WILLIAM SHARP (FIONA MACLEOD) A MEMOIR COMPILED BY HIS WIFE ELIZABETH A. SHARP by ELIZABETH A. SHARP (mobi ebook reader txt) 📕

Mourne Mountains coast. I hope you

 like _The Dominion of Dreams_. Miss Macleod has received two or three

 very strange and moving letters from strangers, as well as others. The

 book of course can appeal to few—that is, much of it. But, I hope, it

 will sink deep. We leave our flat about 20th of July. Shall you be in

 town before then? I doubt if I’ll ever live in London again. It is not

 likely. I do not know that I am overwhelmingly anxious to live anywhere.

 I think you know enough of me to know how profoundly I feel the strain

 of life—the strain of double life. Still, there is much to be done yet.

 But for that ...

 

  Your friend,

  WILLIAM SHARP.

 

Mr. Yeats’ Review of _The Dominion of Dreams_ in the _Bookman_ (July

1899) was carefully critical; it was his desire “to discover the

thoughts about which her thoughts are woven. Other writers are busy

with the way men and women act in joy and sorrow, but Miss Macleod has

rediscovered the art of the mythmaker and gives a visible shape to joys

and sorrows, and makes them seem realities and men and women illusions.

It was minds like hers that created Aphrodite out of love and the foam

of the sea, and Prometheus out of human thought and its likeness to

the leaping fire.” And then he pointed out that “every inspiration

has its besetting sin, and perhaps those who are at the beginning of

movements have no models and no traditional restraints. She has faults

enough to ruin an ordinary writer. Her search for these resemblances

brings her beyond the borders of coherence.... The bent of nature

that makes her turn from circumstance and personalities to symbols

and personifications may perhaps leave her liable to an obsession for

certain emotional words which have for her a kind of symbolic meaning,

but her love of old tales should tell her that the old mysteries are

best told in simple words.”

 

At first this criticism caused the author much emotional perturbation;

but later, when he reconsidered the statements, he admitted that there

was reason for the censure.

 

“Fiona” then asked the Irish poet to indicate the passages he took most

exception to, and Mr. Yeats sent a carefully annotated copy of the book

under discussion. And I may add that a number of the revisions that

differentiate the version in the Collected Edition from the original

issue are the outcome of this criticism. The author’s acknowledgment is

dated the 16th September 1899:

 

 

 MY DEAR MR. YEATS,

 

 I am at present like one of those equinoctial leaves which are whirling

 before me as I write, now this way and now that: for I am, just now,

 addressless, and drift between East and West, with round-the-compass

 eddies, including a flying visit of a day or two in a yacht from Cantyre

 to North Antrim coast....

 

 I am interested in what you write about _The Dominion of Dreams_ and

 shall examine with closest attention all your suggestions. The book

 has already been in great part revised by my friend. In a few textual

 changes in “Dalua” he has in one notable instance followed your

 suggestion about the too literary “lamentable elder voices.” The order

 is slightly changed too: for “The House of Sand and Foam” is to be

 withdrawn and “Lost” is to come after “Dalua” and precede “The Yellow

 Moonrock.”

 

 You will like to know what I most care for myself. From a standpoint of

 literary art _per se_ I think the best work is that wherein the barbaric

 (the old Gaelic or Celto-Scandinavian) note occurs. My three favourite

 tales in this kind are “The Sad Queen” in _The Dominion of Dreams_, “The

 Laughter of Scathach” in _The Washer of the Ford_, and “The Harping of

 Cravetheen” in _The Sin-Eater_. In art, I think “Dalua” and “The Sad

 Queen” and “Enya of the Dark Eyes” the best of _The Dominion of Dreams_.

 

 _Temperamentally_, those which appeal to me are those with the play

 of mysterious psychic forces in them.... as in “Alasdair the Proud,”

 “Children of the Dark Star,” “Enya of the Dark Eyes,” and in the

 earlier tales “Cravetheen,” “The Dan-nan-Ron,” and the Iona tales.

 

 Those others which are full of the individual note of suffering and

 other emotion I find it very difficult to judge. Of one thing only I

 am convinced, as is my friend (an opinion shared by the rare few whose

 judgment really means much), that there is nothing in _The Dominion of

 Dreams_, or elsewhere in these writings under my name, to stand beside

 _The Distant Country_ ... as the deepest and most searching utterance on

 the mystery of passion.... It is indeed the core of all these writings

 ... and will outlast them all.

