ACT I

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 'Perdóndaris 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, Æ. 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

Æ., 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.