Lord Dunsany

by OLIVER ST. JOHN GOGARTY

1

How Lord Dunsany came to be a poet is a problem that may be somewhat baffling. He was brought up to be a soldier and therefore he went to Sandhurst instead of to a university. It is not necessary to go to a university to be a poet; but it is necessary to have a poetic gift, something innately strong within you, if poetry is to survive Sandhurst. Poetry in a military college is a thought satiric. But to Sandhurst Dunsany had to go: noblesse oblige. He could not do otherwise. There have been many poets who were soldiers but few soldier poets. Not the least remarkable of his gifts is this ability of his to have survived the mental discipline that regiments a soldier’s soul. He also survived the prose of the fox hunter with its contempt for the definite article: for example, “Hounds found.”

Many of his plays were written before the First World War, between 1909 and April, 1913. They reveal a high distinction and one quite unusual in modern drama. There is an unearthly liturgic quality about them, a language measured appropriately to the inexorable utterance of outlandish gods in far inaccessible fastnesses, strong places high above the lowly world of men.

His first play was The Glittering Gates. It was produced in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, April 29, 1909. It was such a success that Lady Gregory, who controlled the Abbey Theatre, took it off the program with the excuse that it was not sufficiently long. In spite of this rebuff (perhaps it was so disguised that it did not seem a rebuff) he offered his next play to the same management two years later. Its title was King Argimēnēs and the Unknown Warrior. This time the characters were dressed in the dregs of the Abbey greenroom, so no longer was the discouragement disguised. For a while I thought that Dunsany’s resentment was not altogether justified, until I saw to what extent the management of the Abbey would go to make one of Yeats’s plays or the plays of Lady Gregory a success. Dunsany’s dislike of Yeats grew from this. The Abbey Theatre saw Dunsany no more.

Since he tried his prentice hand in the Abbey, he has written some of the greatest plays in the English language: Alexander, The Queen’s Enemies, and A Night at an Inn, to name but three.

It is not quite fair to attribute a trend to a dramatist; but sometimes unfair things are quite allowable; so I can see that Dunsany judges men by the gods they worship. It may not be so; that is why I have taken the unfairness to myself. To prosecute the thought further, there is in the Irish defiance in the midst of destruction and desolation, in Irish bravery in the face of ruin, that which is akin to the dramatic attitude toward life: regarding it from a detached point of view. The judgment on men by the gods they choose!

The Abbey Theatre, being a one man and woman show, could not hold such an independent and selfcontained spirit as Dunsany long. So the world became his stage, and on it he was a success second to none — certainly not to those who deal with passing and ephemeral things.

I shall content myself to present one of his notable sayings and sentiments. Here is an echo which they who love to air their acumen in tracing ideas to their source would attribute to his ancestral history: —

It is built of rock and our palace is all of marble. Time has not scratched it with six centuries. Six centuries tearing with all their claws. We are throned on gold and founded upon marble. Death will some day find me indeed, but I am young. Sire after sire of mine has died in Barbul-el-Sharnak or in Thek, but has left our dynasty laughing sheer in the face of time from over these age-old walls.

The aristocracy of the language is a fitting vehicle for the poetry that becomes lyrical in these lyrical dramas, for they are not dramas of the folk or of humanity in the coil of life, but chants of those who are confronted more immediately with Destiny than are ordinary mundane beings.

2

IF DUNSANY’S spirit survived the routine and discipline of an army school, it endured because of influences earlier still—the breath of the woods and skies about Dunsany Castle and the aloofness, rather than the loneliness, they provided. Those were part of his heredity. In his childhood he was protected from slipshod and ignoble reading, lie had access to nothing but language of the Bible and of romances such as those that had set Don Quixote’s spear in rest. These, acting on a mind of extraordinary sensitiveness and discrimination, have given us some of the purest and most distinguished English of today.

Where did he get those names of thrones and dominations and principalities from some astral hierarchy all his own which he uses so effectively: l’erdondaris, Erl, Ziroonderel, Thek, A aim, Lirazel, Alveric, Tharrabas? Names that never were on sea or land, astronomic and skyey names, yet with an echo of the Gospel in the last. I cannot tell; but I remember one afternoon, while walking in the woods of Dunsany, I spoke of Coleridge and his name for the Sacred River in his Kubla Khan.

“Where did he get it?” I asked.

“From the first word in the Greek alphabet obviously,” Dunsany answered, and that came as a revelation to me.

When I mention beautiful prose, I think of a comparison: Dunsany s prose is as pure, fabulous, and as rare as the unicorn of which he writes so familiarly.

