LORD DUNSANY’S outlook on the art of the theater and that of the drama has by no means been confined by local restrictions. In 1913 there might have been seen in the pamphlet issued from Florence by Edward Gordon Craig an advertisement of Craig’s school for the art of the theater. An international committee was appointed and the two members for Ireland were W. B. Yeats and Lord Dunsany. There is printed too in the same place a list of the donations and gifts toward this school, and here Dunsany’s name “heads all the rest.” This is doubtless because his was the only cash contribution; it was certainly a most generous one, consisting of one hundred pounds. What became of the venture, and how Lord Dunsany’s hundred pounds were expended belongs to that part of history which is still immured in the archives of the unknown. At any rate it was a worthy cause, and one which, by reason of its very intangibility, was sure to appeal to both the members from Ireland.
That which is far away always seems to appeal to Dunsany most, and the further away it is the stronger the appeal. When he speaks of “King Argimenes and the Unknown Warrior” as being the first play about his own country he is very evidently not talking about Ireland, but of that mythical land of which he is the discoverer. There is a danger in all this, and it is no small danger. The realm of pure abstraction invites to rest and contemplation, especially after one has been deluged with the opposite phase of life to the point of nausea. But when one wanders so far from the things of every day that one’s thoughts seem to have no application to the everyday man, it is high time to pause and consider the possibility of inter-terrestrial communication. There is a point where Dunsany in his effort to deal only with the big things ends by glorifying the little things, by doing the small thing infinitely well, instead of doing the big thing in any manner.
Not once but many times I have compared Lord Dunsany’s work with that of ancient Greece, tracing in his plays and tales a resemblance to the old gods, and to the eternal battle between man and destiny. And I have pointed out the three points of view with which a poet may regard his own creations. But I neglected to say that all three of these points of view are the same. It is necessary for me to talk a little of religion in order that I may make this clear to you. I have no apology for including such a dissertation here, for I am talking of a poet, of one who writes of Beauty; and surely God and Beauty are the same. Lord Dunsany has made his gods to be absolute, omnipotent, divine beyond the very outskirts of the cosmos, and in this I believe he has been mistaken. His gods are those of the ancient Hebrews; they are like the Egyptian gods, for they are implacable and apart. Not so the gods of Greece. Before they became material for the plays and stories of men they had been humanized, they had learned to suffer. Their followers endowed them with the traits of mankind, love, hate, gratitude, and they were even permitted to sorrow. In a word they were not only individual but personal. Then came the Christian religion founded upon Christ crucified, the greatest and most intimate personification of all. Lord Dunsany has removed his gods too wholly from the lives of men. They are depersonalized, detached, impenetrable, and vast, but they bear no relation to their servant, man. This mythology is wholly of itself, a thing apart, and therein lies its weakness. In the three points of view which I have offered as a basis for discussion, the first two must blend and lose themselves in the last before we can have the perfect, rounded work of art. Man in his relation to himself, and to his fellows, is in his relation to the whole, to the cosmos, to God. For while man is not a God, God is a man. The three cannot in reality be considered as separate entities; they are simply the three parts of one great whole. Lord Dunsany has taken one of these parts and has set it aside from the other two; he has isolated it, and differentiated it by every possible means. In this way he hoped to achieve infinity, but in reality he has only imposed a false restriction. God may be infinite, but He is not so in His relation to us, and so when we deal with gods and men we must, by very reason of the relationship, deal with those gods as finite. This was well understood by the great dramatists of Greece, and it is in the misunderstanding of this eternal fact that Dunsany has handicapped his power. Dunsany has shown us the falsity of the super-man of Nietzsche, but in his place we are given a super-god even more terrible. His place is that of pure abstract thought, devoid of emotion, and so neither in his gods nor in the world they rule do we find a trace of passion either human or divine. It is this that sets his work apart from the lives of men, and it is this which is his greatest limitation. Life is action motivated by emotion. Dunsany deals only with ideas. It is true that those ideas are beautiful, but no matter how beautiful they may be they are nothing more than the unborn children of life. In the dream world he has created we find many of the superficial traits and idiosyncrasies of humanity, and these deceive us into thinking for a moment that his people are even as ourselves. But when we probe deeper we discover that it is all a sham, that not once does a single human emotion show above the surface. If this make-believe world is to remain as calm and as detached as he would have it there must be no human passion to disturb the quiet of the dream. That is why there are so few women in Dunsany’s plays, and that is why, when they do appear, they serve merely as a background or a mouthpiece. For man’s relationship with woman is more intimate than any other; it is vitally personal, and it is often great with passion. Intimacy, personality, and passion are three things with which Dunsany’s gods may have nothing to do. If they had it might make them less god-like, but certainly it would make them more divine. Dunsany has remembered that in heaven there is “neither marrying nor giving in marriage,” but his interpretation has been too literal. Let me say again that while a poet may, nay, must, have his head in the clouds, his feet must touch earth soil.
