Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsay written by Lord Dunsany

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Transcriber's Note:

Two names are accented with Macrons (a short horizontal bar over
the letter), for which there is no ASCII character. They are usually
marked as [=e], as in Argim[=e]n[=e]s. For legibility, they have been
replaced here by the bare letter. To restore the original accents,

change Oonrana to Oonr[=a]na
change Argimenes to Argim[=e]n[=e]s

SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS OF LORD DUNSANY

MCMXII

[Illustration]

CONTENTS

The Gods of the Mountain
The First Act of King Argimenes and the Unknown Warrior
The Fall of Babbulkund
The Sphinx at Gizeh
Idle Days on the Yann
A Miracle
The Castle of Time

INTRODUCTION

I

Lady Wilde once told me that when she was a young girl she was stopped
in some Dublin street by a great crowd and turned into a shop to
escape from it. She stayed there some time and the crowd still passed.
She asked the shopman what it was, and he said, 'the funeral of Thomas
Davis, a poet.' She had never heard of Davis; but because she thought
a country that so honoured a poet must be worth something, she became
interested in Ireland and was soon a famous patriotic poet herself,
being, as she once said to me half in mockery, an eagle in her youth.

That age will be an age of romance for an hundred years to come.
Its poetry slid into men's ears so smoothly that a man still living,
though a very old man now, heard men singing at the railway stations
he passed upon a journey into the country the verses he had published
but that morning in a Dublin newspaper; and yet we should not regret
too often that it has vanished, and left us poets even more unpopular
than are our kind elsewhere in Europe; for now that we are unpopular
we escape from crowds, from noises in the street, from voices that
sing out of tune, from bad paper made one knows not from what refuse,
from evil-smelling gum, from covers of emerald green, from that ideal
of reliable, invariable men and women, which would forbid saint
and connoisseur who always, the one in his simple, the other in his
elaborate way, do what is unaccountable, and forbid life itself which,
being, as the definition says, the only thing that moves itself,
is always without precedent. When our age too has passed, when its
moments also, that are so common and many, seem scarce and precious,
students will perhaps open these books, printed by village girls at
Dundrum, as curiously as at twenty years I opened the books of history
and ballad verse of the old 'Library of Ireland.' They will notice
that this new 'Library,' where I have gathered so much that seems to
me representative or beautiful, unlike the old, is intended for few
people, and written by men and women with that ideal condemned by
'Mary of the Nation', who wished, as she said, to make no elaborate
beauty and to write nothing but what a peasant could understand. If
they are philosophic or phantastic, it may even amuse them to find
some analogy of the old with O'Connell's hearty eloquence, his winged
dart shot always into the midst of the people, his mood of comedy;
and of the new, with that lonely and haughty person below whose tragic
shadow we of modern Ireland began to write.

II

The melancholy, the philosophic irony, the elaborate music of a play
by John Synge, the simplicity, the sense of splendour of living in
Lady Gregory's lamentation of Emer, Mr. James Stephens when he makes
the sea waves 'Tramp with banners on the shore' are as much typical
of our thoughts and day, as was 'She dwelt beside the Anner with mild
eyes like the dawn,' or any stanza of the 'Pretty girl of Lough Dan,'
or any novel of Charles Lever's of a time that sought to bring Irish
men and women into one nation by means of simple patriotism and a
genial taste for oratory and anecdotes. A like change passed over
Ferrara's brick and stone when its great Duke, where there had been
but narrow medieval streets, made many palaces and threw out one
straight and wide street, as Carducci said, to meet the Muses.
Doubtless the men of 'Perdondaris that famous city' have such
antiquity of manners and of culture that it is of small moment should
they please themselves with some tavern humour; but we must needs
cling to 'our foolish Irish pride' and form an etiquette, if we would
not have our people crunch their chicken bones with too convenient
teeth, and make our intellect architectural that we may not see them
turn domestic and effusive nor nag at one another in narrow streets.

