subordinate, by the turn of events now master, unable to prevent himself from rising when this one-time chief, now unhorsed, entered his room for orders.

It may be, of course, that Dunsany means more by this play than the truth, "a slave may never be wholly freed." He may wish us to feel that if the spirit of a man is once broken it may never be made whole again. Dunsany is angered by people asking of this play or that of his, "What's it all about?" He says, not very humbly, "One does not explain a sunset, nor does one need to explain a work of art." It is true that each one of his plays is first of all a story, and a story so simply told we understand at once its meaning. Some of these stories are so fully revealed by the action that they could be understood by pantomime alone, and no speech at all from their characters. Yet for all this there may be inner meanings that one would care to understand.

So fully felt as drama are these plays, that it is scenes from that I recall first, as I have said, when I think of them, and the story of each as it is revealed scene by scene. I think of the stage pictures from each play first, then of its story; then of the emotion that underlies it; then what truth it tells, or as Dunsany says, "What's it all about?"

After all, even the most resolute aesthete does not enjoy a sunset in just the way he enjoys a play. Choose for him a play that has no revelation in it, no possible allegorical interpretation, and that aesthete will yet be glad of it in a way other than that in which he is glad of a sunset, or of a symphony either. No writing, no matter how beautiful its form or its expression, can be all it may be to us until we have lived with it a while and thought about it and made it a part of ourselves.

It is difficult too, to refrain from looking for allegories or, at least, veiled truths in the plays of a man who has written so many tales that are obviously allegorical or bulging with symbols of certain meaning. "The Fortress Unvanquishable Save for Sacnoth" is a tale to hold children from play, with its delectable dragon, an iron monster with a nose of lead, and its even more delectable spider, big as a ram "with eyes that were little, but in which there was much sin." Is it wrong then to ask is this dragon Tharagaverrug, which is certainly a humorous grotesque, also a symbol of some phase of the manufacturing England that Dunsany so hates?

Surely there is no doubt that "The Fail of Babbulkind" has a moral. When travellers came to where was that city of the desert, a city report of whose loveliness had spread over the world, they found it gone as utterly as if it had not been. Does this mean that what we set our hearts upon cannot content us when we get it, or does it mean that the ideal can never be attained? We are surely justified, too, in hunting a meaning in "How Plash-Goo Came to the Land of None's Desire." But what is that meaning? Does this triumph of the broad dwarf over the little giant symbolize the triumph of the Bolsheviki?

What does King Argimenes and the Unknown Warrior tell? Maybe what I have guessed above. But there are intimations of so many truths in the play it is difficult to know which is dominant. Is the slave who says, "If the king found that I had a sword, why then it would be an evil day for the king," but putting in another form the moral of "How Plash-Goo Came to the Land of None's Desire," or is it another affirmation of the old truth about letting sleeping dogs lie?

One wonders whether like thoughts about the proletariat are embodied in The Gods of the Mountain (1911). Are these seven beggars, who are turned into the likeness of the stone idols they pretend they are come to life, symbolic of men who believe in the perfectibility of man? Is that the heresy for which they are punished by the jealous gods? r is the play an intimation that traditions of the past held in little regard today will cost dear the age that neglects them? Maybe one or the other of these guesses is true, maybe neither. It is interesting to speculate, but it does not matter if neither be true. The play is so good as drama we need ask no more of it. It moves slowly at first, to give us time to learn the strange ways of the world it represents, a world made of a dream as bizarre as any in the Arabian Nights, but different from any there. And then, that world known and the story well under way, the play crashes to its close like thunder. It is a grotesque surely, this Gods of the Mountain, but a grotesque in green jade, and perfectly cut.

It is memorable not only for its whole effect, but for its many challenging and winning sayings. What in these days may we make of such a declaration as this, even if it is a beggar that utters it: "All those things that are divine in men, such as benevolence, drunkenness, extravagance and song"?

Is it easier to make more of this: "Let none that has known the mystery of roads, or has felt the wind arising new in the morning, or who has called forth out of the souls of men divine benevolence, ever speak any more of any trade or of the miserable gains of shops and the trading men."

