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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.
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