Lord Dunsany: The Career of a Fantaisiste
[An American editor and critic, Joshi is the leading figure in H. P. Lovecraft scholarship and criticism. In the following excerpt, he traces prominent themes, concepts, and imagery in Dunsany's works.]
The career of Lord Dunsany is a peculiar one. After achieving spectacular fame with early short stories and plays about "the edge of the world," he continued to write for several decades—novels, tales, plays, articles, reviews—with considerable success but without the thundering recognition that had greeted his early work. In the 930s and 1940s Dunsany was certainly a respected enough writer—his work appeared in The Spectator, Life and Letters, Time and Tide, and other distinguished journals, and his books were reviewed by Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen, and Sean O'Faoláin—but even his admirers seemed to wish that he had continued to write more in the vein of Gods of Pegffna [1905] and Dreamer's Tales [1910]. H. P. Lovecraft, his most ardent supporter, labeled Dunsany's Jorkens tales "tripe" and never stopped expressing wistful regret at what he felt was Dunsany's waning power. Lovecraft seems to have continued to read Dunsany dutifully into at least the early thirties but without much enthusiasm; other critics responded with a similarly stony silence. The articles of the teens that had marveled at the phenomenon of Dunsany ceased abruptly when he began writing novels in the 1920s; Broadway, which had once staged five of his plays simultaneously, took no interest in his dramas after If (1921). I know of no significant article on Dunsany from the mid-1920s until well after his death.
Now all this is both unfortunate and unfair. It is unfortunate because some of Dunsany's later work—The Blessing of Pan (1927), The Curse of the Wise Woman [1933], The Story of Mona Sheehy [1939]—is very brilliant, and in fact there are few works of Dunsany's that do not offer something of interest to the critic and the enthusiast; and it is unfair because it is foolish and unjust to expect an author to adhere to a single style and manner over a career of fifty years. In weird fiction, the course of Dunsany's writing is in its way even more remarkable than that of Lovecraft: whereas we can see that Lovecraft's later novelettes and novels, although light-years ahead of his early tales, nevertheless are clearly similar to them in theme and substance, the work of Dunsany is constantly expanding in style, execution, and even philosophical orientation. Whether Dunsany felt oppressed by the success of his early work—and I have received no impression that he did—he was constantly experimenting with new modes of narration, new tones and manners, new ways of saying the many things he had to say. In fact, from a critical perspective it is very hard to say anything about the early work: one can simply rhapsodize over it as an unrivaled and unique body of fantasy literature. The later work is considerably more amenable to analysis, and I hope to be excused if I spend much of my time on the later novels, plays, and stories.
What we need initially, however, is a brief critical survey of Dunsany's entire career, so that the whole of his work can be put in perspective. We need only mention the early volumes of tales—The Gods of Pegāna (1905), 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)—plus the two drama collections Five Plays (1914) and Plays of Gods and Men (1917) to be aware of the awesome achievement of Dunsany's first decade or so of work. Although Tales of Three Hemispheres postdates World War I, the tales in it seem to have been written before or during the war; whether that conflict, in which Dunsany served, had anything to do with his abandonment of this vein of writing is hard to tell, for Dunsany is one of the most reticent of all fantaisistes. Whatever the cause, after Tales of War (1918) and Unhappy Far-Off Things (1919), his first purely nonfantastic writings, Dunsany abandoned the short story for the novel. "Abandon" is perhaps too strong a word, for Dunsany was stupefyingly prolific and continued to write many short tales, some collected much later and many not collected; but, to be sure, he abandoned the Gods of Pegäna style of tale. Its swan song may be The King of Elfland's Daughter (1924), criticized by some contemporary reviewers precisely for its attempted maintenance of the jeweled, quasi-biblical prose of his early tales over the course of an entire novel; but on the whole the work is as successful a recapturing of that gorgeous early style as can be imagined.
Don Rodriguez (1922) and The Charwoman's Shadow (1926), both pseudohistorical novels set in the Spain of the "Golden Age," represent a transition from the never-never-land of Pegāna to the realities of the modern world. In fact, it is remarkable that it took Dunsany so long to discover that fantasy can also be achieved by juxtaposing the real and the dream worlds—a juxtaposition tentatively achieved in the play If and in The King of Elfland's Daughter but first exploited to the full in The Blessing of Pan (1927). In a sense the rest of Dunsany's career can be seen as the gradual banishing of fantasy in the ordinary sense of the term: in style Dunsany has entirely given up any attempts at pseudoarchaism, while in substance there is a greater and greater tendency to use the supernatural less for its own sake than to underscore a philosophical point. In The Curse of the Wise Woman (1933) there is no strict need to explain events supernaturally; the curious novel Up in the Hills (1935) is purely nonfantastic in its tale of a mock war among boys in the hills of Ireland; as Darrell Schweitzer has pointed out, The Story of Mona Sheehy (1939) is a watershed in overtly denying anything fantastic in its incidents. A similar thing occurs in many of the tales in The Man Who Ate the Phoenix (1949); all but one of the tales in The Little Tales of Smethers and Other Stories (1952) are nonsupernatural. Of the very late novels, The Strange Journeys of Colonel Polders (1950) s supernatural, His Fellow Men (1951) is nonfantastic, and The Last Revolution (1952) is quasi science fiction. The later plays correspond to this trend: while The Old Folk of the Centuries (1930) is definitely supernatural, Mr. Faithful (1935; written in 1922) is definitely not; Lord Adrian (1933; written in 1922-1923) is somewhere in between. All the Seven Modern Comedies (1928) and the Plays for Earth and Air (1937), when they use the supernatural at all, use it as a vehicle for conveying a particular point.
In a sense, though, the distinction between what is supernatural and nonsupernatural in Dunsany is an artificial one: the transition from the one to the other is not systematic, and Dunsany used either whenever he felt it would best get his point across. What we can note in Dunsany is a constant sensitivity to style and in particular to the question of how a style that has abandoned the "crystalline singing prose" (Lovecraft's memorable phrase) of the early tales can nevertheless create that atmosphere of shimmering fantasy that we find in the whole of Dunsany. The later work also reveals a quite pervasive interest in the question of the "suspension of disbelief ": how is a tale, set in the prosy world of London or the less prosy but still obtrusively real world of Ireland or (as in the Jorkens tales) Africa or the Near East and without the benefit of the quasi-biblical rhythm and imagery that so effortlessly transport us to Bethmoora or Pegina, to convince us of the bizarre events it is relating? If the magic of the early Dunsany makes us look for feeble parallels in the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde or, later, the convoluted prose of E. R. Eddison, the later Dunsany tempts us to look for comparisons in the starkness of Hemingway or Sherwood Anderson. This problem of belief is a very real one that Dunsany quite knowingly posed for himself, and he solved it in ways that, I think, will make us marvel the more at his ingenuity and versatility.
One of the difficulties in studying Dunsany at all is that he has left behind remarkably few sustained statements of his motives and purposes in writing fantasy. His three autobiographies—Patches of Sunlight (1938), While the Sirens Slept (1944), and The Sirens Wake (1945)—tell much less about his work than about his wide-ranging travels and hunting expeditions; the pieces in The Donnellan Lectures (1945) on poetry, fiction, and drama are very general; and of his relatively few (few, that is, in comparison with the voluminous Lovecraft and Machen) essays and reviews we can learn only very indirectly of his theory of literature. Such an essay as "Nowadays" (1912) is very pretty, even poignant, in its condemnation of industrialism and paean to the expressive powers of poetry; but it is hard to apply these dicta in any precise way to the interpretation of Dunsany's own work. Lovecraft, at the opposite extreme, has left such an ocean of philosophical and literary comment in his letters and essays that critics seem to have had a difficult time getting beyond his own views on his work; it does not help that Lovecraft is almost invariably his own best commentator. The extremes to which Dunsany went in avoiding interpretation of his own work—aside from some routine disavowals of allegory in his early fantasies—may actually be of significance from a critical standpoint; I see it as part of a rather thoroughgoing tendency on Dunsany's part to portray himself as an ingenu, a child of nature who wrote whatever came to mind without any thought of pointing a moral. Lovecraft, at the height of his "art for art's sake" phase, sensed this, remarking that Dunsany's tales "are fashioned in that purely decorative spirit which means the highest art," adding significantly, "About his work Dunsany spreads a quaint atmosphere of cultivated naivete and child-like ignorance." "Cultivated naivete" is exactly right, for the dominant note in Dunsany's early work is the tension between his apparently artless manner of expression and the worldly, cynical, even nihilistic message underlying it.
