SOURCE: “Departed Kings.” The New Republic XXV, no. 316 (22 December 1920): 111–12.

In the following review of Irish Fairy Tales, the critic relates Stephens's temperament to the fairy tale.

A critical man is usually an intensely practical man, and an intensely practical man does not like fairy tales. At best, he escapes from the real world by playing poker or telling anecdotes or reading detective stories. He may write a sort of fairy tale, if he is a writer, because it gives him a world that is varied and colored and free; but he enjoys that variety and freedom and color because he can play with it in the service of his common sense. He imagines another world, as Swift did, only because by the ways of another world he can betray the great assumptions of this world, and its self-sufficiency and its pride. But, being a critical man and a...