III

Some of the writers of our school have intended, so far as any
creative art can have deliberate intention, to make this change, a
change having more meaning and implications than a few sentences can
define. When I was first moved by Lord Dunsany's work I thought that
he would more help this change if he could bring his imagination into
the old Irish legendary world instead of those magic lands of his with
their vague Eastern air; but even as I urged him I knew that he could
not, without losing his rich beauty of careless suggestion, and the
persons and images that for ancestry have all those romantic ideas
that are somewhere in the background of all our minds. He could not
have made Slieve-na-Mon nor Slieve Fua incredible and phantastic
enough, because that prolonged study of a past age, necessary before
he could separate them from modern association, would have changed
the spontaneity of his mood to something learned, premeditated, and
scientific.

When we approach subtle elaborate emotions we can but give our minds
up to play or become as superstitious as an old woman, for we cannot
hope to understand. It is one of my superstitions that we became
entangled in a dream some twenty years ago; but I do not know whether
this dream was born in Ireland from the beliefs of the country men and
women, or whether we but gave ourselves up to a foreign habit as our
spirited Georgian fathers did to gambling, sometimes lying, as their
history has it, on the roadside naked, but for the heap of straw they
had pulled over them, till they could wager a lock of hair or the
paring of a nail against what might set them up in clothes again.
Whether it came from Slieve-na-Mon or Mount Abora, AE. found it with
his gods and I in my 'Land of Heart's Desire,' which no longer
pleases me much. And then it seemed far enough till Mr. Edward Martyn
discovered his ragged Peg Inerney, who for all that was a queen in
faery; but soon John Synge was to see all the world as a withered and
witless place in comparison with the dazzle of that dream; and now
Lord Dunsany has seen it once more and as simply as if he were a child
imagining adventures for the knights and ladies that rode out over the
drawbridges in the piece of old tapestry in its mother's room. But to
persuade others that it is all but one dream, or to persuade them that
Lord Dunsany has his part in that change I have described I have but
my superstition and this series of little books where I have set his
tender, pathetic, haughty fancies among books by Lady Gregory, by
AE., by Dr. Douglas Hyde, by John Synge, and by myself. His work which
seems today so much on the outside, as it were, of life and daily
interest, may yet seem to those students I have imagined rooted in
both. Did not the Maeterlinck of 'Pelleas and Melisande' seem to be
outside life? and now he has so influenced other writers, he has been
so much written about, he has been associated with so much celebrated
music, he has been talked about by so many charming ladies, that he is
less a vapour than that Dumas _fils_ who wrote of such a living
Paris. And has not Edgar Allen Poe, having entered the imagination of
Baudelaire, touched that of Europe? for there are seeds still carried
upon a tree, and seeds so light they drift upon the wind and yet can
prove that they, give them but time, carry a big tree. Had I read
'The Fall of Babbulkund' or 'Idle Days on the Yann' when a boy I had
perhaps been changed for better or worse, and looked to that first
reading as the creation of my world; for when we are young the less
circumstantial, the further from common life a book is, the more
does it touch our hearts and make us dream. We are idle, unhappy and
exorbitant, and like the young Blake admit no city beautiful that is
not paved with gold and silver.

IV

These plays and stories 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
travellers, 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 colours, ceremonies and
incredible processions that never passed before the eyes of Edgar
Allen 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 those astonishments that seemed
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 gipsies 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 river coughed.' And how he can play
upon our fears with that great gate of his carved from a single ivory
tusk dropped by 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 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 at
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.

V

Not all Lord Dunsany's moods delight me, for he writes out of a
careless abundance; and from the moment I first read him I have wished
to have between two covers something of all the moods that do. I
believe that I have it in this book, which I have just been reading
aloud to an imaginative young girl more French than English, whose
understanding, that of a child and of a woman, and expressed not in
words but in her face, has doubled my own. Some of my selections,
those that I have called 'A Miracle' and 'The Castle of Time' are
passages from stories of some length, and I give but the first act of
'Argimenes,' a play in the repertory of the Abbey Theatre, but each
selection can be read I think with no thoughts but of itself. If 'Idle
Days on the Yann' is a fragment it was left so by its author, and if
I am moved to complain I shall remember that perhaps not even his
imagination could have found adventures worthy of a traveller who had
passed 'memorable, holy Golnuz, and heard the pilgrims praying,' and
smelt burned poppies in Mandaroon.

