concern with men and women as a revelation of what is thrillingly human.

"The Tents of the Arabs" tells a simple story, the story of a king that abdicates with joy. This is not a new story, either in life or literature, but it is a story that will always seem strange to many. The King of Thalanna is held to his throne through a sense of duty only. He longs for the free life of the desert, a desert that had lured his father before him. We meet him first in the glow of evening, watching a caravan that is about to start for the desert. He is envious of the common camel-drivers that will pad off soon through the twilight. His chamberlain and a counsellor of his come to tell him of affairs of state that need his decision. Inadvertently it slips out in their discussion that the king could go now without cost to his kingdom. His decision is made: he will go. He promises to return at a year's end, when they shall have a princess there for him to marry. The nobles think they will catch him as he goes and persuade him to stay, but he steals away without a word in the brown cloak of a camel driver.

In Act II the curtain rises on the same scene, but a year later. The king has kept his promise. He is at Thalanna again, but he is not alone. He has with him Eznarza, a girl of the desert, whom he had met at El-Lolith, nearly a year before, when his caravan was some days out. The year had been a year of happiness and now they are to part, for he was pledged, by his statesmen, to the Princess of Tharba.

The king and Eznarza recall the great days of that year in a duet that is eloquent beyond any other of the writing of Dunsany. They live over, in memory, their meeting, their love, their wanderings together, and they try to accept with high hearts the parting that now must be. These are his words as he recalls their meeting:

At first I could see

"You had come to the well for water. your eyes; then the stars came out, and it grew dark and I only saw your shape, and there was a little light about your hair: I do not know if it was the light of the stars, I only knew that it shone."

As the King leaves her to reenter his city, the nobles that were so loath to have him go come in to await his return. To them enter in a moment Aoob and Bel-Narb, camel-drivers. Bel-Narb resembles the king. Just as the King is about to acknowledge himself, Bel-Narb cries out that he is the King. Aoob confirms him in his claim, and so, too, does the King, telling how "in holy Mecca, in green-roofed Mecca of the many gates, we knew him for the King." The King in his disguise as camel-driver, is, of course, not recognized by either the pretender or the befooled. Then he rejoins Eznarza. The play turns lyric again, and lifts to its quiet close in a passage of high beauty. Here it is in the words of its maker: EZNARZA.-You have done wisely, wisely, and the reward of wisdom is happiness.

KING. They have their king now. But we will turn again to the tents of the Arabs.

EZNARZA.-They are foolish people.

KING. They have found a foolish king.

EZNARZA.-It is a foolish man that would choose to dwell among walls.

KING. Some are born kings, but this man has chosen to be

one.

EZNARZA.-Come, let us leave them.

KING.-We will go back again.

EZNARZA.-Come back to the tents of my people.

KING.-We will dwell a little apart in a dear brown tent of

our own.

EZNARZA.-We shall hear the sand again, whispering low to the dawn-wind.

KING. We shall hear the nomads stirring in their camps far off because it is dawn.

EZNARZA.-The jackals will patter past us slipping back to the hills.

KING.-When at evening the sun is set we shall weep for no day that is gone.

EZNARZA.-I will raise up my head of a night-time against the sky, and the old, old unbought stars shall twinkle through

my hair, and we shall not envy any of the diademmed queens of the world.

There is no writing of Dunsany more memorable than this. You will not soon forget "the reward of wisdom is happiness," even if you cannot be assured of its truth as you can of that of the kindred saying of Masefield that "The days that make us happy make us wise."

It is not often that Dunsany gives us just one sentence to remember; it is more often a passage. There are such sentences, of course, as:

"It is a golden thing to gallop on good turf in one's youth." More common is such a saying as this from "The Laughter of the Gods:"

"I do not trust a prophet. He is the go-between of Gods and men. They are so far apart. How can he be true to both?" And more characteristic even are still longer passages like this from the tale "The Bride of the Man-Horse":

"Yet in the blood of man there is a tide, an old sea-current rather, that is somehow akin to the twilight, which brings him rumors of beauty, from however far away, as driftwood is found at sea from islands not yet discovered: and this springtide or current that visits the blood of man comes from the fabulous quarter of his lineage, from the legendary, the old; it takes him out to the woodlands, out to the hills; he listens to ancient song."

