Introduction to Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsany (1912)

Abstract

Lady Wilde once told me that when she was a young girl she was stopped in some Dublin street by a great crowd and turned into a shop to escape from it. She stayed there some time and the crowd still passed. She asked the shopman what it was, and he said, ‘the funeral of Thomas Davis, a poet.’¹ She had never heard of Davis; but because she thought a country that so honoured a poet must be worth something, she became interested in Ireland and was soon a famous patriotic poet herself, being, as she once said to me half in mockery, an eagle in her youth. That age will be an age of romance for a hundred years to come. Its poetry slid into men’s ears so smoothly that a man still living, though a very old man now, heard men singing at the railway stations he passed upon a journey into the country the verses he had published but that morning in a Dublin newspaper; and yet we should not regret too often that it has vanished, and left us poets even more unpopular than are our kind elsewhere in Europe; for now that we are unpopular we escape from crowds, from noises in the street, from voices that sing out of tune, from bad paper made one knows not from what refuse, from evil-smelling gum, from covers of emerald green, from that ideal of reliable, invariable men and women, which would forbid saint and connoisseur who always, the one in his simple, the other in his elaborate way, do what is unaccountable, and forbid life itself which, being, as the definition says, the only thing that moves itself, is always without precedent.