Normandy 1912.

W. B. Yeats.

THE GODS OF THE MOUNTAIN

ACT I

SCENE: The East. Outside a city wall; three beggars seated on the
ground.

OOGNO These days are bad for beggary.

THAHN They are bad.

ULF (an older beggar but not grey) Some evil has befallen the rich
ones of this city. They take no joy any longer in benevolence, but are
become sour and miserly at heart. Alas for them! I sometimes sigh for
them when I think of this.

OOGNO Alas for them. A miserly heart must be a sore affliction.

THAHN A sore affliction indeed, and bad for our calling.

OOGNO (reflectively) They have been thus for many months. What thing
has befallen them?

THAHN Some evil thing.

ULF There has been a comet come near to the earth of late and the
earth has been parched and sultry so that the gods are drowsy and all
those things that are divine in man, such as benevolence, drunkenness,
extravagance and song, have faded and died and have not been
replenished by the gods.

OOGNO It has indeed been sultry.

THAHN I have seen the comet o' nights.

ULF The gods are drowsy.

OOGNO If they awake not soon and make this city worthy again of our
order, I for one shall forsake the calling and buy a shop and sit at
ease in the shade and barter for gain.

THAHN You will keep a shop? (Enter Agmar and Slag. Agmar, though
poorly dressed, is tall, imperious, and older than Ulf. Slag follows
behind him.)

AGMAR Is this a beggar who speaks?

OOGNO Yes, master, a poor beggar.

AGMAR How long has the calling of beggary existed?

OOGNO Since the building of the first city, Master.

AGMAR And when has a beggar ever followed a trade? When has he ever
haggled and bartered and sat in a shop?

OOGNO Why, he has never done so.

AGMAR Are you he that shall be first to forsake the calling?

OOGNO Times are bad for the calling here.

THAHN They are bad.

AGMAR So you would forsake the calling.

OOGNO The city is unworthy of our calling. The gods are drowsy, and
all that is divine in man is dead. (To third Beggar) Are not the gods
drowsy?

ULF They are drowsy in their mountains away at Marma. The seven green
idols are drowsy. Who is this that rebukes us?

THAHN Are you some great merchant, Master? Perhaps you will help a
poor man that is starving.

SLAG My Master a Merchant! No, no. He is no merchant. My Master is no
merchant.

OOGNO I perceive that he is some lord in disguise. The gods have woken
and have sent him to save us.

SLAG No, no. You do not know my Master. You do not know him.

THAHN Is he the Soldan's self that has come to rebuke us?

AGMAR (with great pride) I am a beggar, and an old beggar.

SLAG There is none like my Master. No traveller has met with cunning
like to his, not even those that come from Aethiopia.

ULF We make you welcome to our town, upon which an evil has fallen,
the days being bad for beggary.

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

OOGNO I but spoke hastily, the times being bad.

AGMAR I will put right the times.

SLAG There is nothing that my Master cannot do.

AGMAR (to Slag) Be silent and attend to me. I do not know this city, I
have travelled from far, having somewhat exhausted the city of Ackara.

SLAG My Master was three times knocked down and injured by carriages
there, once he was killed and seven times beaten and robbed, and every
time he was generously compensated. He had nine diseases, many of them
mortal....

AGMAR Be silent, Slag.... Have you any thieves among the calling here?

ULF We have a few that we call thieves here, Master, but they would
scarcely seem thieves to you. They are not good thieves.

AGMAR I shall need the best thief you have.

(Enter two citizens richly clad, Illanaun and Oorander)

ILLANAUN Therefore we will send galleons to Ardaspes.

OORANDER Right to Ardaspes through the silver gates.

(Agmar transfers the thick handle of his long staff to his left
armpit, he droops on to it and it supports his weight, he is upright
no longer. His right arm hangs limp and useless. He hobbles up to the
citizens imploring alms.)

