Beside his plays there are to Lord Dunsany’s credit seven volumes of short tales; I call them tales for want of a better title. Sometimes they are mere random thoughts jotted down seemingly until such time as they found place in some more pretentious form. The book of “Fifty-One Tales” might so be described almost as a note-book, so fleeting, and so incomplete are some of the conceptions; yet there are others of which one might say that to write them alone was to have at least a finger upon immortality. There is not one of them which is not beautiful in thought and in expression. They give too strange inner glimpses of the man’s philosophy, his entire loyalty to beauty, and his disgust of com-
HIS WORK promise. Baudelaire might have written them so far as form is concerned, but the point of view, and it is that which makes them important first of all, is Dunsany’s alone. In some of the longer tales one may find pure metrical flights of surpassing loveliness, almost sensuous in the long swinging hexameters which are so reminiscent of the Greece by which they were doubtless suggested. The following fragment by the change of a syllable here and there is a perfect example of this phase:
“Clad though that city was in one robe always, in twilight, yet was its beauty worthy of even so lovely a wonder; city and twilight both were peerless but for each other. Built of a stone unknown in the world we tread were its bastions, quarried we know not where, but called by the gnomes dbyx, it so flashed back to the twilight its glories, color for color, that none can say of them where their boundary is, and which the eternal twilight, and which the City of Never; they are the twin-born children, the fairest daughters of Wonder. Time had been there, but not to work destruction; he had turned to a fair, pale green the domes that were made of copper, the rest he had left untouched, even he, the destroyer of cities, by what bribe I know not averted.”
This is from a tale in “The Book of Wonder”, which Dunsany calls “A Chronicle of Little Adventures at the Edge of the World.” The Preface to this volume is very charming, and is even remindful of another invitation extended to us all some hundreds of years ago: “Come with me, ladies and gentlemen who are in any wise weary of London: come with me: and those that tire at all of the worlds we know: for we have new worlds here.”
It is in “The Gods of Pegana” that Dunsany creates that mythology upon which so much of his work is founded. He is discovered here playing with his gods as with a new toy, tender, ironic, and severe as the occasion seems to warrant. And little by little grew his gods in strength and stature, until they were as gods indeed. In 1912, W. B. Yeats published “Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsany”, to which Mr. Yeats contributed an Introduction from which I shall quote at length, for it gives an estimate of Dunsany from a fellow craftsman who is always as great in his generosity as in his genius.
“These stories and plays have for their continual theme the passing away of gods and men and cities before the mysterious power which is sometimes called by some great god’s name but more often ‘Time.’
His travelers who travel by so many rivers and deserts and listen to sounding names none heard before, come back with no tale that does not tell of vague rebellion against that power, and all the beautiful things they have seen get something of their charm from the pathos of fragility. This poet who has imagined colors, ceremonies and incredible processions that never passed before the eyes of Edgar Allan Poe or of De Quincey, and remembered as much fabulous beauty as Sir John Mandeville, has yet never wearied of the most universal of emotions and the one most constantly associated with the sense of beauty; and when we come to examine these astonishments that seem so alien we find that he has but transfigured with beauty the common sights of the world. He describes the dance in the air of large butterflies as we have seen it in the sun-steeped air of noon. ‘And they danced, but danced idly, on the wings of the air, as some haughty queen of distant conquered lands might in her poverty and exile dance in some encampment of the gypsies for the mere bread to live by, but beyond this would never abate her pride to dance for one fragment more.’ He can show us the movement of sand, as we have seen it where the sea shore meets the grass, but so changed that it becomes the deserts of the world:— ‘And all that night the desert said many things softly and in a whisper, but I knew not what he said. Only the sand knew and arose and was troubled and lay down again and the wind knew. Then as the hours of the night went by, these two discovered the foot-tracks wherewith we had disturbed the holy desert and they troubled over them and covered them up; and then the wind lay down and the sand rested.’ Or he will invent some incredible sound that will yet call before us the strange sounds of the night, as when he says, ‘Sometimes some monster of the sea coughed.’ And how he can play upon our fears with that great gate of his, carved from a single ivory tusk dropped from some terrible beast; or with his tribe of wanderers that pass about the city telling one another tales that we know to be terrible from the blanched faces of the listeners though they tell them in an unknown tongue; or with his stone gods of the mountain, for ‘when we see rock walking it is terrible,’ ‘rock should not walk in the evening.’
“Yet say what I will, so strange is the pleasure that they give, so hard to analyse and describe, I do not know why these stories and plays delight me. Now they set me to thinking of some old Irish jewel work, now of a sword covered with Indian Arabesques that hangs in a friend’s hall, now of St. Mark’s at Venice, now of cloud palaces in the sundown; but more often still of a strange country or state of the soul that once for a few weeks I entered in deep sleep and after lost and have ever mourned and desired.”
Indeed the tales are very like to the plays except that lacking the fixed quality of the dramatic form they have become even more fanciful. “Fifty-One Tales” is perhaps a little more philosophical in tone; the gentle irony of the author shows itself again and again, sometimes flaring up fiercely in a glow of indignation at the cobbled streets that dare to wander over the dancing places of Pan, sometimes tenderly rebuking those who can see no other beauty than the tall chimneys of factories, and again the spirit changes to a wonder and an awe at the great immensity of existence.
It has been remarked that most of the plays would fit well into the form of stories, and it is quite as true, on the other hand, that many of the stories would do well as plays. Some of them could not be dramatised, they are too light, too fragile, and too lacking in action; but others would be splendid material. The tale of the magic window and of the war in the other world, the story of the quest of the Queen’s tears, the dreadful adventure that befell three literary men, would all make plays, and there are many more that would go with them. Yet were they put into dramatic form there would be so much that would have to be lost from them that the change would be of questionable wisdom. For in these tales Dunsany has permitted the bridle rein to droop upon the neck of Pegasus, and that steed has wandered to and fro among the hills and meadows, he has sniffed the woods and has paused to drink from the stream that runs through the pasture, and all life around him has known a golden and a glorious awakening. So there are some things which are too subtle, and there are some which are too delicate to be transmitted to a play, but though this be so the tales themselves would never have risen to their present importance had it not been that some of their kind were embodied in dramatic form. There is a force, a directness, a concentration, not only of attention, but of energy which gives a carrying power to the play which the tale can never attain. Nor is such attainment intended; the cow and the horse are both noble animals, but we would never look for milk from the latter.
Dunsany’s tales convey us to lands that we never before knew existed. His favourite location is that which he calls “The Edge of the World”, for the passion for geography is of the school-room, and Dunsany is too big to be confined within the mean and narrow circle of four walls. We may call some of the tales symbolic, and others allegorical, while to nearly all of them we may attribute some deep and hidden meaning that must be frantically HIS WORK searched for by women’s clubs and classes in the drama. Far better is it to take them as they stand, fairy tales for grown ups, whose merit is in the story to be told and in the manner of the telling. What else comes to us easily and naturally from them may be considered as a gift from the gods. It may have been placed there carefully by the author, or he may never have seen it. The last seems to me the only true conclusion. But whatever we find we shall be happier, and even wiser, for it.