Dunsany is an aesthete. His beauty is that which we appreciate with our minds, and senses. We see the splendour of the pictures he paints for us, the wonder and magic of his faerie dawns and twilights soothes and dazzles our eyes, but not once do we feel a throb of living emotion. Our ears are enraptured with the music of his lines, we feel the wonderful rhythm, swing, and beat of phrase on phrase, but not once do we know the poignancy of the familiar. It is all apart. In his scenes, in the times he has given for his actions, in the very costumes of his people there is an effort made to universalize by choosing something which is typical of the whole and yet so different from each part that it cannot be confused with reality. One cannot universalize a thought by making it unlike; it must be more like than the thing itself. It must not be different; it must be even more than the same.
It may be thought that I have devoted much space to destroying that which to all of us has been beautiful. I have not intended to do so. It seems necessary to me to point out that the great fundamental error which Dunsany has made is that he has set himself to find the least common multiple instead of the greatest common divisor. In doing this he has imposed a limitation upon his work which must be recognized. He deals in the most delicate tints and shadings; his writing is a marvelous pastel, but it lacks the vigour and lasting power of oil. And now having said all this I will ask you to forget it, if you have not so far disagreed with me as to make such forgetting unnecessary. It is interesting and even important that any work of art should be made to stand the test of analysis, and of comparison, but this test may be considered as a dose of peculiarly nasty medicine which once taken is soon forgotten. It is not what Dunsany should be, or what we would have him be that concerns us. It is what he is. Once the limitations of a work are defined there should be no complaining because the nature of that work does not extend beyond the limitations. We may regret that blue is not red, but it would surely be captious to insist just because it is not, that blue is an imperfect and unpleasant colour. Lord Dunsany has given us much that we stand greatly in need of; surely it would be ungracious to complain because it is not more. In an all too sordid day and age, when the romance of the open road seems to have given place to the romance of the counting-house, he has opened anew for us the door of wonder. For this we can never be too thankful. Dunsany has played the perfect host for us in his magic land; he has given us of his best, and we have found that that best is truly beautiful. He has done a fine, it may not be too much to say a great work, and he has done it with the deftness of the perfect craftsman. And now it is well to let the man speak for himself; it is only just that his voice should be heard in a discussion which touches him so nearly. The following extracts are from an article contributed by Lord Dunsany to the National Review of London during 1911, and the title of the article is “Romance and the Modern Stage.”
“Something must be wrong with an age whose drama deserts romance; and a cause that soonest occurs to one is the alarming spread of advertisement, its frightful vulgarity, and its whole-hearted devotion to the snaring of money.
“What advertisement (the screaming voice of our age) seeks to be other than a lie, and if the actual statement is literally true, then all the more must the suggestion correct this error by being especially false.