The Gods of Pegia is a perfect example. This book, Dunsany's first, is a fascinating farrago of biblical sonority and very advanced philosophical views—Nietzsche in a fairy tale. In what purports to be the bible of an imaginary race dwelling on the "islands in the Central Sea" we do not expect to find such conceptions—derived from nineteenth-century science—as the infinity of time (the gods "sat in the middle of Time, for there was as much Time before them as behind them") and space ("Pegāna was The Middle of All, for there was below Pegāna what there was above it, and there lay before it that which lay beyond"), determinism (a Greek idea, to be sure, but emphasized in the teachings of the Social Darwinists), and this very strange conception, which a god utters to a mortal: "'There is an Eternity behind thee as well as one before. Hast thou bewailed the aeons that passed without thee, who are so much afraid of the aeons that shall pass?'" This exact notion is attributed to Hume, that most skeptical and "modern" of eighteenth-century philosophers, in Boswell's Life of Johnson: "David Hume said to me, he was no more uneasy to think he should not be after this life, than that he had not been before he began to exist." It is a notion that the atheist Lovecraft is endlessly fond of citing in his polemics against the idea of life after death.
But, of course, the profoundest cynicism comes in the very hierarchy of the gods and its attendant cosmology. As the preface to The Gods of Pegins states, life is only a "game" to Mina-Yood-Sushili, the Jupiter of the gods; the other gods confess themselves to be merely the "little games" of Mina-Yood-Sushail, but they decide to "make worlds to amuse Ourselves while Mana rests." The gods and all they create are nothing but the dreams of Māna-Yood-Sushal. Nor are we comforted by the fact that the god Hoodrazai knows "the wherefore of the making of the gods" and becomes "mirthless" as a result. The gods are cruel gods: "Thousands of years ago They were in mirthful mood. They said: 'Let Us call up a man before Us that We may laugh in Pegāna.'" The god Slid sends death as a reward, for he "will not forget to send thee Death when most thou needest it."
Later collections only hammer home this bleak message—but always in that exquisitely lyrical prose that is like a smiling goddess handing us a daisy while summoning lightning to blast us. "The Dreams of a Prophet" ( Time and the Gods ) effectively conveys the precise idea of Nietzsche's eternal recurrence. After "Fate and Chance had played their game and ended, and all was over," they decide to play it all over again: "So that those things which have been shall all be again, and under the same bank in the same land a sudden glare of sunlight on the same spring day shall bring the same daffodil to bloom once more and the same child shall pick it, and not regretted shall be the billion years that fell between." In "The Journey of the King," a lengthy tale that concludes Time and the Gods, a king asks various prophets to tell him what comes after death; again, every prophet speaks in the sweetest possible prose, but the core of every prophet's message is the extinction and nothingness that follow death.
Much of Dunsany's early work suggests his dim—or perhaps intentionally skewed—recollections of his classical learning. In one of his few candid moments, Dunsany seems to suggest that his failure to master the Greek language as a boy was ultimately a source for the creation of his imaginary pantheon: "It may have been the retirement of the Greek gods from my vision after I left Eton that eventually drove me to satisfy some such longing by making gods unto myself." To be sure, his early collections, for all their biblical prose, bring the Greco-Roman pantheon more to mind than Jesus and the Apostles. Several early tales—"The Revolt of the Home Gods" in The Gods of Pegāna; "The King That Was Not" in Time and the Gods—are textbook cases of hubris. The gods in Dunsany also seem to have a certain Epicurean air to them: Māna-Yood-Sushāī "is the god of Having Done—the god of Having Done and of the Resting," reminding one of Epicurus's ethereal gods who do nothing but seek repose in the spaces between the stars. And note this passage in "The Vengeance of Man" (Time and the Gods): "All feared the Pestilence, and those that he smote beheld him; but none saw the great shapes of the gods by starlight as They urged Their Pestilence on." This is, I think, an echo of the celebrated passage in book 2 of the Aeneid in which Venus tells Aeneas that the destruction of Troy is being caused not only by the Greeks but by the gods:
Look—for the cloud which, o'er thy vision drawn,
Dulls mortal sight, and spreads a misty murk,
I will snatch from thee utterly … here where thou but seest
Huge shattered fragments and stone rent from stone,
And dust and smoke blent in one surging sea,
Neptune with his vast trident shakes the walls,
And heaves the deep foundations, from her bed
O'ertopping all the city. Juno here
Storms at the entrance of the Scaean gate,
Implacable, and raging, sword on thigh,
Summons her armed confederates from the ships.
Now backward glance, and on the embattled height
Already see Tritonian Pallas throned,
Flashing with storm-cloud and with Gorgon fell.…
But there is more to these early tales than echoes of half-remembered classics. In fact, I think we have to ask ourselves why Dunsany chose to invent this decadent cosmology to begin with. I am not at the moment concerned with any possible literary influences: I frankly know of nothing in earlier literature that is even remotely like The Gods of Pegāna or Time and the Gods; and even if viable antecedents could be found, that would not answer the question of why Dunsany was led to create his own pantheon and give it the traits he did. The early essay "Romance and the Modern Stage" (1911) may suggest an answer, and we see Dunsany arguing for the "romantic drama" as an antidote to the modern age: "… all we need, to obtain romantic drama, is for the dramatist to find any age or any 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 it 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." What else is Pegāna and its gods but a repudiation of modernism? The archaism of style immediately banishes us from the present and engulfs us in a world where we are, to be sure, the playthings of the gods but where things are cleaner, purer, simpler, and more august than the world of workaday London. Later stories of Dunsany's early phase begin to suggest this social satire more explicitly: in the city on Mallington Moor "there was none of that hurry of which foolish cities boast, nothing ugly or sordid so far as I could see. I saw that it was a city of beauty and song" ( The Last Book of Wonder). But the city on Mallington Moor is imaginary.
Another uncollected story or prose-poem, "Jetsam" (1910), encapsulates another possible motive for Dunsany's early work:
… the cliffs of destiny wholly hem us in, they are beautiful in the morning lit by the rising sun, but they grow darker and darker as evening falls behind them. And therefore let us run swiftly along the shore and gather pretty things or build sand castles and defy the sea, for those mutable waves are coming up the beach and sweeping away the children's paper ships and sweeping away the navies of the nations and curving their beautiful crests and calling for us.
We seem to have heard this all before—"Après nous le deluge"' "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die." But this is Dunsany at his most nihilistic, and I do not think we are to take him quite at his word here. The view that Dunsany is—exaggeratedly—expressing might be adequately summed up as the aesthetic interpretation of life. The aesthete lives for beauty; beauty and ugliness, not good and evil, are the aesthete's opposites. We all know that Dunsany the aesthete does not believe, and does not expect us to believe, in the literal reality of the Pegina pantheon (in this sense his repudiation of allegory becomes somewhat disingenuous, for it is either as allegory or symbolism or parable that we must interpret his work); but we believe aesthetically because Dunsany, while capturing perfectly the tone of naive earnestness that characterizes all primitive religious writing, is hammering home a profoundly "modern" message.
It is, I think, the aesthetic interpretation of life that is at the bottom of what turns out to be a systematic criticism or mockery of conventional religion. This is a tendency that can be traced through the whole of Dunsany's career, and it may be well to pursue this entire thread here. What Dunsany's actual religious beliefs were, I have no idea: I suspect he was an atheist, but he never says so. Perhaps he need not have bothered, for his antireligious (or, at the very least, anticlerical) polemic lies very close to the surface of much of his work. We have already seen the cruel and capricious nature of the gods of Pegāna; in Time and the Gods they continue to play out "the game of the gods, the game of life and death" ("When the Gods Slept"). "The Sorrow of Search" is a transparent allegory about the quest for truth and the inability of religion to satisfy it. King Khanazar "would know somewhat concerning the gods," and a prophet tells him a parable: there is a long road with temples all along its course, and the keeper of each temple believes that the road ends there; but one traveler walks past them all:
It is told that the traveller came at last to the utter End and there was a mighty gulf, and in the darkness at the bottom of the gulf one small god crept, no bigger than a hare, whose voice came out in the cold:
"I know not."