It is Agmar, prince of beggars, who says this last, but surely he speaks for Dunsany as well as himself. Snobbish some would call such talk, and so, maybe, it is, but I doubt if Dunsany would trouble to deny such a charge any more than would Sir Philip Sidney.

Dunsany would, I think, subscribe wholeheartedly to a large part of that creed of The Joy of Youth, which Eden Phillpotts assigns to his hero. Bertram Dangerfield declares that you cannot get ruler art from the lower middle classes. You think of Ibsen and Keats, artists from the lower middle classes, and you laugh at the young painter; you think of Wells and Wilfrid Gibson and you sympathize with him.

There is the pride of caste in Dunsany, but it is the hatred of the artist for an age that he conceives is making ugly a beautiful world which leads Dunsany to attack mills and trade and the civilization that thrives through them. He indicts the bourgeois ideals of this civilization and kindles to scorn at thought of its schoolmasters and journalists and priests.

Nor is there in Dunsany any bending of the knee to the "divinity of man." He does not, in fact, believe divinity a common possession. And man is by no means to him the greatest thing in the world. He writes of his seven beggars that they had "made themselves out to be greater than men may be." They paid for their presumption by being turned into stone by the gods they took lightly. It is only when man is artist that Dunsany wholly admires him, and of all artists he admires most the poet. He who lives life nobly is, too, an artist, but to live life nobly he must follow a dream. Again and again and again he tells us, in one form and another, that the greatest thing in the world is the dreams of man. And as often he indicates that he means these dreams as they are caught in writing that is poetry, whether it is in verse or prose.

In this belief, as in much else, Dunsany is at one with Yeats, from whom, however, he differs greatly in that he, for all his lyric intervals, is essentially and predominantly the playwright. Instinctively the playwright, perhaps I should have said. The Golden Doom (1912), for instance, is a thing of only sixteen octavo pages, and pages of dialogue at that. Nor is it concerned with what most people would say were basic things. The theme is not love or death or lust of power or the high hopes of man. Ambition and love of great place come into it, but only to be sacrificed. It recites this slight story. A boy writes on a king's gate a verse that a girl has made for her own delight.

I saw a purple bird
Go up against the sky,
And it went up and up
And round about did fly.

Out of whim the boy added

I saw it die.

The sentries of the king had paid no attention to the children playing about the gate and so it was not known who wrote the verse. It was interpreted by "the prophet of the stars" as a warning to the king that the gods were angry with him. It was, the prophets said, because he had done good to man rather than homage to the stars that were the gods of the country. The king was troubled by the words of the prophets and offered to make sacrifice "of a girl child to the twinkling stars and a male child to the stars that blink not." You fear the death of the two children of the play, but the prophet suggests that the king sacrifice instead the insignia of his kingship, his crown and his sceptre, that the stars may know him "humbled and uncrowned." The king puts crown and sceptre by the gate on which the writing was. The boy comes back that way and finds them. Using the sceptre as stick he beats off stage the king's crown as the hoop he has long desired.

What shall we say is the moral of The Golden Doom? Is it that what is all in all to a man is but a toy to a child, or is it that the fall of a king and the happiness of a child are of equal value in the scheme of things? Or is it that little things lead to large issues? As important at least as any inner meaning is the irony of its action. There is lyric talk of the sentries at curtain-rise, and suggestion of trouble to come. There is the play of the children and its unintentional consequence in the humbling of a king. There is the solemn trickery of the prophets that threatens the authority of the king; the peril of the children; and the whimsy and the satire and the sudden solution of it all.

It would seem that his next play, The Lost Silk Hat, was a satire of his own ideals. It tells the story of a lover who has quarreled so irrevocably with his beloved that he rushes out of her house determined to seek forgetfulness in battles over sea. On the pavement he discovers that he has forgotten his hat. He tries to persuade passers-by, first a laborer, then a clerk, and then a poet, to go in to get it for him. All fail him, and he goes in to get it himself. He dreads less the blow to his pride his return will deal, than being seen without a proper hat in the London streets. "Beautiful battles, high deeds and lost causes," which have had so proud a place in his characteristic tales and plays, are juggled with here as if they were mere conjurer's balls. Elsewhere they are symbols of what he holds priceless.