“Everywhere the sacredness of business is preached, everywhere it is pointed to as an end, to this great error advertisements testify alike in all places; children are brought up on them; for everything sublime or beautiful that any city shows them twenty times do they see far more noticeable, some placard sordid with avarice. Advertisements drop from the books that children read, they confront them in their homes.
They stand large between them and the scenery when they travel. Will anyone say that their preaching is neglected; not unless the bill-sticker has lost his cunning. Those who are thus educated will learn to bow down to business. When most we need romance, romance has been frightened away.
“As he steals over dewy hills in the dusk of summer evenings he sees those placards standing in the fields and praising Mammon; to Romance they seem the battlements of the fortress of Avarice, and he is gone at once.
“It is not from business that romance has fled, but from the worshiping of it; the calf was not an unclean beast among the Israelites, but when they worshiped the Golden Calf then God deserted them.
“To-day a work of art must be defended in terms of business. ‘What’s the use of it?’ they will say of some painting, and woe to the artist who cannot answer, ‘It brings me in so much.’
“A year or so ago this age of ours spoke through the pen of some writer of a brief letter to a journal. The fate of Crosby Hall was being discussed. I do not remember the arguments; it was beautiful, it was historic, and in the way. And the age spoke and said, ‘Let us have a little more business and less sentiment.’ “That was the great error put into a sentence which the age inspired its prophet to write to the press.
“Human happiness is nothing more than a fairy ring of human sentiments dancing in the moonlight. The wand that compels them may possibly be of gold. Business, perhaps, may be needed to make them dance, but to think that business, the possible means, should be more desirable than the certain end showed that that obscure writer whom the age had inspired was ignorant firstly even of himself and the little fanciful things that he intended some day to do. Thus is the end given up for the sake of the means, and truth and beauty sacrificed every day upon innumerable counters, until the generation fostered among these things says to the artist, ‘What do you get by it?’ and to the poet, ‘Does it pay?’
“In discussing the state of the stage one has to watch the affairs of its neighboring kingdoms, the stalls and the pit. If their conditions are sordid, romance will not easily flourish across the border.
“The drama is the mirror of life if not something more. And an age that paints its woodwork red to ape mahogany, that makes respected fortunes by mixing up sulphuric acid with glucose and calling the product beer, the age of flannelette and the patent pill... such an age may well have such a drama as will be pleasant and acceptable to the doers of these things: for when insincerity has once raised up its honored head in politics and commerce, as it has, and in daily life as well, it is quite certain that its worshipers will demand a drama sufficiently stale and smug to suit their lives.
“In any beautiful age a poet is scarcely noticed, he is the natural product of the beauty of the time, he is no more than the lilac in the Spring; only in evil days does he appear half-witted, having the foolish look of a lily upon a pavement.
“I am quite ignorant of the cost or feasibility of risking new experiments in the theater. I have no means or method of producing romantic drama. I should not dare to advise and have nothing to say except to ask that the theater be set up against the false, that the highest realism, the realism of the poets, who see the whole of life’s journey, be set up against the lower realism that sees only how man equips himself with morals, and money, and custom for the journey; but knows not where the journey leads nor why man wants to go. That is what we need more to-day than in any age.