I do not know when "The Laughter of the Gods" was written, but as it has never been played I have delayed speaking of it until last. Alone among the six of his plays that are written of what he calls his "own country," a country of dream, it leads you to question is it wholly of that country. You wonder does it not lie partly across the border into the country of Maeterlinck. In "The Laughter of the Gods" you find not only the form of Maeterlinck and the symbols of Maeterlinck but the very quality of impending terror distinctive of Maeterlinck. There is terror hovering over "The Queen's Enemies," but that is of another kind. There is horror at the end of "A Night at an Inn," and there is awe at

the end of "The Gods of the Mountain," and horror and awe are of another effect than terror. In no other play of Dunsany is there so much of the quality of any other writer as in "The Laughter of the Gods." It has much of him, of course, but there is not only suggestion of Maeterlinck but even of William Sharp. Death the lute-player is a figure older than Sharp, but the way in which Dunsany brings it in reminds me very much of "Vistas."

"The Laughter of the Gods" tells the story of a conspiracy of courtiers and of wives of courtiers to force King Karnos to return from the jungle city of Thek to Barbul-el-Sharnak, the great city of his empire and the centre of the world. The courtiers force the prophet "Voice of the Gods" to make a false prophecy of the destruction of Thek. The King believes that the prophet has lied, but he determines to wait out the three days until the prophecy shall be proved false or true before the fate of the prophet is determined. Each evening of these days a lute-player is heard under the windows of the palace of Thek, heard by all but one camel-driver who is to go back to Barbul-el-Sharnak on the third day. The old superstition is that the lute-player is Death but none except the wife of King Karnos suspects he is Death. All old beliefs are fading out at this court. At the end of the third day Thek is overthrown in a cataclysm, to the demoniac laughter of the gods that have been scorned. Is the moral "the gods still live," or that "man proposes, chance disposes"? I do not know if either is meant, or whether there is any moral at all to the play. What I carry away from reading it is a feeling of a heavier, moister air than is usual in the country of Dunsany, not that rare air and warm light of the desert that freshen the other plays of his land of dream.

What place, now, have his plays, these six of his land of dream, and the three that are concerned with phases of English life, what place have they in the drama in English of our time? Was the success of six of them in the winter of 1916-17 but a flash in the pan or the augury of a long day on the stage? It is not often that six plays of a new author find their way to the

American stage in one year. Of these six Mr. Stuart Walker produced three in his Portmanteau Theatre, "King Argimenes and the Unknown Warrior," "The Gods of the Mountain and "The Golden Doom"; and a fourth, "The Tents of the Arabs" had no more than a like "little theatre" success on its presentation by the Arts and Crafts Theatre in Detroit. Night at an Inn" and "The Queen's Enemies," however, after "little theatre" productions made their way into the commercial theatre and succeeded there. Only their author's own great god Time will tell whether they hold their place for long but there is every indication that "A Night at an Inn" will stand the wear and tear as did "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" or "The Bells." It surely will if some actor of power makes it his own as Irving made "The Bells" his own and Mansfield "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."

There is no doubt that Dunsany has a following among those who read plays, and such a following tends to hold the plays it reads upon the stage, or at least to force their return there now and then. There are many of us, too, who care for the new art of stage setting that owns Gordon Craig its master, and the plays of Dunsany proffer peculiar opportunities to this art. And when that art, that may help the plays on our stage of today, is gone out of fashion, there will still be the plays themselves with their tense emotions and swift surprises in action to thrill us as they do now. Depending not at all on the manners of a time for their appeal they have a better chance than most of the drama of our generation to last into another day.

For all the thirty years of our generation we have been trying to persuade ourselves that this playwright or that was bringing literature back to the stage. Many of us were sure Pinero had done it with "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray" in 1893. Others of us were surer still that Wilde had done the trick a year or so later. Today most of us, I think, are not so sure of Pinero as literature as we were yesterday, and few of us will say now that Wilde is much more than clever. Shaw has still his cohorts of the faithful but even they are beginning to wonder whether, after all, his plays are anything more than