And beyond the gulf was nought, only the small god crying.
In "For the Honour of the Gods," we find that the only happy people are those with no gods; all the other folk are ruled by capricious gods who compel them to fight and kill in their name. In "The Relenting of Sardinac" a lame dwarf comes to be hailed as a god: this is no retelling of the Greek story of lame Hephaestus (he was not a dwarf) ut a vicious jab at (morally) deformed gods.
Some of the plays enforce the antireligious diatribe in a different way. King Argimenes, now a slave of King Darniak, remarks mournfully: "I have no … hope, for my god was cast down in the temple and broken into three pieces on the day they surprised us and took me sleeping." How fragile are the gods! But Argimenes' fellow slave speaks of Darniak's god: "'Yet is Illuriel a very potent god … Once an enemy cast Illuriel into the river and overthrew the dynasty, but a fisherman found him again and set him up, and the enemy was driven out and the dynasty returned'" (act 1). The Glittering Gate, Dunsany's first play, makes the point even more bluntly. Jim and Bill, both criminals who have died, are at the Gate of Heaven; Bill, who has just arrived, thinks there may be a way to break in (he is a master lock-picker), but Jim, who has been there a long time, has no hope. Bill manages to pick the lock and finds nothing but an abyss: "Stars. Blooming great stars." Bill concludes: "There ain't no Heaven, Jim." At this, the "faint and unpleasant laughter" that has been heard constantly in the background bursts forth into a "cruel and violent laugh" which "increases in volume and grows louder and louder." Actually Dunsany leaves open the question of whether we are really to imagine this as the gate of a nonexistent Heaven or the gate of a very real Hell.
Dunsany's novels, both early and late, continue the antireligious polemic. The Blessing of Pan presents a clear-cut confrontation of conventional religion and paganism. Tommy Duffin's Pan pipes ultimately lure the inhabitants of an entire village to revive ancient pagan rituals, until finally even the vicar, Elderick Anwrel, submits. But Anwrel is not the butt of the attack, and at one point Dunsany even extends sympathy toward his quest to preserve his religion: "The old ways were in danger; something strange had come and was threatening the old ways, and they were gathered there to defend the things they knew, the old familiar ways that were threatened now by this tune that troubled the evenings." The real satire is directed at the bishop and his underlings who refuse to believe what is going on and rest comfortable in their pious conventions. The rector Hetley, sent to replace Anwrel when he is forced by the bishop to take a vacation, never hears the pipes at all: he is deaf to the spiritual plight of the community. After even his wife deserts him to join the others in the hills, Anwrel's resistance is undermined and he comes to lead the ceremony.
The nonfantasy novel His Fellow Men (1952) is Dunsany's last exhaustive statement on religion. Here we are presented with a hopelessly naive and idealistic young man, Mathew Perry, who roams the world searching for a religion that practices "tolerance"; of course, he finds it nowhere—certainly not in the Ireland he is compelled to flee because he cannot accept the conventional enmity of Catholic and Protestant, and not in Africa, Arabia, India, or England. Although Dunsany commits the aesthetic mistake of supplying a contrived happy ending, we are left with the impression that Perry's quest was doomed to failure.
We have reached the end of Dunsany's career, but we have by no means finished discussing his early work. In particular we must demolish the notion that all his early collections, from The Gods of Pegāna to Tales of Three Hemispheres, represent a uniform body of work. It is not merely that the Pegāna mythos is not sustained after Time and the Gods; it is that Dunsany's attitude toward his work changes and does so rather early on. I think it would have been impossible for Dunsany to have maintained his biblical prose or his otherworldly subject matter for very long, and sure enough we find exceptions as early as the third collection, The Sword of Welleran (1908). "The Kith of the Elf-Folk" is the first tale that actually acknowledges the existence of the "real" world and presents the conflict between the "Wild Thing" of the title and the conventional human beings who do not understand what she is. "The Highwayman," later in the collection, is Dunsany's first tale set entirely in the "real" world.
Further curious things happen in A Dreamer's Tales (1910). By now much of the biblical archaism of style has slipped away, and the sense of fantasy is created almost wholly by exoticism of setting ("Idle Days on the Yann," "Bethmoora"). "The Hashish Man" is a somewhat disturbing tale, and not entirely for the reasons Dunsany intended: it is a conscious sequel to "Bethmoora" and signals the beginning of a strain of self-cannibalization that would reach a height in Tales of Three Hemispheres.
With The Book of Wonder and The Last Book of Wonder something disastrous has occurred. Dunsany can no longer summon the perfect naivete that made us marvel at The Gods of Pegāna, and his growing sophistication (or, more likely, his increasing disinclination to suppress his sophistication) leads him to mar his creations with ever-increasing doses of whimsy, irony, and deflation. The first two paragraphs of "The Quest of the Queen's Tears" ( The Book of Wonder ) tell it all:
Sylvia, Queen of the Woods, in her woodland palace, held court, and made a mockery of her suitors. She would sing to them, she said, she would give them banquets, she would tell them tales of legendary days, her jugglers should caper before them, her armies salute them, her fools crack jests with them and make whimsical quips, only she could not love them.
This was not the way, they said, to treat princes in their splendour and mysterious troubadours concealing kingly names; it was not in accordance with fable; myth had no precedent for it. She should have thrown her glove, they said, into some lion's den, she should have asked for a score of venomous heads of the serpents of Licantara, or demanded the death of any notable dragon, or sent them all upon some deadly quest, but that she could not love them—! It was unheard of—it had no parallel in the annals of romance.
I think it is passages like this that led Lovecraft to rue the passing of Dunsany's early manner: "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."
Lovecraft is, I suspect, right as to the result but wrong as to the motive: I believe Dunsany simply found the Gods of Pegina vein running dry, so that the only thing to do was to poke fun at it. This comes out especially well in an exquisite self-parody, "Why the Milkman Shudders When He Perceives the Dawn" ( The Last Book of Wonder), where we are never given the answer to the question implied in the title. In both "The City on Mallington Moor" and "The Long Porter's Tale" we find that it is possible to get to the Edge of the World with a ticket from Victoria Station—a ticket "that they only give if they know you." There is complete deflation at the end of "The Long Porter's Tale," where we are told flatly that the "grizzled man" who told it is "a liar"; while the interminable "A Story of Land and Sea" concludes with a pompous "Guarantee to the Reader," whose final paragraph reads: "Meanwhile, 0 my reader, believe the story, resting assured that if you are taken in the thing shall be a matter for the hangman."
Tales of Three Hemispheres continues the lamentable tendency, with abrupt shattering of the atmosphere by direct addresses to the reader, transparent social satire, and, on occasion, an intentionally flat and pedestrian style used for comic effect. Self-cannibalization continues with two moderately interesting but ultimately vacuous continuations of "Idle Days on the Yann."
Accompanying this shift of attitude is a shift in Dunsany's whole conception of fantasy. In The Gods of Pegāna, aside from a curious mention of Olympus and Allah on the very first page, one would have no idea that the "real" world ever existed. Indeed, this mention—"Before there stood gods upon Olympus, or ever Allah was Allah, had wrought and rested Māna-Yood-Sushāī" (my italics)—obviously states a chronological priority of Pegāna to the world. Although this conception is maintained in a few other stories—not the reference to "the days of long ago" in "The Fortress Unvanquishable Save for Sacnoth" ( The Sword of Welleran )—it is not consistent in Dunsany. Indeed, Dunsany has singularly little concern with the relation of his invented realms to the "real" world. Babbulkund was known to Pharaoh and Araby and received gifts from Ceylon and Ind. There were Europeans in Bethmoora before its desertion. The narrator of "Idle Days on the Yann" comes "from Ireland, which is of Europe, whereat the captain and all the sailors laughed, for they said, 'There are no such places in all the land of dreams.'" So at least Yann is in a dream world. And we have seen how it is possible to get to the Edge of the World from Victoria Station. I wonder which way the route lies. North? Does Dunsany think, with Samuel Johnson, that the Hebrides are the Edge of the World? I don't know, and it hardly matters. There is, of course, no reason why Dunsany should be consistent in the establishment of his fantasy lands: he is not writing a connected epic like Eddison or Tolkien, and he would be the first to scorn the notion that trains, maps, or any such appurtenances of the rational world have any application to his realms.