ILLANAUN I am sorry. I cannot help you. There have been too many
beggars here, and we must decline alms for the good of the town.

AGMAR (sitting down and weeping) I have come from far. (Illanaun
presently returns and gives Agmar a coin. Exit Illanaun. Agmar, erect
again, walks back to the others.)

AGMAR We shall need fine raiment, let the thief start at once. Let it
rather be green raiment.

BEGGAR I will go and fetch the thief. (Exit)

ULF We will dress ourselves as lords and impose upon the city.

OOGNO Yes, yes; we will say we are ambassadors from a far land.

ULF And there will be good eating.

SLAG (in an undertone to Ulf) But you do not know my Master. Now that
you have suggested that we shall go as lords, he will make a better
suggestion. He will suggest that we should go as kings.

ULF (incredulous) Beggars as kings!

SLAG Ay. You do not know my Master.

ULF (to Agmar) What do you bid us do?

AGMAR You shall first come by the fine raiment in the manner I have
mentioned.

ULF And what then, Master?

AGMAR Why then we shall go as gods.

BEGGARS As gods?

AGMAR As gods. Know you the land through which I have lately come in
my wanderings? Marma, where the gods are carved from green stone in
the mountains. They sit all seven of them against the hills. They sit
there motionless and travellers worship them.

ULF Yes, yes, we know those gods. They are much reverenced here; but
they are drowsy and send us nothing beautiful.

AGMAR They are of green jade. They sit cross-legged with their right
elbows resting on their left hands, the right forefinger pointing
upwards. We will come into the city disguised, from the direction of
Marma, and will claim to be these gods. We must be seven as they are.
And when we sit, we must sit cross-legged as they do, with the right
hand uplifted.

ULF This is a bad city in which to fall into the hands of oppressors,
for the judges lack amiability here as the merchants lack benevolence
ever since the gods forgot them.

AGMAR In our ancient calling a man may sit at one street corner for
fifty years doing the one thing, and yet a day may come when it is
well for him to rise up and to do another thing, while the timorous
man starves.

ULF Also it were well not to anger the gods.

AGMAR Is not all life a beggary to the gods? Do they not see all men
always begging of them and asking alms with incense, and bells, and
subtle devices?

OOGNO Yes, all men indeed are beggars before the gods.

AGMAR Does not the mighty Soldan often sit by the agate altar in his
royal temple as we sit at a street corner or by a palace gate?

ULF It is even so.

AGMAR Then will the gods be glad when we follow the holy calling with
new devices and with subtlety, as they are glad when the priests sing
a new song.

ULF Yet I have a fear.

AGMAR (to Slag) Go you into the city before us, and let there be a
prophecy there which saith that the gods who are carven from green
rock in the mountain shall one day arise in Marma and come here in the
guise of men.

SLAG Yes, Master. Shall I make the prophecy myself? Or shall it be
found in some old document?

AGMAR Let someone have seen it once in some rare document. Let it be
spoken of in the market-place.

SLAG It shall be spoken of, Master. (Slag lingers. Enter thief and
Thahn)

OOGNO This is our thief.

AGMAR (encouragingly) Ah, he is a quick thief.

THIEF I could only procure you three green raiments, Master. The city
is not now well supplied with them; moreover it is a very suspicious
city, and without shame for the baseness of its suspicions.

SLAG (to a beggar) This is not thieving.

THIEF I could do no more, Master. I have not practised thieving all my
life.

AGMAR You have got something: it may serve our purpose. How long have
you been thieving?

THIEF I stole first when I was ten.

SLAG When he was ten!

AGMAR We must tear them up and divide them amongst the seven. (to
Thahn) Bring me another beggar.

SLAG When my Master was ten he had already had to slip by night out of
two cities.

OOGNO (admiringly) Out of two cities!

SLAG (nodding his head) In his native city they do not now know what
became of the golden cup that stood in the Lunar Temple.

AGMAR Yes, into seven pieces.

ULF We will each wear a piece of it over our rags.

OOGNO Yes, yes, we shall look fine.

