[A German-born American novelist and critic, Lewisohn served as the drama critic for The Nation during the early 920s and later edited the Zionist magazine New Palestine. In the following essay, he praises the dramas collected in Plays of Gods and Men and Plays of Near and Far.]

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 Mountain and The Sword of King Argimenes. 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 breast-plates 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 none the less 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 story-teller. He is so good a story-teller 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.