But what is more important than the precise location of Pegāna is why it and similar imaginary realms gradually disappear from Dunsany's work. A glancing reference in The Queen's Enemies to "fairy Mitylenë," uttered by Queen Nitokris of Egypt, may be our starting point: it does not take a classical scholar to know that Mitylene was a very real city in ancient Greece, and this is our first suggestion in Dunsany that the realm of fantasy is dependent upon perspective and imagination. The Last Book of Wonder brings this point home emphatically. In "A Tale of London" London is spoken of in the same exotic terms as any fabled Eastern city; in "A Tale of the Equator" a Sultan finds greater satisfaction in hearing his court poets describe a wondrous city than in actually building it. "The Last Dream of Bwona Khubla," in Tales of Three Hemispheres, completes the circle: here again a mirage of London seen in the depths of Africa inspires all the awe and wonder that Babbulkund or Sardathrion ever did.
Later works continue to develop and enrich the idea. The King of Elfland's Daughter, if stylistically a striking resumption of Dunsany's early biblical manner, is thematically quite different. One would think that this tale of a mortal man winning the hand of Lirazel, the daughter of the King of Elfland, would provide an opportunity for contrasting the prosiness of the "real" world with the wonder of an imaginary realm; but in large part the reverse is the case. To be sure, Elfland is a place of magic; but the very name of the "real" country involved—Erl, the German for "elf "—already signals a very tenuous distinction between our world and fairyland. Similarly, the names of characters in Erl—Narl the blacksmith, Guhic the farmer, Oth the hunter, Vlel the ploughman—remind us pointedly of certain inhabitants of Pegāna and its congeners. And to Lirazel and the other denizens of Elfland, the real world is just as much a source of wonder as their realm is to us:
He [a troll] told of cows and goats and the moon, three horned creatures that he found curious. He had found more wonder in Earth than we remember, though we also saw these things once for the first time; and out of the wonder he felt at the ways of the fields we know, he made many a tale that held the inquisitive trolls and gripped them silent upon the floor of the forest, as though they were indeed a fall of brown leaves in October that a frost had suddenly bound. They heard of chimneys and carts for the first time: with a thrill they heard of windmills. They listened spell-bound to the ways of men; and every now and then, as when he told of hats, there ran through the forest a wave of little yelps of laughter.
In Don Rodriguez and The Charwoman's Shadow Dunsany solves—or, rather, evades—the problem by setting the tale in a half-fantastic historical time—the "Golden Age past its wonderful zenith" ( The Charwoman's Shadow), whenever that is—but the matter is taken up again in The Curse of the Wise Woman and later novels. Wise Woman is, strangely, the first of Dunsany's novels to deal explicitly with Ireland; and with its two companions, Rory and Bran (1936) and The Story of Mona Sheehy (1939), we reach the culmination and resolution—a very curious one—of Dunsany's approach to fantasy. Has Dunsany here merely replaced Pegāna with Ireland? The answer is not quite as simple as that. Certainly Dunsany's lyric descriptions of Ireland in these novels create a certain sense of shimmering fantasy, but his approach is really subtler than this. In all three novels we are quite clearly dealing with a real Ireland of farmers, tinkers, and estates. The contrast to this reality is provided, first, by the dialect speech put in the mouths of the Irish characters and, second, by the allusions to names out of Irish folklore or topography—the half-imaginary realm of Tir-nan-og in Wise Woman, the mountain Slievenamona in Rory and Bran and Mona Sheehy. The first replaces Dunsany's archaistic prose, the second his resonant, imaginary place-names. The Wise Woman's ponderous utterances now supply the only escapes into prose-poetry that Dunsany allows himself:
"We walked down the river, Mother," said Marlin.
"Aye, the river," said she, "and one of the great rivers of the world, though it's small here. For it widens out on its way, and there's cities on it, high and ancient and stately, with wide courts shining by the river's banks, and steps of marble going down to the ships, and folk walking there by the thousand, all proud of their mighty river, but forgetting the wild bog-water."
The Story of Mona Sheehy seems to represent a dramatic shift in Dunsany's attitude to fantasy: here we are concerned with a young girl who believes herself to be a child of the fairies, when in fact Dunsany makes it abundantly—almost excessively—plain to us that she is merely the product of an illicit liaison between Lady Gurtrim and Dennis O'Flanagan. The opening and closing sentences are identical—" 'I never saw a more mortal child' "—and Dunsany never tires of reminding us that Mona's belief in her magical birth is all a delusion. It is not merely that fantasy has become relative, as in the "fairy Mitylene" reference: fantasy here is explicitly denied. I am not sure that this novel is not the sole representative of an anomalous new class, which might be called "psychological fantasy," analogous to "psychological horror." Just as psychological horror is horrific but nonsupernatural (Bloch's Psycho, Campbell's The Face That Must Die), so in psychological fantasy the fantasy does not exist except in the mind—here, in the mind of Mona Sheehy and the many townspeople who share her delusion. Dunsany even provides some simple-minded anthropology to account for the phenomenon: "… the story of many a fairy, many an elf, is probably but the history of the small things dwelling in woods, altered a little by the eye of man, for he saw them in dim light, altered again by his mind as he tried to explain them, and altered again by frailties of his memory, when he tried for his children's sake to remember the stories that his grandmother told him."
I think, though, that this climax to Dunsany's fantasy work has some possible antecedents. Thematically Mona Sheehy is very similar to Lirazel in The King of Elfland's Daughter: both are outcasts from conventional society, Lirazel supernaturally, Mona nonsupernaturally. In The Curse of the Wise Woman the role of the supernatural is highly problematical: Dunsany leaves entirely open the question of whether the titanic storm concluding the novel is a natural occurrence or the result of the Wise Woman's curses. Some highly significant passages in Rory and Bran also anticipate the renunciation of fantasy in Mona Sheehy: "The world is full of wonders, and all the wonders that our imagination paints are but the mirages of them." And note the constant use of similes when fairyland is invoked: "the notes of thrushes [seemed] like notes from the horns of Elfland." What in the early Dunsany would have been a bold metaphor explicitly identifying the thrushes with Elfland has now become a mere simile which precisely negates such an identification. Mona Sheehy, then, has its predecessors.
The shift, of course, is not irrevocable, and with many later short stories and the novel The Strange Journeys of Colonel Polders we are back among the supernatural; but the manner in which Dunsany now approaches the supernatural is very different and must be discussed when we study the notion of belief in Dunsany's later work.
A curious coherence can be noticed in Dunsany's novels, stories, and plays of the late twenties and thirties, a coherence whose central theme is what might be called the nonhuman perspective of life. The plays The Old Folk of the Centuries (1930), Lord Adrian (1933), Mr. Faithful (1935), and The Use of Man (1937) and the novels My Talks with Dean Spanley (1936), Rory and Bran (1936), and the very late The Strange Journeys of Colonel Polders (1950) all focus around the conflict of human beings with the animal world. But in truth the theme is broader than this, and the use of nonhuman perspective—seeing the world as, say, a dog or a fox might see it—is merely a vehicle for Dunsany's wholesale criticism of modern society and the industrialized civilization it has erected. The focal point for this criticism is nothing less than the very brief play The Evil Kettle (in Alexander and Three Small Plays, 1925).
This powerful little play asks us to imagine the young James Watt as he notices his mother's teakettle boiling and begins to realize the awesome potential of steam. Later the Devil comes to him and shows him apocalyptic visions of the future with the familiar "dark, Satanic mills" marring the natural environment. The symbolism of this play is very obvious (steam = factory smoke = the fires of Hell), but it nevertheless lays the groundwork for two fundamental and related principles in Dunsany's later work: first, the tragic and increasing separation of human beings from their natural environment; and, second (evidently the cause of the first), the dominance of the machine in modern civilization. The first theme is developed in a much more interesting and dynamic way than the second, and it is worth studying in detail.