“But romance has not been driven from the stage only by those that like the false and the sham — obviously among these romance will not abide for romance is the most real thing in life — but he has been jostled out of the way by the enemies of the shams that are too busy trying to overthrow the false to have leisure to let their fancies dance on the hills. For our age is full of new problems that we have not as yet found time to understand, that bewilder and absorb us, the gift of matter enthroned and endowed by man with life; I mean iron vitalized by steam and rushing from city to city and owning men for slaves. I know the boons that machinery has conferred on man, all tyrants have boons to confer, but service to a dynasty of steam and steel is a hard service, and gives little leisure to fancy to flit from field to field. Machinery has given us many problems to solve, and it may be a long time yet before we make the ultimate discovery that the ways and means of living are less important than life. When every man has recognized that for himself, we shall come out on the other side of all our problems, and laying aside our universal interest in the latest information about the newest question upon any subject that arises anywhere, we shall come to know a little about something once more, as our forefathers did before the days of encyclopedias. Then we shall have drama again that shall concern itself with life rather than with our anxious uncertainties about it. But the discoveries of steam and electricity which have given life to matter, are as perplexing to every one of us as what came out of the bottle that the Arabian fisherman found, and we have not yet recovered from our perplexity. I am not criticising machinery. I stand in awe of so terrible a genie whose shadow has darkened all the midlands of England; but I mention it to explain the newness and suddenness of our problems, our unfamiliarity with ourselves and the puzzled expression on the faces of all who deal with these things, and the difference between the stories we tell, whereat romance yawns loudly, and the simpler tales and songs of more rural people.
“Romance is so inseparable from life that all we need to obtain romantic drama is for the dramatist to find any age and 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 that it is 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.
“It is easy for a philanthropist to endow a hospital, and easy for a benevolent man to work for the sake of the poor, their goal is near to them, logic supports them and reasonable men applaud them upon the way.
But the way of the poet is the way of the martyr. The greater his work the more infinite his goal. His own eyes cannot assess it. There is little logic in a lyric, and notoriously little money. How can an age which values all things in gold understand so unvalued a thing as a romantic fancy?
“The kind of drama that we most need to-day seems to me to be the kind that will build new worlds for the fancy, for the spirit as much as the body sometimes needs a change of scene.
“Every morning railway trains, telegraphs, and motors await to spread the latest information everywhere. Even were this information of value there would be more than men’s minds could digest. I do not object to detailed accounts of murder trials, life is at a high tension in a court where a man is on trial for his life; what does the harm is meaningless reports of cricket matches spun out with insipid phrases and newly invented sham slang, which fill a people’s mind with nothingness, and are widely read by men who no longer die, but pass away at their residence. Phrases are parasites in the fur of thought and in time they destroy the thing upon which they feed. Many and many an erstwhile clever head pours forth phrase after phrase picked up from to-day and yesterday, behind which thought is dead, and only the parasites left. Too much information about the fads and fashions of empty lives is stealing year by year the traditions and simplicity even of rural people. Yet places remain unaffected by all these things, these are the hunting ground of the dramatist. Then there is the other world — the world of fancy. It seems to me that a play that is true to fancy is as true as one that is true to modern times, for fancy is quite as real as more solid things and every bit as necessary to a man. A fancy of some sort is the mainspring and end of every human ambition, and a writer who turns away from conventions and problems to build with no other bricks than fancy and beauty is doing no trivial work, his raw material is the dreams, and whims, and shadowy impulses in the soul of man, out of which all else ariseth.”
Here we may see Dunsany as a critic, less of the drama than of the age which begets it, and less of the age than of the philosophy which underlies its spirit. One is inclined to wonder too whether the fact of Dunsany’s critical ability does not in some wise explain many other things about his work. Often we find him in a critical mood in his tales and plays, and we realize again that good criticism is always creative in the highest sense. But this tendency on the part of Dunsany emphasizes the fact that his outlook is essentially intellectual. Dunsany realizes, but he does not experience; he perceives, but he does not feel. In his desire to get away from the life of to-day he ends almost by getting away from all life. His drama is that of imagination coated with a veneer of observation, albeit this same observation is of the keenest and most sensitive description.
In his disregard of human relations Lord Dunsany may be compared to many of those who have enlivened literature with the creations of pure fancy. Of such are Hans Andersen, and Grimm; Lewis Carroll and Barrie likewise belong in this category, but none of these have proceeded to the length which has made Dunsany unique, certainly in the contemporary, and probably in the previous literary age. We have had a literature based on folk-lore more than once; the Greek drama partook of this element, as has the literature of Germany and the northern countries from time to time; it is to be found to-day in the work of nearly all the Irish poets and dramatists. But in every instance this folk-lore has been the gradual growth of centuries until finally it has been preserved for all time upon the printed page. But with Dunsany it is very obviously quite different. He has created a folk-lore, or better, a mythology of his own, and in so doing he has managed to invest it with some of the actual atmosphere of antiquity. The whole conception is a most extraordinary tour de force.
