This quotation above may help us to understand why Lovecraft initially derived pessimism from cosmicism. His various comments to the contrary notwithstanding, I suspect he did suffer a sort of disillusion when he contemplated the myriad worlds of infinite space; the first reaction may well have been one of exhilaration, but perhaps not much later there came to him the sensation of the utter futility of all human effort in light of the vastness of the cosmos and the inconsequentiality of mankind in it. At a still later stage Lovecraft turned this pessimism to his advantage, and it became a bulwark against the tragedies of his own existence—his failure to graduate from high school and enter college; his failure to secure a job; his dissatisfaction with the progress of his writing— since these things could be regarded as cosmically unimportant, however large they loomed in his own circumstances. Lovecraft largely abandoned Schopenhauerian pessimism over the next decade or so, evolving instead his notion of ‘indifferentism’; but this should be treated at a later stage.
Philosophy was only one of Lovecraft’s many concerns in this period. Perhaps more significantly for his future career, he simultaneously began—or attempted to begin—separating himself from amateur activity and turning determinedly to fiction-writing. We can at last study the influence of Lord Dunsany on his fiction, as well as the many other tales of supernatural horror that laid the groundwork for his later, more substantial fiction.
Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett (1878–1957) became the eighteenth Lord Dunsany (pronounced Dun-SAY-ny) upon the death of his father in 1899. He could trace his lineage to the twelfth century, but few members of this Anglo-Norman line had shown much aptitude for literature. Dunsany himself did not do so in his early years, spent alternately in various homes in England and in Dunsany Castle in County Meath. He had gone to Eton and Sandhurst, had served in the Boer War, and appeared on his way to occupying an undistinguished place amongst the Anglo-Irish aristocracy as sportsman, hunter, and socialite. He married Beatrice Villiers, daughter of the Earl of Jersey, in 1904.
In 1904 Dunsany sat down and wrote The Gods of Pegana. Having no literary reputation, he was forced to pay for its publication with Elkin Mathews of London. Never again, however, would Dunsany have to resort to vanity publishing.
The Gods of Pega na, with its rhythmic prose and cosmic subject matter, both self-consciously derived from the King James Bible, introduced something unique to literature. Here was an entire theogony whose principal motivation was not the expression of religious fervour (Dunsany was in all likelihood an atheist) but an instantiation of Oscar Wilde’s imperishable dictum: ‘The artist is the creator of beautiful things.’11 While there are a number of provocative philosophical undercurrents in The Gods of Pegana, as in Dunsany’s work as a whole, its main function is merely the evocation of beauty—beauty of language, beauty of conception, beauty of image. Readers and critics alike responded to this rarefied creation of exotic loveliness, with its seamless mixture of naivety and sophistication, archaism and modernity, sly humour and brooding horror, chilling remoteness and quiet pathos.
By the time Lovecraft discovered him, Dunsany had published much of the fiction and drama that would gain him fame, even adulation, on both sides of the Atlantic: Time and the Gods (1906); The Sword of Welleran (1908); A Dreamer’s Tales (1910); The Book of Wonder (1912); Five Plays (1914); Fifty-one Tales (1915); The Last Book of Wonder (1916); Plays of Gods and Men (1917). Tales of Three Hemispheres would appear at the very end of 1919, marking the definite end of this phase of his work. By this time, however, Dunsany had achieved idolatrous fame in America. In 1916 he had five plays simultaneously produced in New York, as each of the Five Plays appeared in a different ‘little’ theatre off Broadway. His work was appearing in the most sophisticated and highbrow magazines—Vanity Fair, The Smart Set, Harper’s, and (a little later) the Atlantic Monthly. By 1919 Dunsany would probably have been considered one of the ten greatest living writers in the Englishspeaking world.
An examination of Dunsany’s early tales and plays reveals many thematic and philosophical similarities with Lovecraft: cosmicism (largely restricted to The Gods of Pegana); the exaltation of Nature; hostility to industrialism; the power of dream to transform the mundane world into a realm of gorgeously exotic beauty; the awesome role of Time in human and divine affairs; and, of course, the evocative use of language. It is scarcely to be wondered at that Lovecraft felt for a time that Dunsany had said all he wished to say in a given literary and philosophical direction.
Lovecraft could hardly have been unaware of Dunsany’s reputation. He admits to knowing of him well before he read him in 1919, but he had passed him off as a writer of whimsical, benign fantasy of the J. M. Barrie sort. The first work he read was not Dunsany’s own first volume, The Gods of Pegana, but A Dreamer’s Tales, which may well be his best single short story collection in its diversity of contents and its several powerful tales of horror. Lovecraft admits: ‘The book had been recommended to me by one whose judgment I did not highly esteem.’12 This person was Alice M. Hamlet, an amateur journalist residing in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and probably a member of Winifred Virginia Jackson’s informal coterie of writers.
Lovecraft would repeatedly say, even late in life, that Dunsany ‘has certainly influenced me more than any other living writer’.13 The first paragraph of A Dreamer’s Tales ‘arrested me as with an electrick shock, & I had not read two pages before I became a Dunsany devotee for life’.14
Hamlet had given Lovecraft A Dreamer’s Tales in anticipation of Dunsany’s lecture at the Copley Plaza in Boston on 20 October 1919, part of his extensive American tour. Lovecraft attended the lecture in the company of Miss Hamlet and her aunt. The group secured seats in the very front row, ‘not ten feet’ from Dunsany; it was the closest Lovecraft would ever come to meeting one of his literary idols, since he was too diffident to meet or correspond with Machen, Blackwood, or M. R. James.