Again and again the unicorn aimed fair at Orion’s heart; the huge white beast stepped forward pressing Orion back. That graceful bowing neck, with its white arch of hard muscle driving the deadly horn, was wearying Orion’s arm.

There were other causes at work to keep his lips more eloquent than words of army command required — causes that have been the making of many a poet: and these were the sounds of the wind in the trees and the light on the fields and bogs around his Irish home. This love of nature is seen clearly and simply, because it is not as idealized as in The King of Elfland’s Daughter, when he writes of the Ireland that he knows as no one else knows it who can transmit it so well. Mg Ireland is the best book about the Irish countryside that has been written. His sympathy with wild nature glows through it, and that wry humor of his enlightens its every page. The quest he sets for himself which is never achieved is an example. lie pretends that he is writing about the one thing that anyone will want to hear (as if all were not sick of it), Irish politics.

In this Imok that I am planning to write about Ireland, there is only one thing that anyone will want to hear, a thing without which the book will be totally uninstructive, and that is — What the people of Ireland actually think of the new form of government.

As if anyone in a country pre-eminent for its moral cowardice would dare to speak his mind!

Here is an example of his sarcastic humor from another book. How tolerant and detached it is!

The house is a windowless ruin, burnt for political reasons, upon which I will not enlarge, for they are well enough known in Ireland, while my English readers ure not likely to have that inner knowledge of polities which it is necessary to have before all the advantages of burning the house of a man with whose politics you are in disagreement arc clearly understood.

All through My Ireland he is put off by strange excuses. He never meets an outspoken man. Some were interrupted as they were about to expound. One had a lapse of memory. None spoke his thought. Here is another example of Dunsany’s cryptic humor: —

A wind was still raging. We found some snipe that had not been flooded out, and I shot four. But in the opinion of my gamekeeper, who tias considerable experience, they were wild as the Devil’s father.

Again when he stalks plover from the shelter of an ambling cow: “In spite of the name on the cover of this book [My Ireland], it was not mg cow.”

Dunsany’s feeling for the hills and fields he knows, set in the days dim in history when the Milesians warred and ruled, appears in this beautiful extract from My Ireland: —

For the hills of Slieve-na-Calliagh seem very blue from Tara, and unlike the fields of this world; and the long row of them going over the utmost rim of the view might upon many an evening have hinted to the people gazing from Tara that amongst that gathering of dim blue mountains there was the magic for which their hearts were yearning, and of which their druids spoke. And so, when the end came to tlie days of their kings, they carried them there to the hills that seemed so mysterious, trusting those far blue slopes to hold the mystery of death. There the Milesians buried Ollamh Fodlda, one of the chief of their kings, at the top of the hill, with counties spread out all round him. I do not know what hopes they had of heaven, but they must have had a great love of earth who chose this view.

It Is a great love of earth that inspires such writing. While you arc reading you ask yourself repeatedly as you come across passages of great poetry and charm, “Why is Dunsany not more popular? Why is he not better known?”

We must differentiate between popularity and vulgarity. Burns vvus a popular and vulgar poet. Dunsany is neither the one nor the other. He is not popular because he stood outside the parochial procession of the times. When Yeats was reviving the old sagas and with them patriotic sentiment, he established a claim upon the public as interpreter of the national myth, and thereby got the public in a quandary because they dare not repudiate nationality. They had to accept its exponent and they did so grudgingly. So Yeats became popular by that only. His songs never were in the common mouth, nor are they ever likely to be. Neither to Yeats nor to Dunsany was the vernacular known.

Dunsany had none of these myths or sagas to help him. He invented his own. He “dwelt apart. More than that, he was repudiated by the vigilant Lady Gregory in her desire to fend off any competition from her Abbey internees.

While it is not strange that Dunsany should scent a conspiracy to keep him out ol the Irish Literary Renaissance, it is odd that he should feel aggrieved at the absence of a wider recognition of his poetry in Ireland.

In My Ireland Dunsany fails to get an opinion on government from any of the cottagers within miles of his home. He should have taken thought about the significance of this. In it lies the clue to what at first was rivalry, and later enmity, between himself and Yeats, his great contemporary. Radically it is the distrust of the cottage for the castle, of the folk for the aristocrat, of the peasant for the peer. There is no bridging this quagmire into which all that is lofty must sink in the end. “One docs not fully understand Ireland if one overlooks the pace with which ruin floats on the gentle wind, and the grudge that the Irish soil seems to bear to civilization. So Dunsany writes.