AGMAR That is not the way that we shall disguise ourselves.

OOGNO Not cover our rags?

AGMAR No, no. The first who looked closely would say 'These are only
beggars. They have disguised themselves.'

ULF What shall we do?

AGMAR Each of the seven shall wear a piece of the green raiment
underneath his rags. And peradventure here and there a little shall
show through; and men shall say 'These seven have disguised themselves
as beggars. But we know not what they be.'

SLAG Hear my wise Master.

OOGNO (in admiration) _He_ is a beggar.

ULF He is an _old_ beggar.

ACT II

SCENE: The Metropolitan Hall of the city of Kongros. Citizens, etc.
Enter the seven beggars with green silk under their rags.

OORANDER Who are you and whence come you?

AGMAR Who may say what we are or whence we come?

OORANDER What are these beggars and why do they come here?

AGMAR Who said to you that we were beggars?

OORANDER Why do these men come here?

AGMAR Who said to you that we were men?

ILLANAUN Now, by the moon!

AGMAR My sister.

ILLANAUN What?

AGMAR My little sister.

SLAG Our little sister the Moon. She comes to us at evenings away in
the mountain of Marma. She trips over the mountains when she is young:
when she is young and slender she comes and dances before us: and when
she is old and unshapely she hobbles away from the hills.

AGMAR Yet she is young again and forever nimble with youth: yet she
comes dancing back. The years are not able to curb her nor to bring
grey hairs to her brethren.

OORANDER This is not wonted.

ILLANAUN It is not in accordance with custom.

AKMOS Prophecy hath not thought it.

SLAG She comes to us new and nimble remembering olden loves.

OORANDER It were well that prophets should come and speak to us.

ILLANAUN This hath not been in the past. Let prophets come; let
prophets speak to us of future things. (The beggars seat themselves
upon the floor in the attitude of the seven gods of Marma.)

CITIZEN I heard men speak to-day in the market-place. They speak of a
prophecy read somewhere of old. It says the seven gods shall come from
Marma in the guise of men.

ILLANAUN Is this a true prophecy?

OORANDER It is all the prophecy we have. Man without prophecy is like
a sailor going by night over uncharted seas. He knows not where are
the rocks nor where the havens. To the man on watch all things ahead
are black and the stars guide him not, for he knows not what they are.

ILLANAUN Should we not investigate this prophecy?

OORANDER Let us accept it. It is as the small uncertain light of a
lantern, carried it may be by a drunkard but along the shore of some
haven. Let us be guided.

AKMOS It may be that they are but benevolent gods.

AGMAR There is no benevolence greater than our benevolence.

ILLANAUN _Then_ we need do little: they portend no danger to us.

AGMAR There is no anger greater than our anger.

OORANDER Let us make sacrifice to them, if they be gods.

AKMOS We humbly worship you, if ye be gods.

ILLANAUN (kneeling too) You are mightier than all men and hold high
rank among other gods and are lords of this our city, and have the
thunder as your plaything and the whirlwind and the eclipse and all
the destinies of human tribes, if ye be gods.

AGMAR Let the pestilence not fall at once upon this city, as it had
indeed designed to; let not the earthquake swallow it all immediately
up amid the howls of the thunder; let not infuriate armies overwhelm
those that escape if we be gods.

POPULACE (in horror) If we be gods!

OORANDER Come let us sacrifice.

ILLANAUN Bring lambs.

AKMOS Quick, quick. (Exit some.)

SLAG (with solemn air) This god is a very divine god.

THAHN He is no common god.

MLAN Indeed he has made us.

CITIZEN (A WOMAN) (to Slag) He will not punish us, Master? None of the
gods will punish us? We will make a sacrifice, a good sacrifice.

ANOTHER We will sacrifice a lamb that the priests have blessed.

FIRST CITIZEN Master, you are not wroth with us?

SLAG Who may say what cloudy dooms are rolling up in the mind of the
eldest of the gods. He is no common god like us. Once a shepherd went
by him in the mountains and doubted as he went. He sent a doom after
that shepherd.

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