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.