Yeats came to realize this when he wrote over the door of his tower of Ballylee: —

The only things that can remain are the characters, the written word. Let the word then ring over the ruin. For all that can remain when the bog has sucked in castle and cottage is unassailable song.

It would be a mistake to think that the rivalry between Dunsany and Yeats was a literary one. Far from it. Yeats had no rival to fear among contemporary poets. It was not so much rivalry on Yeats’s part as it was envy. Yeats, through his descent from parsons, innately loved a lord. He was at heart an aristocrat, and it must always have been a disappointment to him that he was not born one. Not by taking thought could he trace his descent from the year 1181.

Yeats loved high and worthy things. They “invited” his soul. He treasured a silver bowl said to have belonged to the Butlers of Ormonde. According to his historian J. M. Hone, to a friend he confided, “If I had my rights, I would be Marquis of Ormonde.” “What about your father?” asked Æ — George Russell. I am no genealogist, and it would take such a one to clear up the claim ol William Butler Yeats.

For a while, until George Moore’s mockery’made him relinquish it, Yeats displayed the Butler crest on his signet ring. Moore, who loved to harass one whom he knew he could never equal, warned Yeats that he would be required to pay a tax for a crest in England. Eventually Yeats changed his signet ring for a large gold ring with blue enamel representing zodiacal signs which Dulac made for him. Thus appropriately he traced his pedigree from the stars.

Dunsany displayed nothing. It was not necessary to his own self-esteem. He was born to the purple and he saw life through oriels of gules.

This, then, was at bottom the cause of the failure of friendship between Dunsany and Yeats. Dunsany sensed some sort of opposition real and imaginary, for some of the forms it was reputed to have taken were probably part of an oversensitive suspicion. Yeats paraded nothing more ancestrian than the Abbey Theatre.

3

I HAPPENED to be at Dunsany Castle when a letter with some specimens of poetry was delivered. Dunsany read them aloud. They were the first, poems of Francis Ledwidge. I remember how unsophisticated they were, crude and ungrammatical, but fresh with the freshness of morning mist. Dunsany was full of understanding and sympathy. He said that he would point out the lapses when he saw Ledwidge and that it would be all right.

How long the tuition then begun lasted, I do not know. I do know that Dunsany’s teaching was effective. How effective it was may be seen in the improvement from Ledwidge’s faltering to assured writing. This was a feat of instruction which proves that Dunsany could transmit learning by sympathy; there was no time to teach in the schoolmasters’ way. Somebody encouraged a poet in Francis Ledwidge, and filled him with the joy of elevated thought. That man was Dunsany. And, seeing that poetry in a way is courage, Dunsany’s encouragement of Ledwidge was a vitalizing and indispensable force.

Not only did he teach Ledwidge English, but he settled a sum of money on him (frequently augmented many times over) which made him independent of earning his living as an overseer of road work.

Ledwidge went with his master to the war and served through many campaigns, to fall, after a return home on sick leave, behind the lines in Flanders where he was building a road.

Now for a contrast which is by no means a digression. Compare Dunsany’s attitude to a struggling poet with that of Yeats in like circumstances. When George Russell approached Yeats, who had called Russell’s circle of poetically-minded people “Russell’s canaries,” to request him to help, not financially, but with a word of encouragement, a certain poet whose work was already influenced by Yeats, the elder poet asked with scorn, “Where is the wild dog ever praised his fleas?”

Was this benevolence? Was this concern for 1 rish literature? The effect on the victim was to make him bitter. It altered his character, for he depended on his poetry for his self-esteem. To him the riposte is attributed, “Where is the wild dog ever knew his father?”

Lord Dunsany’s earlier poems told of the wonders he had seen when the hills of Alrica looked like crumpled roses in the setting sun. They told of his thoughts by campfires and on the many journeys he had made. They told of the passing of glamour and the unspoiled wild places in his Mirage Water. Here he is Vergiiian in his regret that civilization is an enemy of old simplicity.

“Which were old when Caesar came”! With such things he is familiar.

Here is another of his poems which goes to show that a dramatist can also be a lyrical poet of the first order. Such a one was Shakespeare. Notice Fate takes the place of one of the gods.

FATE AND CHANCE

Horseman, soldier, sportsman, poet, and playwright, Dunsany is the most representative man I know. His is the life I would choose if I were not contented with my own. It does me good to visit him, and the effect of those visits I have tried to record in the sonnet’s narrow room of fourteen lines. Here is a sonnet addressed to the man and his house: —

DUNSANY CASTLE