There is no doubt about the humor of this play. It is self-evident. But, in many of the plays, the humor is so mixed with the grotesque that borders on beauty, or with tragedy, that one may not detect it on a reading only. On seeing the plays on the stage their humor becomes more apparent, but it sometimes costs the audience the realization of the tragedy or grotesque beauty with which it is joined. Thus at the close of King Argimenes and the Unknown Warrior the cry of "Bones!" wrung from the king and the other onetime slaves, raises a laugh in the audience. The actors have to have real power to make us feel, too, the tragedy that lies in the inability of the king-that-had-been-slave to free himself from his servility. Can he who desires the bones of a dog be really a king? And on a reading alone do we become aware of the humor of the salaaming prophets of The Golden Doom? We visualize them in queerly beautiful attitudes like those of priests on Babylonian friezes, but it takes interpretation by actors of power to bring out the real unctuousness of humor their creator intended. In such of the tales as are humorous the humor is more pervasive and more likely to be appreciated than the humor of the plays before one has seen them on the stage. No man will read "The Death of Pan," for instance, without loud and raucous laughter. Interpretation of Dunsany cannot be true unless it acknowledge the large element of humor there is in his writing.

In A Night at an Inn (1916), with its avenging idol, Dunsany uses an idea very nearly that of his Gods of the Mountain. The earlier play is to the later, he himself acknowledges, like "a man to his own shadow." It would seem that Dunsany wished to try himself out on a curtain-raiser for the commercial theatre. Unlike as such an attitude is to Dunsany as we know him through his tales and his plays, it is difficult to account else for his recurrence to the motive of stone idol come to life. If one knows, however, that Dunsany is dead shot and cross-country rider, one can guess he liked the sport of seeing whether he could give the public what it wants. If he could do that once, he would feel more secure in his determination to please himself in all his other writing.

In A Night at an Inn, a toff who is seaman and thief has with five pals stolen the ruby that is an Indian idol's eye. The priests of the idol, tracking the seamen across the world, have killed two of them; and now the four that remain are in a deserted inn that the toff has rented in a remote country place in England. The three common sailors want to get back to their old haunts in London, sell the ruby and have a royal time. But the priests are still on their trail, tireless as assassins from the mountains of Lebanon. Presently we see the toff has taken the inn to receive them. He very dexterously lures in one, and then another, and finally the third, each one to his death by knife. You feel the four sailors have escaped the threatened doom. Just when you have so comforted yourself, one of the sailors who has gone out comes in so terrorstruck he does not dare tell what he has found. Nothing in Poe is more effective than this scene. Upon it comes a hideous idol, blind and groping its way. It picks up the ruby and "screws it into a socket in the forehead." It then moves out. You hear its steps come to a stop. Its voice summons a seaman out into the night. What it does to him you are not told, but one who has gone to the window sees what has happened to his fellow, and communicates somehow his horror to you. Then another is summoned, and then the one who has seen. Finally goes the toff, against his will, like the others, but wholly powerless to withstand the idol's call.

The Queen's Enemies (1916), presents another sort of "the tempestuous loveliness of terror." It tells how a slip of a girl, greatly venturing though half-sick with fear, beguiles great warriors her enemies into an underground temple by Nile and lets in upon them the waters of the great river. She escapes from the banquet of state that is her pretext for inviting them with no more of discomfort than the wetting of the train of her dress. To her lady in waiting she calls:

O Ackazarpses! are all my enemies gone?

ACKAZARPSES. Illustrious lady, the Nile has
taken them all.

QUEEN. Most holy river. (With intense emotion)

ACKAZARPSES. Illustrious lady, you will sleep
tonight?

QUEEN. Yes, I shall sleep sweetly.

Is this play but a decoration, and a thrill of horror, a higher form of the art that was revealed in "One of Cleopatra's Nights"? It is these surely. Is it more? We all know "My Lady Loves Her Will." The play speaks this clearly. Does it speak also the remorseless pursuit of ease and of comfort and of freedom from anxiety that some older writers have declared a certain type of woman could not but engage on, at whatsoever consequences to those in the way of such ends?

