Playwrights From Ireland

"I am reminded of a comment Lord Dunsany made. He saw a script which had a gorgeous description of a sun setting over a landscape, and this had to be crossed out, and it said, "Sun sets, left." This is what I mean by the visuals being supplied by someone else, in that case the stage designer and the director."

"...by the time I came along (I was the fourth kid), there was a lot of mythology around, mostly in kids' versions, but what's the difference. Beautiful big books with lots of illustrations. I plunged around in those books and in everything else; the Norse myths were my favorite. Sometime in here I also came across Dunsany's Dreamer's Tales, which proved to be another revelation. Dunsany was important to me because he was the first writer I had come across who wrote what I would call "pure fantasy." Today his works probably seem old-fashioned-I know my kids didn't take to him at all. He wrote in a Biblical-grand-Irish-Romantic language, a very mannered style. But as a kid in the 1930s, I wasn't so far from that early-twentieth-century mannerism. What I saw in Dunsany were these absolutely pure invented fantasies: a mythology that one person had made up. The idea that people could invent their own myths, use their imagination to the limit was a wonderful discovery."

"Many authors, when one meets them for the first time, are comparatively unimpressive compared with their books. But Lord Dunsany, who died last week, never disappointed. He was every inch a poet, playwright, storyteller, Irish peer, big-game hunter, painter, modeller in clay, Conservative politician, soldier and country gentleman, all of which occupations he followed In the busiest and most-enjoyed life I have seen. He was a tall, splendid-looking man with a young voice, decided opinions and boundless energy. He was very happily married and had the good manners of an Edwardian autocrat."

"The source of all imagination is here in our fields, and Creation is beautiful enough for the furthest flights of the poets. What is called realism only falls far from these flights because it is too meticulously concerned with the detail of material; mere inventories of rocks are not poetry; but all the memories of crags and hills and meadows and woods and sky that lie in a sensitive spirit are materials for poetry, only waiting to be taken out, and to be laid before the eyes of such as care to perceive them."

"Once I found out the secret of the universe. I have forgotten what it was, but I know that the Creator does not take Creation seriously, for I remember that He sat in Space with all His work in front of Him and laughed."

"Inventor of a new mythology and weaver of surprising folklore, Lord Dunsany stands dedicated to a strange world of fantastic beauty . . . unexcelled in the sorcery of crystalline singing prose, and supreme in the creation of a gorgeous and languorous world of incandescently exotic vision. No amount of mere description can convey more than a fraction of Lord Dunsany's pervasive charm."

"I know of the boons that machinery has conferred on men, all tyrants have boons to confer, but service to the dynasty of steam and steel is a hard service and gives little leisure to fancy to flit from field to field."

"How much do you know?" she said. "Do you know that dreams are illusion?"

"I hope that when London is clean passed away and the defeated fields come back again, like an exiled people returning after a war, they may find some beautiful thing to remind them of it all; because we have loved a little that swart old city."

"All we who write put me in mind of sailors hastily making rafts upon doomed ships."

"And cities arose and shed their houses in dust, and ever the desert returned again to its own, and covered over and hid the last of all that had troubled its repose."

"What should a man do with the sword of Welleran?"

"Then said the people to the prophet: “Shall not black hills draw round in some forsaken land, to make a vale-wide cauldron wherein the molten rock shall seethe and roar, and where the crags of mountains shall be hurled upward to the surface and bubble and go down again, that there our enemies may boil for ever?”"

"No one can imitate Dunsany, and probably everyone who's ever read him has tried."

"It was quite dark when he went by the towers of Tor, where archers shoot ivory arrows at strangers lest any foreigner should alter their laws, which are bad, but not to be altered by mere aliens."

"I imagine that as one penetrated out from some enormous forest of the tropics, the wild beasts would become fewer, the gloom would lighten, and the horror of the place would slowly lift. Yet as one emerges nearer to the edge of London, and nearer to the beautiful influence of the hills, the houses become uglier, the streets viler, the gloom deepens, the errors of civilisation stand bare to the scorn of the fields."

"It is many a year ago, they say, when the vintage was last gathered in from the vineyards that I knew, where it is all desert now. It was a radiant day, and the people of the city were dancing by the vineyards, while here and there one played upon the kalipac. The purple flowering shrubs were all in bloom, and the snow shone upon the Hills of Hap. Outside the copper gates they crushed the grapes in vats to make the syrabub. It had been a goodly vintage. In the little gardens at the desert's edge men beat the tambang and the tittibuk, and blew melodiously the zootibar."

"Indeed when we trace it all back to its origin we find at the beginning of this unhappy story a man who was only an emperor and wished to be something more. He would have ruled the world but has only meddled with it; and his folly has brought misery to millions, and there lies his broken dream on the broken earth."

