Irish speech. The Bible overpowered the "beautiful speaking" he must have heard about him. In this regard for the rhythm of the Bible, too, he is unlike his fellow Irish playwrights. There is little of the Bible in Yeats or in Synge, or in any other Irish playwright of first prominence of our day.

With Yeats and Synge, however, Dunsany is to be placed on other scores. Like them he has never exploited anything Irish for the delectation of Englishmen, as did Lever and Lover. Like Yeats and Synge, again, Dunsany writes to please himself, to make something beautiful out of his dream of life, and not largely just to shock Englishmen, as did Wilde, and as does Shaw, and as in some of his moods, does George Moore. Wilde and Shaw are, in this attitude of theirs, just as truly parasitical as are Lever and Lover. To live to shock Englishmen is an even more pathetic revelation of dependence upon England than to play the fool so that Englishmen may laugh.

One wonders whether the Irishmen who saw the first play of Dunsany, in April, 1909, realized how it reversed the traditional order of things. "The Glittering Gate" presented to Irishmen the befooling of two Englishmen. They were only burglars, it is true, and they were dead, and it was the Nature of Things that befooled them, but still they were Englishmen and they were befooled. The story of the play is that the burglars break into Heaven only to find no Heaven there. Laughter, cruel and violent, greets their disappointment, very evidently laughter of the Immortals, who in the Aeschylean sense have had out their joke with Bill and Jim. There is nothing in the play to show that Dunsany realized that he was reversing the old practice of Irish playwrights of making Irishmen the butt of jibes that Englishmen may laugh at them. The play gains no added significance from the fact that its protagonists are Englishmen. Nevertheless, as I have said, he has shown Englishmen befooled, and the Abbey audience could have laughed at the predicament of the burglars had it understood the grim humor of the play.

The truth is, of course, that the concern of Dunsany is with man as the plaything of destiny, and that it does not matter

at all to the play that the two men it has to do with are London cockneys. It was three years before the presentation of "The Glittering Gate," in "Time and the Gods" (1906), that Dunsany, interpreting things as he saw them, had shown Time as the arch-villain of the world. Such an interpretation is entirely in accord with that sense of the long past and brief present so instant to one of his perspective and temperament. The Plunketts, from whom Dunsany is sprung, have been nobles in Ireland for five centuries. Dunsany himself, as a lover of all that is beautiful, is very troubled by the few days of bloom, the quick passing of youth, the early ending of all good things. It is his Eton tradition perhaps, that makes him express his poignant realization of all this with a Greek restraint.

In form his plays are Maeterlinckian, and in their suggestion of something terrible about to happen. Some of them have a sharpness of action, however, very unlike Maeterlinck. One might call "The Tents of the Arabs," perhaps, "static," but most of the other plays of Dunsany are dramatic enough to win even the old-timers who revere "blood and thunder." The plays of Dunsany thrill in a more immediate and intenser way than those of Maeterlinck, even if you care much less what happens to their characters.

After the manner of Maeterlinck, too, is the use by Dunsany of the sword as symbol in "King Argimenes and the Unknown Warrior," his second play. This was put on at the Abbey Theatre on January 26, 1911, during the management of Nugent Monck, who designed the scenes and costumes, and attempted to give the production something of the significance its author intended.

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''Argimenes,'" Dunsany has written, "was the first play laid in the land of my spirit." It tells of an enslaved king so broken he gladly gnaws bones from his master's table. Digging one day under the whip he uncovers in the earth the golden sword of an unknown warrior of an older age. With that finding he finds again his old kingliness of spirit. He kills the slaveguards, leads his fellow slaves against their lord, and overthrows him. At the moment of his triumph word is

brought that the dog of King Darniack is dead. Conqueror of Darniack though Argimenes be, and with his kingliness of old come back to mien and eye he cannot help but cry out with his men savagely and hungrily, "Bones!" How true this is to life we all know. One of us has heard a man say "Sir" against his will to a man he despises, just because he had once been an underling of that man. Another of us has seen the subordinate, by the turn of events now master, unable to prevent himself from rising when his one-time chief, now unhorsed, entered his room for orders.

It may be, of course, that Dunsany means more by this play than the truth, "a slave may never be wholly freed." He may wish us to feel that if the spirit of a man is once broken it may never be made whole again.