There is a pageantry about this play that none other of his plays has, save perhaps The Laughter of the Gods. And though there be as much of pageantry in this play of a further east, it has not the richness of the pageantry of The Queen's Enemies. Dunsany does not give you words of high color. The sense of richness comes from the atmosphere, which he creates by an evocation that is difficult to analyze. Words are used with more of suggestion by few other writers. Dunsany has only to say "temple" and "torches" and "pomegranates" and "Egyptian grapes," and we have a sense of sumptuousness. We have only to go over the lists of sounding names of his men and women to accept them as nobles and royalties.

The Tents of the Arabs (1916), is quieter, less haunted, more static, than any other of his plays. It has a steady glow about it, a glow as of golden light over leagues on leagues of sand. It has, too, a warmth that no other of his plays possesses. It is a warmth of human fellowship, a quality that is far to seek in the play we have come to regard as typical of Dunsany. That is, as I have said, aloof from common experience, with the aloofness of the aristocrat unheedful of the little lives of men, with the aloofness of the ponderer of ideas from concern with men and women as a revelation of what is thrillingly human.

The Tents of the Arabs tells a simple story, the story of a king that abdicates with joy. This is not a new story, either in life or literature, but it is a story that will always seem strange to many. The King of Thalanna is held to his throne through a sense of duty only. He longs for the free life of the desert, a desert that had lured his father before him. We meet him first in the glow of evening, watching a caravan that is about to start for the desert. He is envious of the common camel drivers that will pad off soon through the twilight. His chamberlain and a counselor of his come to tell him of affairs of state that need his decision. Inadvertently it slips out in their discussion that the king could go now without cost to his kingdom. His decision is made: he will go. He promises to return at a year's end, when they shall have a princess there for him to marry. The nobles think they will catch him as he goes and persuade him to stay, but he steals away without a word in the brown cloak of a camel driver.

In Act II the curtain rises on the same scene, but a year later. The King has kept his promise. He is at Thalanna again, but he is not alone. He has with him Eznarza, a girl of the desert, whom he had met at El-Lolith, nearly a year before, when his caravan was some days out. The year had been a year of happiness, and now they are to part, for he is pledged, by his statesmen, to the Princess of Tharba.

The King and Eznarza recall the great days of that year in a duet that is eloquent beyond any other of the writing of Dunsany. They live over, in memory, their meeting, their love, their wanderings together, and they try to accept with high hearts the parting that now must be. These are his words as he recalls their meeting: "You had come to the well for water. At first I could see your eyes; then the stars came out, and it grew dark and I only saw your shape, and there was a little light about your hair: I do not know if it was the light of the stars, I only knew that it shone."

As the King leaves her to re-enter his city, the nobles that were so loath to have him go come in to await his return. To them enter in a moment Aoob and Bel-Narb, camel drivers. Bel-Narb resembles the king. Just as the King is about to acknowledge himself, Bel-Narb cries out that he is the King. Aoob confirms him in his claim, and so, too, does the King, telling how "in holy Mecca, in green-roofed Mecca of the many gates, we knew him for the King." The King, in his disguise as camel driver, is, of course, not recognized by either the pretender or the befooled. Then he rejoins Eznarza. The play turns lyric again, and lifts to its quiet close in a passage of high beauty. Here it is in the words of its maker:

EZNARZA. YOU have done wisely, wisely, and the reward of wisdom is happiness.

KING. They have their king now. But we will turn again to the tents of the Arabs.

EZNARZA. They are foolish people.

KING. They have found a foolish king.

EZNARZA. It is a foolish man that would choose to dwell among walls.

KING. Some are born kings, but this man has chosen to be one.

EZNARZA. Come, let us leave them.

KING. We will go back again.

EZNARZA. Come back to the tents of my people.

KING. We will dwell a little apart in a dear brown tent of our own.

EZNARZA. We shall hear the sand again, whispering low to the dawn-wind.

KING. We shall hear the nomads stirring in their camps far off because it is dawn.

EZNARZA. The jackals will patter past us slipping back to the hills.

KING. When at evening the sun is set we shall weep for no day that is gone.

EZNARZA. I will raise up my head of a nighttime against the sky, and the old, old unbought stars shall twinkle through my hair, and we shall not envy any of the diademmed queens of the world.

