So picturesque and impressive a piece of work needs no gloss, but some of the comment it has received invites analysis. Mr. Bjorkman says of it: The crime of hybris which to the Greeks was the 'unforgivable sin' is here made as real to us as it was to them." And Mr. Hale makes verdict thus: "It is probable that there has never been a play more gigantic than this in conception. The fatality which Dunsany shares with the Greek dramas is here in its most perfect form.'

Such annotation is not a little misleading, for just as it is impossible for Lord Dunsany to write like a Greek, so is it impossible for his modern auditor to feel like one. We later people can never reproduce the antique, nor can we reproduce the responses of an antique people. Such annotation forces us back into the philosophical lists we left when we mounted the slopes of El Dorado. It is a pity, I think, to return, for The Gods of the Mountain is so colorful, so concentrated in action, so restrained and yet so graphic in dialogue so admirably logical, so chiseled an ironic grotesque, that it is belittling to its art to carry it from the world of fancy where its axiomatic conclusion is convincing to a world of reality where it is not. Hybris was repellent to the Greeks because Fear of the gods was the bulwark of their religion. On the advancing margin of our life something nobler than fear is working in men's hearts, however bound to the wheel of Fate they may feel themselves to be. It may be argued that these Beggars are not on the advancing margin, that the Beggars in life always fear, because they are not self-sustaining. And the point is, of course, well taken, but Dunsany, with large implication, would make us all Beggars, since it is in the very nature of man to essay the godlike, and he would have the gods turn us all, without mercy, into rock-bound mockeries of our aspirations. Such echo of Egyptian fatalism is foreign to our accustomed thought, for we have admitted

mercy, compensatory values, redemptive possibilities, to our decalogue, and we no longer openly demand an eye for an eye. And although it is true that we have become criminally maudlin over men's weaknesses in this—our Age of Sympathy-yet is it equally true that our attempt to understand the psychology of mankind is more excellent than devotion to the hieratic judgments of the Book of the Dead. Dunsany's beautiful simplicity is charming, refreshing to us as clearly ordered dogma is to a child, only -life is not simple, it is not axiomatic, it is complicated, inchoate, mysterious as the vastness that holds it in its flowing. And any play, to-day, to be "gigantic in conception" must deal with life, as we, unknowing, know it. For life, not logic, is the stuff of the veritable play. Pattern there must be somewhere, but how it uses the spirit of man—that we may only dream, not realize.

This excursion is not to deny what is so definitely connoted in Dunsany's plays, that mankind is vain, shallow, covetous, cruel, selfish, stupid and presumptuous, nor to deny the righteousness of bringing the deed back upon the doer. It is merely to raise the inconsistent question: is not Dunsany himself guilty of Hybris in fashioning for us a Destiny that holds the scales like any Shylock, a pound of flesh for the defaulted bond, and no one by to stanch the wound?

Perhaps one of the greatest mysteries of the present discussion is that Dunsany, with his deep-founded sense of wonder, is yet inclined to believe his dream to be a verity. He has given support to the theory that life is a Euclidian proposition by writing: "Take my Gods of the Mountain. Some Beggars, being hard up, pretend to be gods. Then they get all they want. But Destiny, Nemesis, the Gods, punish them by turning them into the very idols they desire to be. First of all you have a simple story told dramatically, and along that you have hung, without any de

liberate intention of mine-so far as I know—a truth, not true to London only or to New York or to one municipal party but to the experience of man. That is the kind of

way that man does get hit by Destiny.”

Does he? Is it all so simple as this? Do not the beneficent forces walk hand in hand with the malevolent, and can any man tell which is which?

Thinking of these things, I find the Hungarian play Lilioms rising in my mind to match itself with The Gods of the Mountain. Small shrift does Liliom meet in his police-court heaven, and scant change does he discover in his vagabond soul after his fifteen years' confinement in his heavenly gaol: he has just enough blind love to steal a star from the sky for his child. But somewhere, somehow, there is borne to us from this odd tale of another Beggar in life a realization that out of his experience Liliom grows in understanding, grows meagerly, but assuredly. And what greater mercy can the gods show, if, with their retribution, they allow understanding to be born! In the murk of Liliom, Destiny's convergences are somehow more touched with light than they appear when Dunsany's Gods stride plainly to our view.

No "gigantic conception" has Dunsany yet given us, nor any play in mood akin to the splendid seriousness of the Greek. But poetry and irony and design and reach— these are his gifts. Yet if he ever elects to take the near rather than the far view of human kind, he may bring us treasure worth taking to our hearts to hold. Since the creation of his fantastic plays he has lived in the cauldron of malevolence upturned on the French frontier. That he has found beneficence in hell his Tales of War bear witness side by side with his just and honorable hatred of an execrated règime lies his paean to the Splendid Traveller flying home in the chill gold light. And I take it as happily symptomatic of the humanistic drama he may

some day mould that cheek by jowl with the romance of the empyrean adventurer he places this evocation of the heart-piercing beauty and courage of two common men:

"And then we used to have sausages," said the Sergeant
"And mashed?" said the Private.

"Yes," said the Sergeant, "and beer. And then we used

to go home. It was grand in the evenings. We used
to go along a lane that was full of them wild roses.
And then we'd come to a road where the houses were.
They all had their bit of a garden, every house."
"Nice, I calls it, a garden," the Private said,
"Yes," said the Sergeant, "they all had their garden.

It come right down to the road. Wooden palings:

none of that there wire."

"I hates wire," said the Private.

"They didn't have none of it," the N.C.O. went on. "The
gardens came right down to the road, looking lovely.
Old Billy Weeks he had them tall pale-blue flowers in
his garden nearly as high as a man."
"Hollyhocks?" said the Private.

"No, they wasn't hollyhocks. Lovely they were. We used
to stop and look at them, going by every evening. He
had a path up the middle of his garden paved with red
tiles, Billy Weeks had; and these tall blue flowers
growing the whole way along it, both sides like. They
was a wonder. Twenty gardens there must have been,
counting them all; but none to touch Billy Weeks with
his pale-blue flowers. There was an old windmill away
to the left. Then there were the swifts sailing by over-
head and screeching: just about as high again as the
houses. Lord, how them birds did fly..
Those were great days. The bats used to come out,
flutter, flutter, flutter, and then there'd be a star or
two; and the smoke from the chimney going all gray;
and a little cold wind going up and down like the bats;
and all the colour going out of things; and the woods
looking all strange, and wonderful quiet in them, and a
mist coming up from the stream.

...

"You do bring it all back so," said the other.
"That's the time to be out," said the Sergeant. "Ten
o'clock on a summer's night, and the night full of
noises.

Dogs barking, owls hooting, an old cart; and then a
sound you couldn't account for at all, not anyhow.

I've heard sounds on nights like that nobody 'ud think
you'd heard, nothing like the flute young Booker had,
nothing like anything on earth."

"I never told anyone before, because they wouldn't be-
lieve you.

"You bring it all back wonderful," said the Private.

"Its a great thing to have lived," said the Sergeant.
"Yes, Sergeant," said the other, "I wouldn't have missed it
not for anything."

For five days the barrage had rained down behind them:
they were utterly cut off. . . their food was gone and
they did not know where they were.

I am not sure that our other Soldier-poet, the beloved Sidney, made, with his storied water-cup, a gesture more memorably chivalric than that accomplished by the Irish Lord Dunsany when he set title to this Tale and called itEngland.

THE PINE TREE

A PICTURE that unerring hands have etched . .
Black-limned upon a canvas dully grey
A Titan with his brawny arms outstretched,
Invoking heaven.. his feet still bound by clay!

VIRGINIA MCCORMICK