The Blessing of Pan and The Curse of the Wise Woman, two of Dunsany's strongest novels, portray the cleavage between civilization and nature very poignantly. In The Blessing of Pan it is clear that the elfin tune played by Tommy Diffin, a tune that ultimately summons the inhabitants of an entire town to follow him up the hills and reenact ancient rituals, is a means for reintegrating himself and his listeners with primal nature. In an early scene Tommy finds it impossible to take a game of chess seriously: chess presents merely an artificial problem and solution. Lovecraft once remarked in a letter that games are pointless because "after I solve the problem … I don't know a cursed thing more about Nature, history, and the universe than I did before." In Dunsany the game is a symbol for the meaningless artificiality of modern civilized life: it is too far from nature. Such a simple thing as taking off one's shoes holds great significance for Tommy: "Somehow in bare feet he felt a little closer to that mystery of which the pipes were the clue." And the ending leaves no doubt of Dunsany's message: "Tommy Duffin's curious music … 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."
Similarly, The Curse of the Wise Woman particularizes the conflict of human beings versus nature in the struggle of the Wise Woman to defeat a development company that plans to drain an ancient bog—the precise theme, curiously enough, of Lovecraft's early story "The Moon-Bog" 1921). Here the Wise Woman herself is described as "something akin to those forces that ruled, or blew over, the bog, and that cared nothing for man"; and the storm that in the end destroys both her and the development project points to the bitter and perhaps mutually destructive conflict in which the human being dares to take on nature. And, however repulsive it may be to modern sensibilities, we must admit that the narrator's hunting expeditions across the face of Ireland—the bulk of the novel deals with them—reinforce the harmony that can be established between the human and the natural worlds. Yes, the narrator—he is perhaps the only significantly autobiographical character in all Dunsany—kills and kills frequently, but in some strange way he establishes a bond between himself and the world around him. Many of us perhaps find Dunsany's enthusiasm for hunting very repellent; but he never made apologies for it and never regarded it as an aberration. It is true that the narrator of The Curse of the Wise Woman kills principally for food, not for sport fox hunting is defended on the ground that the fox is a menace to sheep and poultry); but, more important, his hunting compels him to learn the ways of nature, and in the end he is no more or less predatory than the animals he hunts and shoots.
From a slightly different perspective many of the plays in Seven Modern Comedies (1928) display "modern" attitudes only to condemn them. In Atalanta in Wimbledon a girl advertises in the paper challenging prospective husbands to a table tennis game: if he wins, he marries her; if he loses, he dies. The title becomes witheringly ironic, for not only do we have a jarring juxtaposition of ancient goddess and modern suburb, but this modern Atalanta sets up a contest for herself that obtrusively lacks the profound mythic dimensions of her predecessor. In The Raffle a man's soul is bartered about with unbelievable cynicism by the "business mentality" of the characters—even a bishop—as they debate how much money is worth spending to buy the soul back from the Devil. In The Journey of the Soul, a virtual metadrama, an acting company hopelessly misconstrues a play that does not provide the frivolous amusement and titillation expected by cast and audience alike from modern plays. In His Sainted Grandmother the ghost of a man's "sainted grandmother" tells the man's daughter that she was by no means as straitlaced and conventional as he has imagined: here the satire is double-edged, directed both at the old fogy's pious reverence for the "old ways" and at the callowness of the younger generation. But the unifying feature of these plays—emphasized by the almost grating modernity of diction employed in them—is the greed, shallowness, and hypocrisy of the modern world: as in many of Dunsany's later plays, there is not a single admirable character in them, not a single one who is not mercilessly caricatured.
Society's alienation from the world of nature has entailed a concurrent polarization with the animal world: this is the theme of a whole series of works of the twenties, thirties, and later, and it is here that Dunsany uses the nonhuman perspective, with varying degrees of effectiveness. Curiously, an uncollected early tale or prose-poem, "From the Mouse's Point of View," anticipates the trend, picturing very prettily the towering vastness of a house and the shuddersome presence of the huge cat as seen from a mouse's perspective. The otherwise very slight play The Old Folk of the Centuries, in which a boy has been turned into a butterfly, does little more than show sympathy with nonhuman life forms: the boy, while being irked at his transformation, finds the situation itself comfortable and even enjoyable. It is in Lord Adrian (composed in 1922-923)—in which a man, injected with the gland of an ape to rejuvenate himself, begets a son (Lord Adrian) who, although perfectly normal-looking, shows disturbing affinities to animals—that the point is first made significantly indeed, if anything, rather too obviously). Adrian makes such utterances as "I don't love men" and "I regard the domination of all life by man as the greatest evil that ever befell the earth." He finally concludes: "Nature's scheme is clear enough. You see it in every bird and every flower. Every city you build, every noisy invention you make, is a step away from the woods, is a step away from Nature, is a step that is wrong." There is some vicious satire in this play—at one point Adrian is trying to explain to his sweetheart Nellie his deep sense of sympathy with the animal world, and she replies with the appallingly platitudinous "I'm awfully fond of animals too"—but on the whole the play lacks subtlety and comes across as naively moralistic.
Much better is the outrageously funny Mr. Faithful (composed in 1922), in which a man desperate for work takes on the job of a watchdog, presenting the argument that, as an intelligent human being, he can do the job far better than a mere animal. The artificial and self-serving way in which people make use of animals is, for all the rollicking hilarity of the play, brutally underscored here; and this play is far more effective in depicting the evils of the human being's domination of beast than is Lord Adrian.
A final play, The Use of Man (in Plays for Earth and Air, 1937), is even more viciously satirical. Here a man is transported in a dream to a meeting of the spirits of animals, who all confront the man and demand to know the "use" of people, just as the man and his friends could find no especial use—from the human perspective—of badgers. None of the animals, save the obsequious dog, speaks up for human beings: the bird hates their cages, the mouse their traps, the cat is too aloof and indifferent to their fate. Finally the mosquito speaks up—the human being is its food.
A trilogy of novels completes the human-animal dichotomy in Dunsany. Rory and Bran tells of a boy and a dog as they lead cattle to a fair and back; but we are never told that Bran is a dog, and through the course of the entire novel it is possible to interpret Bran as simply Rory's brother or (human) companion. But this novel is more than a vast tour de force or practical joke (although evidently some reviewers never saw through the ploy): the point Dunsany is making is the senseless artificiality of distinguishing the animal and the human. This is not a contradiction of such a work as Mr. Faithful, but a confirmation of it from a different perspective: the world of nature makes no distinction between human and animal—and Rory, the farmer's son, is ultimately indistinguishable from Bran because both are part of the natural landscape; it is only when people become civilized that they lose the link with nature. I am reminded of Dunsany's statement about the Irish poet AE, a statement that could apply more precisely to Dunsany himself: "He had a prophetic feeling that cities were somehow wrong."
My Talks with Dean Spanley (1936) is an entertaining but rather slight work about a man who believes himself to have been a dog in a previous incarnation. Dunsany is certainly uncannily precise in depicting a dog's state of mind, but this novel ends up as simply a trial run for the more exhaustive The Strange Journeys of Colonel Polders. Here an Indian pundit causes Colonel Polders to experience dozens of incarnations as all manner of animals—dog, cat, eel, butterfly, stag, and on and on. Again Dunsany is enormously clever at depicting the lives and putative thoughts of various animals; but, like Rory and Bran, all this is more than an exercise in ingenuity. The one message hammered home again and again in Polders's account of his various incarnations is the natural comfort of animal life. When he is made an eel, he remarks: "'To be frank, I was perfectly comfortable. I will say that for the fellow; he always made me comfortable. No credit to him of course. It's merely that animals lead comfortable lives. And, when he sent me there, I was naturally comfortable. Not that an eel is an animal. But you know what I mean. Why animals should be any more comfortable than us I don't know. With all our conveniences, it should be the other way about." Earlier Polders notes that "it takes so much money and so many drinks and smokes and comforts, and machinery of different sorts, to get [the] comfort" of a fox in its den. Throughout the novel, too, infallible animal instinct—the instinct that allows geese to fly south, an eel to reach the open sea, a sparrow to return to its home—is compared invidiously to the slow-moving human reason; and the animal's immediacy of experience leads Polders to claim that the life of a dog is "a more ample life than any, I am sorry to say, than any of us can live. More full, more ample, life with a grander scope." As a dog, Polders finds absolute contentment chasing a ball; as a sparrow, he finds flies "delicious" because they are a sparrow's natural food; and Polders's keenness of sight and smell as a butterfly prompts his exclamation "How blunt our senses are!" The Strange Journeys of Colonel Polders may seem formless, but Polders's kaleidoscopic shifting from one incarnation to the next—with each incarnation designed for maximum contrast with its predecessor—is all the form a novel of this sort needs.