Dunsany is angered by people asking of this play or that of his, "What's it all about?" He says, not very humbly, "One does not explain a sunset nor does one need to explain a work of art." It is true that each one of his plays is first of all a story, and a story so simply told we understand at once its meaning. Some of these stories are so fully revealed by the action that they could be understood by pantomime alone, and no speech at all from their characters. Yet for all this there may be inner meanings that one would care to understand.

So fully felt as drama are these plays that it is scenes from them that I recall first, as I have said, when I think of them, and the story of each as it is revealed scene by scene. I think of the stage pictures from each play first, then of its story; then of the emotion that underlies it; then what truth it tells, or as Dunsany says "What's it all about?"

After all, even the most resolute aesthete does not enjoy a sunset in just the way he enjoys a play. Choose for him a play that has no revelation in it, no possible allegorical interpretation, and that aesthete will yet be glad of it in a way other than that in which he is glad of a sunset, or of a symphony either. No writing, no matter how beautiful its form or its expression, can be all it may be to us until we have lived with it a while and thought about it and made it a part of ourselves.

It is difficult too, to refrain from looking for allegories or at least veiled truths in the plays of a man who has written so many tales that are obviously allegorical or bulging with symbols of certain meaning. "The Fortress Unvanquishable Save for Sacnoth" is a tale to hold children from play, with its delectable dragon, an iron monster with a nose of lead, and its even more delectable spider, big as a ram "with eyes that were little, but in which there was much sin." Is it wrong then to ask is this dragon Tharagaverrug, which is certainly a humorous grotesque, also a symbol of some phase of the manufacturing England that Dunsany so hates?

Surely there is no doubt but "The Fall of Babbulkind" has a moral. When travellers come to where was that city of the desert, a city report of whose loveliness had spread over the world, they found it gone as utterly as if it had not been. Does this mean that what we set our hearts upon cannot content us when we get it, or does it mean that the ideal can never be attained? We are surely justified, too, in hunting a meaning in "How Plash-Goo Came to the Land of None's Desire." But what is that meaning? Does this triumph of the broad dwarf over the little giant symbolize the triumph of the Bolsheviki? What does "King Argimenes and the Unknown Warrior" tell? Maybe what I have guessed above. But there are intimations of so many truths in the play it is difficult to know which is dominant. Is the slave who says, "If the king found that I had a sword, why then it would be an evil day for the king" but putting in another form the moral of "How PlashGoo Came to the Land of None's Desire," or is it another affirmation of the old truth about letting sleeping dogs lie?

One wonders whether like thoughts about the proletariat are embodied in "The Gods of the Mountain" (1911). Are these seven beggars, who are turned into the likeness of the stone idols they pretend they are come to life, symbolic of men who believe in the perfectibility of man? Is that the heresy for which they are punished by the jealous gods? Or is the play an intimation that traditions of the past held in little regard today will cost dear the age that neglects them? Maybe

one or the other of these guesses is true, maybe neither. It is interesting to speculate, but it does not matter if neither be true. The play is so good as drama we need ask no more of it. It moves slowly at first to give us time to learn the strange ways of the world it represents, a world made of a dream as bizarre as any in the Arabian Nights, but different from any there. And then, that world known and the story well under way, the play crashes to its close like thunder. It is a grotesque surely, this "Gods of the Mountain," but a grotesque in green jade, and perfectly cut.

It is memorable not only for its whole effect, but for its many challenging and winning sayings. What in these days may we make of such a declaration as this, even if it is a beggar that utters it: "All those things that are divine in men, such as benevolence, drunkenness, extravagance and song?"

Is it easier to make more of this: "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 ships and the trading men."

It is Agmar, prince of beggars, who says this last, but surely he speaks for Dunsany as well as himself. Snobbish some would call such talk, and so, maybe, it is, but I doubt if Dunsany would trouble to deny such a charge any more than would Sir Philip Sidney.

Dunsany would, I think, subscribe wholeheartedly to a large part of that creed of "The Joy of Youth," which Mr. Eden Phillpotts assigns to his hero. Bertram Dangerfield declares that you cannot get ruler art from the lower middle classes. You think of Ibsen and Keats, artists from the lower middle classes, and you laugh at the young sculptor; you think of Wells and Wilfrid Gibson and you sympathize with him.

There is the pride of caste in Dunsany, but it is the hatred of the artist for an age that he conceives is making ugly a beautiful world which leads Dunsany to attack mills and trade and the civilization that thrives through them. He indicts