"Once, as Mung went his way athwart the Earth and up and down its cities and across its plains, Mung came upon a man who was afraid when Mung said: “I am Mung!”"

"The girl is mettle to the back."

"I can't tell you how urbane and sprightly the old poll parrot was; and (this is what I think using the brain does for one), not a pocket, not a crevice, of pomp, humbug, respectability in him: he was fresh as a daisy."

"...day before yesterday I read "Esther Waters" for the 60th time. It is a book I keep for very bad days, and it never fails me...I don't know why "Esther Waters" has this magic effect on me - because I do not like horses particularly or care about racing [. . . . . .] or servants (White. Black ones are nice). Or religion - Still there it is. Magic for me. Every time."

"George Moore had a ceaseless preoccupation with painting and the theatre, within certain limits a technical understanding of both; whatever idea possessed him, courage and explosive power; but sacrificed all that seemed to other men good breeding, honour, friendship, in pursuit of what he called the root facts of life."

"I told him that he was more mob than man, always an enthusiastic listener or noisy interrupter. Yet I admired him and found myself his advocate. I wrote to Lady Gregory: "He is constantly so likeable that one can believe no evil of him, and then in a moment a kind of a devil takes hold of him, his voice changes, his look changes, and he becomes hateful... It is so hard not to trust him, and yet he is quite untrustworthy. He has what Talleyrand calls 'the terrible gift of familiarity.'""

"I am filled with pride when I think of the noble and exalted world that must have existed before Christian doctrine caused men to look upon women with suspicion and bade them to think of angels instead."

"One must be in London to see the spring."

"We humans are more complicated than animals, and we love through the imagination."

"It would appear that practical morality consists in making the meeting of men and women as casual as that of animals."

"The difficulty in life is the choice."

"Self is man's main business; all outside of self is uncertain, all comes from self, all returns to self."

"The wrong way always seems the more reasonable."

"One thing that cannot be denied to the realists: a constant and intense desire to write well, to write artistically. When I think of what they have done in the matter of the use of words, of the myriad verbal effects they have discovered, of the thousand forms of composition they have created, how they have remodelled and refashioned the language in their untiring striving for intensity of expression for the very osmazome of art, I am lost in ultimate wonder and admiration."

"We all want notoriety; our desires on this point, as upon others, are not noble, but the human is very despicable vermin and only tolerable when it tends to the brute, and away from the evangelical."

"Humanity is a pigsty, where lions, hypocrites, and the obscene in spirit congregate."

"I will admit that an artist may be great and limited; by one word he may light up an abyss of soul; but there must be this one magical and unique word. Shakespeare gives us the word, Balzac, sometimes, after pages of vain striving, gives us the word, Tourgueneff gives it with miraculous certainty; but Henry James, no; a hundred times he flutters about it; his whole book is one long flutter near to the one magical and unique word, but the word is not spoken; and for want of the word his characters are never resolved out of the haze of nebulae. You are on a bowing acquaintance with them; they pass you in the street, they stop and speak to you, you know how they are dressed, you watch the colour of their eyes."

"Love — but not marriage. Marriage means a four-post bed and papa and mamma between eleven and twelve. Love is aspiration: transparencies, colour, light, a sense of the unreal. But a wife — you know all about her — who her father was, who her mother was, what she thinks of you and her opinion of the neighbours over the way. Where, then, is the dream?"

"Injustice we worship; all that lifts us out of the miseries of life is the sublime fruit of injustice. Every immortal deed was an act of fearful injustice; the world of grandeur, of triumph, of courage, of lofty aspiration, was built up on injustice. Man would not be man but for injustice."

"All reformers are bachelors."

"It is said that young men of genius come to London with great poems and dramas in their pockets and find every door closed against them. Chatterton's death perpetuated this legend. But when I, George Moore, came to London in search of literary adventure, I found a ready welcome. Possibly I should not have been accorded any welcome had I been anything but an ordinary person."

"Never could I interest myself in a book if it were not the exact diet my mind required at the time, or in the very immediate future. The mind asked, received, and digested. So much was assimilated, so much expelled; then, after a season, similar demands were made, the same processes were repeated out of sight, below consciousness, as is the case in a well-ordered stomach."

"Ugliness is trivial, the monstrous is terrible."

"It does not matter how badly you paint so long as you don't paint badly like other people."

"The world is dying of machinery; that is the great disease, that is the plague that will sweep away and destroy civilization; man will have to rise against it sooner or later."

"After all there is but one race — humanity."

"Faith goes out of the window when beauty comes in at the door."

"The mind petrifies if a circle be drawn around it, and it can hardly be denied that dogma draws a circle round the mind."

"A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it."

"He must put his shoulder to the wheel and get it right; one more push, that was all that was wanted."

"Acting is therefore the lowest of the arts, if it is an art at all."

"The public will accept a masterpiece, but it will not accept an attempt to write a masterpiece."