The other branch of Dunsany's criticism of modern society—the dominance of machines—is not handled with nearly the richness or subtlety as the theme of the human being's alienation from nature. It is, of course, society's increasing mechanization that has initiated this alienation to begin with, and it is a notion that can be found as early as his essay "Romance and the Modern Stage" (1911). The evils of industrialism randomly and tangentially enter many of Dunsany's works, but one must wait until The Last Revolution (1951) before it is treated comprehensively. And yet this novel of machines developing an intelligence of their own and challenging the supremacy of human beings is not a success: the theme is handled too obviously, and Dunsany's ever-placid narrative tone never produces the requisite tensity and sense of dramatic conflict, in spite of one exciting scene in which the protagonists are besieged by the machines. It is almost as if the theme was so close to Dunsany's heart that he could never treat it except in this blunt and obvious way.
As it is, a much more successful handling of the idea occurs in a very late story, "The Ghost of the Valley" (1955), which ends poignantly:
"Times are changing," it [the ghost] said. "The old firesides are altering, and they are poisoning the river, and the smoke of the cites is unwholesome, like your bread. I am going away among unicorns, griffons, and wyverns."
"But are there such things?" I asked.
"There used to be," it replied.
But I was growing impatient at being lectured to by a ghost, and was a little chilled by the mist.
"Are there such things as ghosts?" I asked then.
And a wind blew then, and the ghost was suddenly gone.
"We used to be," it sighed softly.
This is a fine conceit: the disappearance of the creatures of the imagination is a powerful symbol for the disappearance of wonder and mystery in the industrial age, and it brings full circle the pensive warning that Dunsany made at the beginning of his career: "I know of the boons that machinery has conferred on man, all tyrants have boons to confer, but service to the dynasty of steam and steel is a hard service and gives little leisure to fancy to flit from field to field." …
Style in Dunsany is a massive issue, and we can only touch upon some central features. The magic of Dunsany's early style is close to unanalyzable, for to say that he uses the cadences of the King James Bible explains almost nothing. Certain features are very obvious—sonorous repetition, a staggeringly bold use of metaphor, just the right soupcon of archaism (much less, say, than in E. R. Eddison)-and can be illustrated by a single quotation from "A Legend of the Dawn" ( Time and the Gods), that exquisite fable of the rising and setting of the sun:
Again the Dawnchild tossed the golden ball far up into the blue across the sky, and the second morning shone upon the world, on lakes and oceans, and on drops of dew. But as the ball went bounding on its way, the prowling mists and the rain conspired together and took it and wrapped it in their tattered cloaks and carried it away. And through the rents in their garments gleamed the golden ball, but they held it fast and carried it right away and underneath the world. Then on an onyx step Inzana sat down and wept, who could no more be happy without her golden ball. And again the gods were sorry, and the South Wind came to tell her tales of most enchanted islands, to whom she listened not, nor yet to the tales of temples in lone lands that the East Wind told her, who had stood beside her when she flung her golden ball. But from far away the West Wind came with news of three grey travellers wrapt round with battered cloaks that carried away between them a golden ball.
This passage illustrates two further aspects of Dunsany's early style: the relatively sparing use of adjectives and the exhaustive use of paratactic construction. The early Dunsany probably has significantly fewer adjectives per square inch than similar work of its kind—Wilde's fairy tales, Eddison, Lovecraft's "Dunsanian fantasies"—and Dunsany was always careful never to have mere catalogues of jeweled words and phrases. As for paratactic construction—the conscious avoidance of subordinate clauses, as contrasted with the syntactic construction of the periodic style derived from classical models—it was something Dunsany retained throughout his career and is exemplified perfectly in a passage from The King of Elfland's Daughter:
When Alveric understood that he had lost Elfland it was already evening and he had been gone two days and a night from Erl. For the second time he lay down for the night on that shingly plain whence Elfland had ebbed away: and at sunset the eastern horizon showed clear against turquoise sky, all black and jagged with the rocks, without any sign of Elfland. And the twilight glimmered, but it was Earth's twilight, and not that dense barrier for which Alveric looked, which lies between Elfland and Earth. And the stars came out and were the stars we know, and Alveric slept below their familiar constellations.
There is more to this than merely the old joke of beginning every sentence with "and": there may actually be no less imagery in this passage than in one of similar size in the syntactic construction; but the effect is one of simplicity, because the failure to subordinate clauses creates the impression of linear sequentiality. This is, incidentally, the principal reason why Lovecraft's "Dunsanian fantasies," for all their close derivation from—and in some cases near plagiarism of—Dunsany's work, never ring true: Lovecraft, nurtured from infancy on the Greco-Roman classics and their stylistic imitators of Augustan England, was too wedded to the syntactic construction to abandon it, even for the sake of imitation. Paratactic construction is really the fundamental element Dunsany himself derived from the King James Bible, and it is this element that gives to his work its distinctive air of childlike simplicity. Padraic Colum's antithesis—"We are all fictionists nowadays: Lord Dunsany, however, is that rare creature in literature, the fabulist"—is exactly right as far as this feature of style is concerned.
As Dunsany's style develops, the first thing to be sloughed off is the archaism. I do not mean to imply by this either that there is anything intrinsically wrong with archaism of diction (one only has to point to Lucretius and Spenser) r that Dunsany was at all clumsy in his early use of it: The Gods of Pegāna could be a textbook for that sort of thing. But as early as A Dreamer's Tales almost all the thees and thous are gone. Surprisingly little is lost by this procedure, for to the end of his career Dunsany's style remained one of the most musical and subtly rhythmical in all English, and I think it is possible to assert that his is, quite simply, some of the greatest prose (qua prose) in world literature. But the loss of archaism is not immediately felt because the exoticism of setting continues to dazzle us; this carries us through Dunsany's work of the mid-920s, at least through The Charwoman's Shadow.
In the plays, interestingly enough, the progression is quite otherwise. His first play, The Glittering Gate (1909), presents two Cockney plebeians in all their dialectic colloquialism, something one would never have expected from the author of "Poltarnees, Beholder of Ocean." But this aberration gives way to the richly melodious and atmospheric plays of Dunsany's early period—Five Plays, Plays of Gods and Men, and Alexander (written in 1912)—although even here The Lost Silk Hat (1913) seems an anticipation of his later work. But the real watershed seems to be Plays of Near and Far, whose plays were composed around 1919 and 1920. Here we have archaistic plays—The Compromise of the King of the Golden Isles, The Flight of the Queen—juxtaposed with plays in modern idiom: Cheezo, A Good Bargain, If Sbakespeare Lived To-day, Fame and the Poet. There is much reason for this, for all these plays quite obviously satirize various features of the modern world. In the play If Dunsany can have his cake and eat it, too, for the plot allows him to go from modern London to the Near East and back again. In fact, a large part of the success of this play is the startling contrast between modernism and archaism, as in the following bit of dialogue:
JOHN: … But who is your master?
ALI: He is carved of one piece of jade, a god in the greenest mountains. The years are his dreams. This crystal is his treasure. Guard it safely, for his power is in this more than in all the peaks of his native hills. See what I give you, master.
JOHN: Well, really, it's very good of you.
This sort of device is found in diluted form in one late play—Golden Dragon City in Plays for Earth and Air— but otherwise Dunsany abandons the prose-poetry style entirely in his remaining dramas: Mr. Faithful, Lord Adrian, Seven Modern Comedies, The Old Folk of the Centuries, and the remaining Plays for Earth and Air.
In the novels and later stories a similar tendency is at work, but the break is not quite so clear-cut. The Blessing of Pan is one of Dunsany's most carefully written works, and its subtly modulated and understated prose is as effective in creating an atmosphere of fantasy as the most involved archaism would have been. Here Dunsany's earlier bold metaphors have given way to an equally bold and precise symbolism: "Very soon he [Anwrel] saw the trees rising over the hedges, both of which encircled the rectory and church of Rolton. Great fields lay around it, stretching far away, and the trees seemed guarding that part of the parish from the level waste of the eternal fields. A few farmhouses straggled away behind." The hedges encircle the rectory and church because in the end the forces of nature, symbolized by Tommy's tunes on the Pan pipes, will overwhelm Anwrel's conventional religion and lead him to partake of the ancient rituals; the few farmhouses suggest the tenuous hold of modern civilization over the "great fields" of nature. A later reference to the music of the pipes as "that awful messenger" brilliantly suggests two things at once: the messenger is "awful" in the modern sense to Anwrel but "awful" in the archaic sense "aweful") to the rest of the community. This punning antithesis is all the more apt in that Anwrel represents the modern world and the other inhabitants the ancient world of primitive nature worship.