This creation has offered him unlimited scope for pure flights of fancy; he is bound down by no possible restriction of time or place, or adherence to tradition. He makes his traditions as he goes along. Actual folk-lore is always closely entwined with the actual religion of its people, and thus it proceeds not only from what men think, but from what they feel. An artificial folk-lore such as Dunsany’s, being the product of the imagination of one man, is purely mental, and thus fails to satisfy on one side no matter how beautiful it may be in itself. Imagination is entirely a mental quality. And so, as the greatest art must always be emotion expressed in terms of the intellect, we must convict Dunsany of half measures. He deals not with emotion, but with states of mind, and be it said here again that, lacking or not in the bigger and more vital quality, that which he has given us is of the most surpassing beauty. It is the art of the intellectual aristocrat first, last, and always, and therein lies its weakness; but such as it is, it is a beautiful art. It is not the art of one who feels, it is not even the art of one who thinks, but it is the art of one who dreams.
One could almost wish to discard all the rest and to be content with dreams alone, Dunsany’s are so potent in their magic power.
Dramatically too there is a loss to be noted. Dunsany sometimes disregards a dramatic situation in the very fear that it will conceive a human emotion of violence at variance with his established code. There is always one scene in “King Argimenes and the Unknown Warrior” for which we look from the very outset, and which never comes. It seems almost important enough to be called a scène à faire. This is the meeting of the two Kings, Argimenes and Damiak. What a wonderful situation it would be, and how many notes could be touched upon in its rising scale. But it is not there. For the rest I have called attention to them as occasion arose as we discussed the plays, so there is no need to consider them further here. Whatever his shortcomings as a dramatist, and there lives not one, nor has one ever lived, in which some flaws cannot be found, Dunsany has done the remarkable thing of writing plays which are startling in their dramatic power and really fine in their poetry. They are big in conception, and artistic in execution. Their dialogue might serve as a model for many dramatists who are accounted of more importance than is Dunsany, and their colour and atmosphere exert at times an almost hypnotic effect.
It may be interesting to see what Dunsany has to say concerning a fellow worker, Synge, no less, in the London Saturday Review during 1910. The following bit is taken from a review of Synge’s “Deirdre of the Sorrows”, his finest work so far as regards beauty of expression.
“It is so long now since Pegasus shied at a factory whistle or at one of our own ha-penny newspapers blowing down the road, and soared and left the people and remained aloof from them the way he was wont not to do — for the Elizabethans trotted him in and out wherever men sang, or swore, or followed their callings — it is so long now since his ears caught the sound of the streets that it is strange to think of a poet only over the Irish sea writing in a peasantry’s common tongue. And this is what J. M. Synge was able to do as Homer was able, and as Keats, for instance, and Francis Thompson, were not.
“Synge is never far away from the fields of men, his is not the inspiration of the skylark remote from the earth; our wonder at his fancy is as our wonder at the flight of the white owl low down near beautiful fields.”