There is no writing of Dunsany more memorable than this. You will not soon forget "the reward of wisdom is happiness," even if you cannot be assured of its truth. It is not often that Dunsany gives us just one sentence to remember; it is more often a passage. There are such sentences, of course, as: "It is a golden thing to gallop on good turf in one's youth." More common is such a saying as this from The Laughter of the Gods: "I do not trust a prophet. He is the go-between of Gods and men. They are so far apart. How can he be true to both?" And more characteristic even are still longer passages like this from the tale "The Bride of the Man-Horse":

Yet in the blood of man there is a tide, an old sea-current rather, that is somehow akin to the twilight, which brings him rumors of beauty, from however far away, as driftwood is found at sea from islands not yet discovered: and this springtide or current that visits the blood of man comes from the fabulous quarter of his lineage, from the legendary, the old; it takes him out to the woodlands, out to the hills; he listens to ancient song.

I do not know when The Laughter of the Gods was written, but as it has never been played I have delayed speaking of it until last. Alone among his plays that are written of what he calls his "own country," a country of dream, it leads you to question is it wholly of that country. You wonder does it not lie partly across the border into the country of Maeterlinck. In The Laughter of the Gods you find not only the form of Maeterlinck and the symbols of Maeterlinck, but the very quality of impending terror distinctive of Maeterlinck. There is terror hovering over The Queen's Enemies, but that is of another kind. There is horror at the end of A Night at an Inn, and there is awe at the end of The Gods of the Mountain, and horror and awe are of another effect than terror. In no other play of Dunsany is there so much of the quality of any other writer as in The Laughter of the Gods. It has much of Dunsany, of course, but there is not only suggestion of Maeterlinck, but even of William Sharp. Death the lute-player is a figure older than Sharp, but the way in which Dunsany brings it in reminds me very much of Vistas.

The Laughter of the Gods tells the story of a conspiracy of courtiers and of wives of courtiers to force King Karnos to return from the jungle city of Thek to Barbul-el-Sharnak, the great city of his empire and the centre of the world. The courtiers force the prophet "Voice of the Gods" to make a false prophecy of the destruction of Thek. The King believes that the prophet has lied, but he determines to wait out the three days until the prophecy shall be proved false or true before the fate of the prophet is determined. Each evening of these days a lute-player is heard under the windows of the palace of Thek, heard by all but one camel driver who is to go back to Barbul-el-Sharnak on the third day. The old superstition is that the lute-player is Death, but none, except the wife of King Karnos, suspects he is Death. All old beliefs are fading out at this court. At the end of the third day Thek is overthrown in a cataclysm, to the demoniac laughter of the gods that have been scorned. Is the moral "The gods still live," or that "Man proposes, chance disposes"? I do not know if either is meant, or whether there is any moral at all to the play. What I carry away from reading it is a feeling of a heavier, moister air than is usual in the country of Dunsany, not that rare air and warm light of the desert that freshen the other plays of his land of dream.

If has been the last hit on the stage of Dunsany. It had a commercial success on its presentation in London in the summer of 1921. It did not do so well in America. Its action turns on the power of a crystal ball to give a reliving, if only in dream, of yesterday, of a yesterday that had never been, but that might have been, if John Beal had not missed a train in London's tube. Ten years after he has missed the train, Ali the Easterner gives him the magic crystal. He is now a settled married man, with a fair business and quiet days. Always, however, he has lamented that, on the day so long ago, the porter pushed him away from the closing door of the underground train. Now, lying on his couch in the parlor of his home in suburban London, he wishes he had made the train. He makes it and he meets upon it a lady who sends him adventuring off somewhere east of Persia. He adapts himself strictly to the morals of Al Shaldomir. He murders its sheik, and masters its natives. But the girl in the tube train, Miss Clement, follows him east, grows ungrateful for all he has done for her, and plots his death with Hafiz el Alcolahn. Hafiz had never forgiven John for having anticipated him in the murder of his old enemy Hussein, the ruler of Al Shaldomir. Through a faithful servant, Daoud, John escapes, but penniless, and reaches London after long and hard wanderings, at the ten year's end, just in time to drop back into the life that was, from the dream of the life that might have been. You are made to feel the reality of the might-have-been. You have seen the dream played out before you, and it is fully as real to you, as the more usual realities of the suburban home near London. It is one of the many plays within a play, with the inner play this time more important than the outer. It is just the reverse in II Pagliacci, to compare gory realism with gory romanticism.