We have seen how, in The Curse of the Wise Woman, the utterances of the Wise Woman allow Dunsany a few moments of archaism and prose-poetry. The narrative itself occasionally bursts forth into restrained lyricism, and Dunsany can still coin breathtaking metaphors, as in the description of a sunset as "that unseen finger lifted to still the world" or during the apocalyptic storm: "I seem to remember the sound of the crash of the strides of Time." Obvious as this sort of dactylic prose is, it is yet effective in context. And one earlier passage must be quoted at length:
So we went further into the bog. And Marlin found a place for me, and there I waited, with no thought but for the coming of the geese, while Earth darkened and the sky became like a jewel of a magician in which some apprentice to magic gazes deeply, but comprehends nothing. And while I waited the hush of the evening seemed to deepen, until quite suddenly into that luminous stillness there stepped the rim of the moon, stepped flashing like the footsteps of a princess or faery coming into our world from her own, shod in glittering silver. And, as it rose, it slowly became golden, a vast orb holding me breathless, no pallid wanderer of the wide sky now, but huge on the edge of Earth like an idol of gold on its altar. I gazed at that magical radiance, forgetting the geese. And just as the lower edge of the great disc left the horizon I turned to Marlin to say something of what I felt, but said no more than: "It's a fine moonrise, Marlin."
All the features of Dunsany's earlier style—paratactic construction, boldness of metaphor and simile, utter simplicity of diction—are here but modernized; more important, the lyricism is now brought to bear in describing a very real occurrence.
Rory and Bran and The Story of Mona Sheehy seem more archaistic because of their greater use of Irish dialect, which—at least in Dunsany's rendition—seems, if not more archaic, at least more metaphorical than normal speech, as in Mona's memorable phrase defending her supposedly fantastic lineage: "Sure, we have nothing to do with Heaven." But in Dunsany's short stories and novels of the 1930s and 1940s the modernism of tone has yielded to a positively flat and almost pedestrian style. Again, even this style is still inherently musical, but if we did not know better we would think we were dealing with an English Hemingway. The Jorkens stories are the prime examples here, but other works confirm the tendency. Dunsany remarked that the humor of My Talks with Dean Spanley stems from the contrast between the dean's "rather polished language" and the dog's thoughts he claims to utter.
This statement is interesting because, first, it points to the fact that Dunsany chose his laconic, conversational style deliberately (note that two of his last three novels, The Strange Journeys of Colonel Polders and The Last Revolution, are very largely dialogue); second, it indicates that humor has become a prime concern with Dunsany.
The role of humor in the late works will be studied later, but we can note here that virtually all his fiction of the 940s and 1950s—the Jorkens tales, the short stories in The Man Who Ate the Phoenix and The Little Tales of Smethers (although several were written in the 1920s and 930s), the two novels mentioned above, and many uncollected stories, especially those contributed to Punch—are avowedly comic; only the anomalous His Fellow Men stands apart among his late works. And the means Dunsany chose to convey his dry humor was the deadpan tone exemplified in the following passage from Colonel Polders:
We were again in the reading-room, where I had persuaded our little party to adjourn as soon as possible, because I had seen the colonel looking too often towards the pundit; and, when one reflected that Polders had been a tiger and was but just now remembering it, while Sinadryana had caused him more than one violent death, it was easy to realize how inharmonious, and detrimental to the best interests of the club, a meeting between them might be. There was of course no guarantee that the pundit would not enter the reading-room; indeed, there was a probability that he would; but trouble in the future somehow seemed better than immediate trouble now. I think all of the colonel's little audience saw my motive, and did what they could to further it. Over our coffee and some liqueurs we sat silent awhile. And then the colonel looked up from his coffee. "Yes, I was a tiger," he said.
How successful this is I have no especial interest in deciding: for my part I think Colonel Polders a masterpiece of comic fantasy (or fantastic comedy), and many stories in The Man Who Ate the Phoenix are very amusing; but Dunsany was writing a great deal in this period, and some—perhaps much—necessarily falls flat. I do not think that many of the parodic detective stories in The Little Tales of Smethers are particularly successful; in any case, Dunsany's style in this last decade and a half of work becomes, for once, too uniform and monotonous to be consistently effective. It is foolish to criticize Dunsany for developing this vein of writing: it was in many senses a logical development of his stylistic and aesthetic conceptions of the 1920s and 1930s, with, first, the emergence of Jorkens and, second, the repudiation of fantasy in plays and novels alike. But I think Dunsany's writing becomes rather mechanical after a while, especially in his endless Punch sketches (many of them neither funny nor clever) nd other uncollected tales. But works like Colonel Polders and the wickedly funny "The Two Bottles of Relish" (1932) redeem almost any amount of routine hackwork.…
Dunsany found it irksome when critics labeled his early work allegorical; he was, I suppose, right to do this, but some of his early work, if it is not allegory, must be termed parable, and there is certainly a preponderance of irony, satire, and scarcely veiled philosophy in the whole of his work. It may seem a little late in the game to discuss Dunsany as philosopher; but the fact is that he never evolved—and never claimed to evolve—a coherent philosophy and made it the foundation of his whole work, as Machen and Lovecraft did. This does not, I think, necessarily undermine my initial premise that all weird writing is the result of a world view, for it simply means that each of Dunsany's works must be studied individually for the philosophy imbedded in it. We have seen bits of philosophy come out in our previous discussions—Dunsany's aestheticism as the source for his easygoing atheism and his hatred of mechanization and advertising; his sense of our alienation from the natural world—but some works are so consciously philosophical, so endowed with an obvious "message," that they deserve to be studied separately.
The most concentrated of such works is the collection of prose-poems Fifty-one Tales (1915). I am not sure that this is not in the end Dunsany's finest collection, as every story is one flawless facet of Dunsany's whole approach to life and literature. In under 500 words each of these stories distills a certain essence of the Dunsanian world view: it is as close to philosophy as he ever came.
Dunsany brings all his known tools into play here—simplicity of utterance, boldness of metaphor, a sprinkling of archaism, and all the rest. Many tales deal with the concept of time—time as the foe to beauty but also as the cleanser of ugliness; time in conflict with art for supremacy and survival. In "The Raft-Builders" writing is likened to rafts, but "Oblivion's Sea" deals mercilessly with most of them; the conclusion can only be quoted:
Our ships were all unseaworthy from the first.
There goes the raft that Homer made for Helen.
What can one say when faced with prose like this? Or take "The Prayer of the Flowers," one of Lovecraft's favorites: the message is heart-stoppingly simple—the flowers see the rise of great cities with their smoke and noise, but Pan calms them by saying, "Be patient a little, these things are not for long." It is this offhand way in which Dunsany can speak of the destruction of civilization that makes many of these tales so powerful; and he does not require even his understated prose to achieve the effect. In "The Workman" the ghost of a man who has fallen from a scaffolding comes to the narrator and says bluntly: "Why, yer bloomin' life 'ull go by like a wind, and yer 'ole silly civilisation 'ull be tidied up in a few centuries." The secret of this passage is "tidied up": not only is it shockingly colloquial, but it implies that civilization is some contemptible stain that must be cleaned up. One could write essays on every one of the pieces in Fifty-one Tales: they are all parables, devastating in their simplicity.
