Page:A Dreamers Tales and Other Stories.djvu/16

xii idle, unhappy, exorbitant, and like the young Blake admit no city beautiful that is not paved with gold and silver."

From the making of tales he has gone on to the making of plays, and he has brought into the theatre the impressive simplicity of his myths and stories. His kings and beggars and slaves are utterly simple and single-minded; they have nothing but a passion or a vision or a faith. He came to the theatre with little knowledge of what is called dramatic construction, but with an astonishing feeling for dramatic situation. It is by virtue of this feeling for situation that his "Gods of the Mountain," his "King Argimines and the Unknown Warrior," and his "Night at an Inn," are such effective theatrical pieces.

As fundamental as the sense of situation should be the dramatist's sense of exalted speech. There are words, words, words, but no speech, let alone the exaltation of it in the theatre of to-day. Lord Dunsany, with W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge has restored speech to the theatre and has made it exalted. "O warrior spirit," cries King Argimines, apostrophising the dead man whose sword he has found in the slave-fields—"O warrior spirit, wherever thou wanderest, whoever be thy gods; whether they punish thee or whether they bless thee; O kingly spirit that once laid here this sword, behold I pray to thee having no gods to pray to, for the god of my nation was broken in three by night. Mine arm is stiff with three years' slavery and remembers not the sword. But guide thy sword till I have slain six men and armed the strongest slaves, and thou shalt have sacrifice every year of a hundred goodly oxen. And I shall build in Ithara a temple to thy memory wherein all that enter in shall remember thee, so shalt thou be honored and envied among the dead, for the dead are very jealous of remembrance. Aye, though thou wert a robber that took men's lives unrighteously, yet shall rare spices smoulder in thy temple and little maidens sing and new-plucked flowers deck the solemn aisles... O but it has a good blade this old