For not a little time past we have been possessed of a drama which in its effort to mirror life has gradually become more and more photographic and microcosmic. This is assuredly the art of a mechanical age, an age not of creation but of reproduction. Our music is provided by the phonograph and the mechanical piano; our painting is given us through the medium of the illustrated supplements of the Sunday papers; our drama has degenerated to that point where in its effort to be “real” it has ceased to be anything more than that. What a boon it was to the man of the theater when he found that that which was impossible of achievement on the stage came easily within his grasp in the moving-pictures. Here at least we have real trees, real houses, and real battles. The only thing left to wish for is that the actors be given real guns with real powder and bullets, and that they really discharge these weapons at one another. Perhaps in that way we may, through this very obsession for reality, be rid of some of the most unreal things that ever desecrated the name of art. This realism, or naturalism as it may best be called, rarely has penetrated beneath the surface of humanity, and though it has on occasion cut below the skin it has never yet touched on that sacred, and therefore shocking thing of which modern society stands so greatly in dread. If it ever had so touched, the white heat of the spirit would have withered it away. We have dealt with the isolated example, with the abnormal instance; why, no one can tell unless we admit to a morbid curiosity. It is the age of science, and we have applied the rules of science to the principles of art — and we have failed most miserably. There is every indication that this phase is well on its decline. There is every reason to believe that the romantic renaissance for which we have been waiting is at last within reach. We have a “new art of the theater” which is in reality an old art revitalized and brought up to date. Let us be thankful for it. It is what we need. We may even begin to see signs of a “new” drama, and for this let us be thankful also. We need it as a dying man needs life.
We call one man a realist because he deals in strange mental conditions, and we call another man a romanticist because he deals with common emotional conditions. Personally I am strongly of the conviction that the romanticist is the more real of the two by far. Lord Dunsany does not come under either heading according to this definition. That is because both the realist and the romanticist deal with life, though from different points of view. Lord Dunsany deals not with life, but with dreams. For long it has been forgotten that there were dreams, except when one had eaten too much lobster in some gilded restaurant after seeing a bad play. And then the dreams were not such as to make one desire them. It had almost passed beyond our recollection that there was a land in which realist and romanticist ceased to exist in themselves and blended into one. Dunsany has taught us again the name of that land, and he has called it Wonder. There we find no dramatist who may be labelled with a scientific name; there is only the dreamer. To him all things are possible, and the stranger they are the more probable is their happening. As in this life of the flesh we catch fleeting glimpses of that other life which has no boundaries, so in that life do we see now and again something which may remind us of the existence we have left behind. The dream world is not empty for us; the land of wonder is peopled thickly with those who are glad to give us welcome; the people of the hills are there and waiting.
Dunsany has opened for us the great gates leading into that other world so near, and yet so distant from us all. Like all the little people his creatures have no souls, for if they had then Time might overtake them. For the only thing in all the whole wide world that is imperishable, the only thing that Time stands baffled before, is a dream, even a little one. And that is most of all what Dunsany has told us, that a too great intensity of interest with the things of everyday life, the transient things, is just so much ground given up to that great scourge of all the ages, Time. In our fight with him he hurls the years at us, and our houses crumble, our cities fall into ruin, and our civilization passes away. All our learning, all our wealth, all our accomplishment cannot turn him even so much as a minute from his path. And all we have with which to oppose him are dreams. Only against them is Time powerless.
The world is very tired of thinking, especially about itself, and we who are each a part of the world are all tired too. We have thought so much lately. There seems to be hardly a human problem left untouched, and uninvestigated, and there seems to be hardly a human problem solved. Perhaps we have thought too much and dreamed too little. We have passed from the drama of the boudoir to that of the laboratory and the dissecting room; it may well be that the time has come when these things shall leave us, when we shall pass from the drama of the moment to the drama of all time, and from the destruction of little things to the preservation of great things.
It seems to me that there must be no one who can see the plays of Lord Dunsany or read them without feeling an immense sense of relief as at the release of some intolerable burden. His plays and tales are told to us as very few could have told them for more than many years. He is one of the great figures in a great literary movement, — in some ways he is the greatest figure, — and whatever Time may do to blot from the memory of man that which has passed, I think that the work of Dunsany will remain for always. For he has dreamed, and dreams are imperishable.
He has shown us beauty, which is truth, and truth is immortal. And so, while Lord Dunsany will in due course come to “pass away at his residence”, it is quite as certain that he will never die.