In the Land of Time Read Free Page B

Folk of the Centuries (1930) a butterfly who is magically turned into a little boy quickly finds the life of a human being far too constricting for comfort, and he finds a convenient witch to transform him back to a butterfly. Another play, Lord Adrian (written in 1922-23 but not published until 1933), comes close to misanthropy. Here an elderly nobleman is injected with the glands from an ape and, rejuvenated, produces an offspring, Lord Adrian; but Adrian’s partial animal ancestry leads him to plan an overthrow of the human race, since “I regard the domination of all life by man as the greatest evil that ever befell the earth.” 9 Even the otherwise mild-mannered Colonel Polders, like Gulliver, gradually gains a “distaste for the human race” 10 after repeated deadly encounters with humans. Perhaps the greatest of all instances of this misanthropy occurs in a short play, The Use of Man (in Plays for Earth and Air, 1937). Here the spirit of a hapless and not very bright young man is summoned to a council of the spirits of animals somewhere in space, and he has an extraordinarily difficult time justifying the “use” of the human race in the natural scheme of things. He finds that no animal, aside from the slavishly devoted dog, will stand up for his species: the crow doesn’t like man’s guns; the bear resents the fact that he is locked up in zoos; the mouse hates man’s traps. At the very last a single animal comes to man’s rescue: the mosquito finds a “use” in man—he is its food.
    From the very earliest of his works, Dunsany occasionally took pleasure in envisioning the eventual extirpation of the human race. Several of the exquisite prose poems in Fifty-one Tales have this as their focus, although in many cases it seems part and parcel of the “cosmic” perspective that Dunsany had adopted at this juncture. In later works it is industrialism that will bring a fitting doom to our race, ridding the world of a dangerous menace and leaving the earth free for the animals to resume their sway. The potent one-act play The Evil Kettle (in Alexander and Three Small Plays ) may be Dunsany’s most effective embodiment of this idea. Here the well-known anecdote of the young James Watt looking at a steaming teakettle and envisioning therefrom the awesome power of steam is given a nightmarish twist: at night the Devil comes to Watt and forces him to glimpse a hideous vision of the future with its “dark, Satanic mills” and the earth’s natural beauty corrupted by mechanization. But the Devil casts a spell over him and makes him forget what he has just seen, and we are left with a haunting sense of historic inevitability. Dunsany’s later treatments of this theme—notably his late novel The Last Revolution (1951), which depicts machines revolting from humanity’s control—are, regrettably, much inferior to this concentrated bit of venom.
    One of the subtlest of Dunsany’s treatments of the man-versus-nature theme occurs in what is probably his finest novel, The Curse of the Wise Woman (1933). This work, set entirely in Ireland, brings to the fore the vexed issue of Dunsany’s relations with the land of his ancestors. There had been Plunketts in Ireland since the eleventh century, and Dunsany produced some of his greatest work there; but would he ever abandon his otherworldly realms of dream and fantasy to write about it—its landscape, its people, its rich stores of history and myth? For the first three decades of his career the answer seemed to be a resounding no; although some of his early stories had appeared in such Irish periodicals as the Shanachie and the Irish Homestead, Dunsany himself frequently admitted that he preferred to invent his myths out of whole cloth rather than to adapt existing ones. And yet, he could hardly be unaware that a literary revival was going on in Ireland at exactly the time he began