There is a fine excess about the Eastern scenes of If, splashes of splendor, a grim and stark humor, and satire of Eastern motives Dunsany elsewhere uses almost solely for romantic ends. There is even some characterization, especially in Miss Clement, who suffers that transformation into Eastern ways that Californians call, in another of its phases, going Chinee. Miralda "goes Arabian Nights" in Al Shaldomir, and is left there, we guess, to the life of a super-odalisque.

There is in If a lyric that matters, "Al Shaldomir," and more readings of life than are usual to Dunsany. There is a passage of Meredithian ancestry, though Dunsany may well be unconscious enough of its origin:

ARCHIE BEAL. Women aren't civilized.…

We're tame, they're wild. We like all the dull things and the quiet things, they like all the romantic things, and the dangerous things.

JOHN BEAL. Why, Archie, it's just the other way about.

ARCHIE BEAL 0, yes; we do all the romantic things, and all the dangerous things. But why?

JOHN BEAL. Why? Because we like them, I suppose. I can't think of any other reason.

ARCHIE BEAL. I hate danger. Don't you?

JOHN BEAL. Er—well, yes, I suppose I do, really.

ARCHIE BEAL. Of course you do. We all do. It's the women that put us up to it.

It is, too, an interesting reading of the East that Dunsany puts into the mouth of Daoud, the servant-faithful-unto-death of John Beal. And yet one cannot but wonder whether men in the West as in the East do not dislike good government and long for the old ways of plunder and un-just princes.

The Compromise of the King of the Golden Isles was printed in Plays of Near and Far in 1922. It was written much earlier, however, and I heard it read by Dunsany on his visit to America in 1919. Like all his work, it is first of all a decoration in the Oriental manner, ending with a scene that might well be preserved as a frieze in relief from the walls of some fallen palace of the East. This is of the king, struck immobile with raised arms as he holds the cup to his lips, by the quick poison in that cup. He has refused sanctuary to an enemy of the Emperor, who has fled to him and taken refuge in that part of his Majesty's Court called "holy." He banishes the haunted man, thereby neither obeying nor disobeying the Emperor. The ambassador of the Emperor, prepared for this contingency, gives him the choice of drinking one or the other of two cups, one poisoned and one of rare wine. Hamaran refers the choice of cups to his priests, who tell him to drink the cup that turns out in the end to contain the poisoned potion. He chooses the unpoisoned cup and drinks it. Then he realizes, after torturing the priests, that perhaps it was the message of the gods, through their priests, that it were well for him to drink the poisoned cup. He drinks it, and he is frozen into marble, seated in his throne. The motive of the play is revealed clearly by King Hamaran in his reasoning with himself just before he drinks the poisoned cup. It is: "The future is more terrible than the grave."

Dunsany tells us, in the introduction to Plays of Near and Far, that "there are no allegories in any of my plays." He can say that because he has narrowed the meaning of an allegory to be "a dig at something local and limited, such as politics, while outwardly appearing to tell of things on some higher plane." An allegory is only an extended metaphor, conveying some general truth about life. You extend your metaphor into a story. That story is outwardly about the metaphor, but it is also of much wider application. The old example of the rhetoric books should make the matter clear. "The early bird catches the worm" is as short an allegory as we have. We all recognize the truth of its expressed meaning, and of its inward or parallel meaning, of its wider interpretation, as well. Why should not Dunsany be willing for us to say, what is the obvious truth, that this play reveals, that for many men, "The future is more terrible than the grave," did they only realize it? Many of us hated in childhood the moral to the nursery tale, and it may be that Dunsany cherishes that hate against a moral even now in his middle years. With Gulliver and Pilgrim's Progress and The Faery Queen and Everyman, however, 'grand against the ancient morn," why need he be afraid of writings of his, too, being interpreted as allegories?

The Flight of the Queen (1922) is a transference to the human sphere of the mating flight of the Queen bee. It takes us to a mountain top of rare and dazzling sunlight, preserving all the way through the story, the circumstances of the pursuit of the Queen by the drones, even to her poignarding of the hardiest of them after their moment on the mountain top. It is a play with lift, and it is beautiful, but it has not the authority and stern truth and universality of The King of the Golden Isles.