A somewhat anomalous use to which Dunsany puts philosophy is in a group of tales whose point is nothing less than literary criticism. Methodologically this is different from parody—Lovecraft's "Sweet Ermengarde," for example, a send-up of the Horatio Alger-type story—although the end result is the same, the emphatic underscoring of a particular critical stance. The first example seems to be the Jorkens tale "The Club Secretary" ( Mr. Jorkens Remembers Africa), in which Jorkens stumbles upon a very exclusive club—a club for famous poets, so rigid in its membership qualifications that Pope is only a hall porter. There is no need to cite passages from Dunsany's nonfiction to show his dislike of Pope and the "school of wit" he represented. Late in his career Dunsany produced many tales of this type, most rather crude and obvious, but some quite successful, or at least mildly amusing. "Darwin Superseded" displays a man who has proved that modern poetry is a sure sign that human beings have begun to reverse the course of evolution and return to primitivism; he concludes: "In fact, if my theory is sound, as I feel sure it is, this should bring us back to the trees before the end of the century." This was a theme Dunsany never tired of uttering, not only in countless articles and diatribes against what he felt was the irrationality of modern poetry but in stories like "A Fable of Moderns" (1951), a scathing attack on T. S. Eliot (never named, of course), or "The Awakening," in which a man, listening to a pianist, senses that he is finally beginning to understand modern music and spins a grandiose philosophical interpretation of the piece—but the "pianist" is only the piano tuner. Obvious as this is, it is redeemed by its unrelenting ferocity.
The issue of irony and satire in Dunsany is a large one, and I have earlier pointed out certain examples. Again much of the effectiveness of Dunsany's satire comes from the unnerving contrast between the viciousness of the irony and the mild and gentle manner of its expression. Some of the later plays exhibit this tendency brilliantly. Throughout Seven Modern Comedies and Plays for Earth and Air we look in vain for an admirable character; the success of several of these plays lies in the fact that eveyone is the target of satire. Golden Dragon City, in the latter collection, portrays each of its three characters as shallow and unimaginative fools. A man has bought a window from a strange Arab and sets it up in his flat; and the window magically reveals a fantastic city under siege from an invading army. But the miracle of this sight escapes everyone—Bill, his landlady, and his sweetheart Lily—and it becomes nothing but a carnival amusement. A single bit of dialogue will be enough:
BILL: Won't you take another look at your city, Mrs. Lumley?
MRS. LUMLEY: Not now, thank you, sir. I've a few things to do. I'll take a good look later. I'm glad we've got it down there. Come to think of it, I really am. I'll be going now, sir. (Exit )
BILL: Well, Lily, when you've finished your muffin we'll take another look at the city.
LILY (mouth full): Yes.
A Matter of Honour is a vicious parody of a deathbed scene, as a dying man confesses, "as a matter of honor," that he once succeeded in seducing a bishop's wife, thereby winning an old bet from his two friends. And we have seen how, in The Raffle, all the characters are mercilessly flayed as they bandy about the monetary value of a man's soul.
When Dunsany shifted to a lighter and more overtly humorous style in the 1940s and 1950s, the ferocity of his satire tended to wane and yielded occasionally to a wistful pensiveness that is almost reminiscent of Fifty-one Tales. Three tales collected in The Man Who Ate the Phoenix are good examples. In "The Policeman's Prophecy" (first published 1930) Dunsany uses the casual remark of a policeman to a reckless driver, "You'll kill yourself and everybody else," as a springboard to imagine a world without human beings, concluding with the reflection "What a noise we made! But it will all be forgotten." "Poseidon" (first published 1941) speaks of a man traveling in Greece who meets the ancient god of the title; but Poseidon is a weak and insubstantial god now, no longer having any worshippers, and at the end he quite literally fades away. In a more amusing vein is "The Honorary Member," in which we find the god Atlas an honorary member of a London club. The message is the same as in "Poseidon"—Atlas has no place in the world because, as he remarks, "The world's got too scientific for all that"—but the effect is achieved by the brutal yet comic juxtaposition of the incongruous. I want to single out one further example in which the lighter approach can nonetheless be devastating. I refer to the late work "The Speech" ( The Little Tales of Smetbers and Other Stories), one of the most remarkable stories in Dunsany's entire corpus. In pre-World War I days a firebrand member of the House of Commons plans a speech that will almost certainly bring war to Europe; the government is determined to let the man speak, but a shadowy group is equally determined to stop him in the interests of peace. This group resorts to nothing so crude as assassination—not, at any rate, of the M.P. Instead, they murder the man's father, Lord Inchingthwaite; the M.P. is suddenly a peer and cannot speak in the lower house. At this point the tale is merely amusingly clever; but we have not reached the end:
"So war was averted," said one of us.
"Well, yes," said old Gauscold. "Not that it
made any difference in the end."
The Great War came anyway.…
I have discussed Dunsany's work chronologically, tracing themes, conceptions, and imagery from the beginning to the end of his career, because I think this is the only way to understand him. An honest reader of Dunsany must get beyond the early work, siren song as it is; one must explore what he chose to do in the nearly four decades of writing after Tales of Tbree Hemispheres (1919) and read this material with the expectation that it will be significantly different from—but not necessarily inferior to—the earlier work. I resolutely refuse to pass judgment on whether his earlier or his later writing is superior: there are times when I, like most readers, want to genuflect before The Gods of Pegāna or A Dreamer's Tales, but I would never wish to part with The Blessing of Pan, The Curse of the Wise Woman, The Story of Mona Sheehy, or The Strange Journeys of Colonel Polders. But it is not a matter of likes or dislikes: Dunsany, quite simply, was always evolving as a writer.
It is difficult to lay down any clear divisions in his work, especially with the recent discovery of a mass of uncollected fiction, early and late. Even the series of short-story collections from The Gods of Pegna to Tales of Three Hemispheres cannot be regarded monolithically, since such things as The Book of Wonder, The Last Book of Wonder, and portions of Tales of Three Hemispheres represent a significantly different attitude to his work from that found in Time and the Gods or The Sword of Welleran. As I said earlier, the pseudonaiveté of the Gods of Pegina style was exhausted quite early on. The shift from short stories to novels with Don Rodriguez (1922) did not bring an immediate change of tone or style: of course, the novels as a whole are less intense and concentrated than the tales, but it would have been foolish—or at least risky—for Dunsany to have attempted to maintain the early short-story style in the novels. The real break comes, first, in the complete abandonment of archaism of both style and setting in The Blessing of Pan, then the use of his native Irish background in The Curse of the Wise Woman, and then the rejection of fantasy in The Story of Mona Sbeeby. Overlapping this shift is the inclusion of overt humor, first with the Jorkens tales (the first one composed in 1925), then with My Talks with Dean Spanley, and finally the late stories and The Strange Journeys of Colonel Polders. In the plays the break is more straightforward, and the archaistic manner is abandoned almost completely after Plays of Gods and Men (1917). Lovecraft's comment is interesting in this regard: while he regarded Dunsany's comedies of manners (he must have been referring to the early Lost Silk Hat or to Fame and the Poet, since he was writing well before Seven Modern Comedies and the later plays) worthy of Sheridan, he nonetheless regretted the change: "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." Much as I admire Lovecraft, it is precisely this attitude—this impatience with Dunsany's growth as a writer—that I am interested in combating.
In the end the career of Lord Dunsany is both unique and edifying. Let us by all means reverence the early work, the work we unconsciously designate when we use the adjective "Dunsanian"; but let us learn that the later work is just as Dunsanian, just as representative of his temperament at a later stage. Let us marvel at his seemingly effortless mastery of so many different forms (short story, novel, play, even essay and lecture), his unfailingly sound narrative sense, and the amazing consistency he maintained over a breathtakingly prolific output. Like Lovecraft, like Machen, Dunsany claimed aesthetic independence from his time and culture, became a sharp and unrelenting critic of the industrialism and plebeianism that were shattering the beauty both of literature and of the world, wrote works almost obtrusively and aggressively unpopular in tone and import yet retained a surprising popularity—at least in terms of the sale of his work—through the whole of his career. The criticism of Dunsany is at an even more primitive level than that of Machen, Lovecraft, or M. R. James, and certainly more than that of Poe and Bierce. In part I think this is because many critics—and I will include myself in this number—find his early work so flawless of its kind as to be virtually uncriticizable, and most have not considered the later work at all. But it is also because Dunsany is seen by many simply as a predecessor: a dominant influence on Lovecraft, Tolkien, and others, to whom an obligatory tip of the hat and no more is necessary. Lovecraft died in 1937, the year The Hobbit was published; Dunsany continued to write for nearly two decades after this. I have done all I can to indicate the compelling interest in the whole of this work; later critics must continue the task of explication so that Lord Dunsany becomes more than just a hallowed name.
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