The other plays in this volume are of very varying quality. Cheezo is an out-and-out tract against poisonous patent foods. Its scene is everyday England. A Good Bargain, a morality in little, has much of the spring and youth in it. If Shakespeare Lived Today is of a sort of writing we have had much of since If Christ Came to Chicago fluttered the dove-cotes. It has humor, and it scores. Fame and the Poet makes Fame far from a Lady of Quality. After she draws the crowd to the poet's house with blasts on her trumpet, she lights a cigarette and settles down to live with him. "She sits in a comfortable chair, leans right back, and puts her feet right up on the table among the poet's papers." She announces that she "ain't going to leave him." As the curtain falls on the discomfited poet, she blows a puff of smoke from her cigarette through her trumpet.

Alexander and Three Small Plays was published in 1925. Alexander, we are told, was written by Dunsany as long ago as 1914. It is, save If, his longest play, and most favored by him of the score and more he has written. It is to him, perhaps, as The Shadowy Waters to Yeats, a play on a subject that has haunted him since boyhood. A swift worker, Dunsany has not, apparently, been rewriting the play over and over, as Yeats did The Shadowy Waters, but there is no doubt at all that its subject and background have been long what most vitally concerned him. The country of his spirit is dreamed from the Persia of Alexander, and Persepolis, the dead city, is the most recurrent image of his art.

It is not in the creation of character that Dunsany is at his best, and his Alexander, though drawn at fuller length than any of his heroes, is, I think, relatively of no more body than the rest of them. We know more of Alexander than of any other of his characters, and so we can visualize him, and realize him more fully, than we can an "unnamed" Queen of Egypt, or a King of Thalanna who prefers the freedom of the desert to the duties of his throne. The suddenness of Alexander's decisions, and the ease with which his courtiers befool him, are doubtless part of Dunsany's conception of the character, but they do not make Alexander more believable. The action of the play seems hurried; the transitions are not well worked out; the contrast between what we are led to believe at the outset is the character of the hero, and his subsequent action, is too great to make for verisimilitude.

There are fine moments in the play, like that of the banishment of Apollo; the lament over the murdered Clitus; the meeting with the Queen of the Amazons; and the reconciliation with Nearchos, his old general. Even the coming of Queen Rhododactilos with her Amazons and the golden catafalque cannot save the end of the play from bathos. The real close is the death of Alexander. That last scene, showing his body deserted, fulfills the prophecy, but it is anticlimax.

There are sayings in Alexander that we are likely to remember. Here is a preachment, for one, to compare with Henley's in "The Song of the Sword": "The sword is the ploughshare of man, that he grow not corrupt in his cities." Nor are we likely to forget: "There are no troubles in death…only the dead are safe." The scene in the Hall of Fates, Act III, Scene II, reads like some outlawed passages of the Psalms. The whole play has an accent of greatness.

The Old King's Tale is, as its title foretells, hardly a play at all. It is a tale of great beauty given a dramatic setting. It has its share of readings of life. You may quarrel with "After thirty all is sadness," but you will remember it. You will remember, too, the herculean labors of the old King, labors that came to naught; and the ringing defiance of youth in the last words of Thardees, "Love, let us fight the Gods."

The Evil Kettle is a play that laments what steam has done to make ugly and to enslave the world. James Watt dreams that through the force of the boiling kettle "All the work of the world would be done in the morning, and men could walk about its beautiful hills all the rest of the day." It is Satan, of course, who perverts its use, and makes it a thing of evil.…

Those of us who rejoiced in the success of six of the plays of Dunsany in the winter of 1916-17 cannot point to any other such success of his upon the stage save the good run of If in London in 1921. It is an important fact, however, that there was such a phenomenon as that success of 191-67, even if it was only a flash in the pan. It is important that If succeeded as it did, if only for a season. Let us then chronicle the success of those six and hope it is a happy augury for the future. It is not often that six plays of an author find their way to the American stage in one year. Of these six Stuart Walker produced three in his Portmanteau Theatre, King Argimenes and the Unknown Warrior, The Gods of the Mountain and The Golden Doom. A fourth, The Tents of the Arabs, had a like "little theatre" success on its presentation by the Arts and Crafts Theatre in Detroit. A Night at an Inn and The Queen's Enemies, after "little theatre" productions, made their way into the commercial theatre and succeeded there. Only their author's own great god Time will tell whether they hold their place for long, but there is every indication that A Night at an Inn will stand the wear and tear as did Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Bells. It surely will if some actor of power makes it his own as Irving made The Bells his own and Mansfield Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

There is no doubt that Dunsany has a following among those who read plays, and such a following tends to hold the plays it reads upon the stage, or at least to force their return there now and then. There are many of us, too, who care for the new art of stage setting that owns Gordon Craig its master, and the plays of Dunsany proffer peculiar opportunities to this art. And when that art, which may help the plays on our stage of today, is gone out of fashion, there will still be the plays themselves with their tense emotions and swift surprises in action to thrill us as they do now. Depending not at all on the manners of a time for their appeal, they have a better chance than most of the drama of our generation to last into another day.

For all the thirty years of our generation we have been trying to persuade ourselves that this playwright or that was bringing literature back to the stage. Many of us were sure Pinero had done it with The Second Mrs. Tanqueray in 893. Others of us were surer still that Wilde had done the trick a year or so later. Today most of us, I think, are not so sure of Pinero as literature as we were yesterday, and few of us will say now that Wilde is much more than clever. Shaw has still his cohorts of the faithful, but even they are beginning to wonder whether, after all, his plays are anything more than fun and high spirits and satire,—and day before yesterday's newspaper. There are others who will contend that Barrie is the man who has brought literature back to the stage. Charm he certainly has, whimsy and pleasantness, but one who has watched the waning of Pinero and Wilde and Shaw may well be afraid that Barrie, too, is all but through his little day. Some think the one success of the short life of Houghton a great play, but Hindle Wakes has none too firm a place on the stage. And what, we may well ask, will be the rating tomorrow of these men as writers? Surely not one of them ranks with the greater novelists and poets of our day, with Hardy or Conrad, with Yeats or Masefield. Fine spirit that Galsworthy is, he is not a great playwright. The pity is that the old saying is nearly true: those plays that are literature have not succeeded upon the stage and those plays that have succeeded upon the stage are not literature. The plays of Synge are literature, and they have had a limited success upon the stage, but they are not frequently played. In the same category is the Nan of Masefield; no other of his plays approaches Nan as literature or drama.

The plays in verse of our time have even less vitality on the stage than those in prose. Becket all but passed with Irving; Paolo and Francesca and Herod and Nero gave us high hopes for the future; but only Yeats has had any considerable success with drama in verse since these experiments in blank verse of Stephen Phillips have flared out: and again I have to say it, even The Land of Heart's Desire and The Countess Kathleen and Deirdre had only a restricted appeal. Will Shakespeare (1922) of "Clemence Dane," was a bold undertaking, but not more in effect than any nine days' wonder.

I am not arguing as to whether the failure of plays that are literature to hold a place upon the stage is the fault of playwright or audience. I am just recording that failure. The plays of Dunsany belong to literature. For a while they had a place upon the stage. Whatever their fate, they put their author among this honorable company I have mentioned. By his art of the stage he is of them: by qualities that are all his own he stands apart from all. He writes in prose, but his writing has about it the lift of poetry, so we accept him as what he claims to be, a poet. Never do we lose hold of the dramatist, though, in the poet. Unquestionably the sheer drama of his plays moves us more than any other quality in them. We are very thankful for this, for, of late, the gods have very seldom given dramatic power to playwrights whose writing belongs to poetry. We are thankful to Dunsany, too, for the aloofness of his plays from the moil and toil of today. We are thankful that they are so seldom concerned with such poor sinners as most of us are, that he deals with abstractions, with decorations, with symbols of romance. We would not want most of our writers to be so little interested in the "common human," but we are glad one of them is. We are glad to be relieved for a while of the obsession of sex and social problems. We are glad of his invitation in The Book of Wonder:

Come with me, ladies and gentlemen who are in any way weary of cities; come with me: and those that tire of all of the world we know: for we have new worlds here.

We have new worlds here in the plays, as well as in the tales of Dunsany.