 

 Of course I am speaking for myself only. As for my friend, his heart is

 in the ancient world and his mind for ever questing in the domain of the

 spirit. I think he cares little for anything but through the remembering

 imagination to recall and interpret, and through the formative and

 penetrative imagination to discover certain mysteries of psychological

 and spiritual life.

 

 Apropos—I wish very much you would read, when it appears in the

 _Fortnightly Review_—probably either in October or November—the

 spiritual ‘essay’ called “The Divine Adventure”—an imaginative effort to

 reach the same vital problems of spiritual life along the separate yet

 inevitably interrelated lines of the Body, the Will (Mind or Intellect)

 and the soul....

 

 I have no time to write about the plays. Two are typed: the third, the

 chief, is not yet finished. When all are revised and ready, you can see

 them. “The Immortal Hour” (the shortest, practically a one act play in

 time) is in verse.

 

  Sincerely yours,

  FIONA MACLEOD.

 

These two plays were finally entitled “The Immortal Hour” and “The

House of Usna.” The third, “The Enchanted Valleys,” remains a fragment.

 

At midsummer we gave up our flat in South Hampstead and stored our

furniture indefinitely. It was decreed that we were to live no more

in London; so we decided to make the experiment of wintering at

Chorleywood, Bucks. Meanwhile, we went to our dear West Highlands, to

Loch Goil, to Corrie on Arran, and to Iona. And in August we crossed

over to Belfast and stayed for a short time at Ballycastle, the north

easterly point of Ireland, to Newcastle, and then to Dublin.

 

From Ballycastle my husband wrote to Mrs. Janvier:

 

 

  6th Aug., 1899.

 

 ... We are glad to get away from Belfast, tho’ very glad to be there,

 in a nice hotel, after our fatigues and 10 hours’ exposure in the damp

 sea-fog. It was a lovely day in Belfast, and Elizabeth had her first

 experience of an Irish car.

 

 We are on the shore of a beautiful bay—with the great ram-shaped

 headland of Fair Head on the right, the Atlantic in front, and also

 in front but leftward the remote Gaelic island of Rathlin. It is the

 neighbourhood whence Deirdrê and Naois fled from Concobar, and it is

 from a haven in this coast that they sailed for Scotland. It is an

 enchanted land for those who dream the old dreams: though perhaps

 without magic or even appeal for those who do not....”

 

October found us at Chorleywood, in rooms overlooking the high common.

Thence he wrote to Mr. Murray Gilchrist:

 

 

 MY DEAR ROBERT,

 

 It is a disappointment to us both that you are not coming south

 immediately. Yes; the war-news saddens one, and in many ways. Yet,

 the war was inevitable: of that I am convinced, apart from political

 engineering or financial interests. There are strifes as recurrent and

 inevitable as tidal waves. Today I am acutely saddened by the loss of a

 very dear friend, Grant Allen. I loved the man—and admired the brilliant

 writer and catholic critic and eager student. He was of a most winsome

 nature. The world seems shrunken a bit more. As yet, I cannot realise I

 am not to see him again. Our hearts ache for his wife—an ideal loveable

 woman—a dear friend of us both.

 

 We are both very busy. Elizabeth has now the artwork to do for a London

 paper as well as for _The Glasgow Herald_. For myself, in addition to

 a great complication of work on hand I have undertaken (for financial

 reasons) to do a big book on the Fine Arts in the Nineteenth Century. I

 hope to begin on it Monday next. It is to be about 125,000 words, (over

 400 close-printed pp.), and if possible is to be done by December-end!...

 

 You see I am not so idle as you think me. It is likely that our friend

 Miss Macleod will have a new book out in January or thereabouts—but

 not fiction. It is a volume of ‘Spiritual Essays’ etc.—studies in the

 spiritual history of the Gael.

 

 We like this most beautiful and bracing neighbourhood greatly: and as we

 have pleasant artist-friends near, and are so quickly and easily reached

 from London, we are as little isolated as at So. Hampstead—personally,

 I wish we were more! It has been the loveliest October I remember for

 years. The equinoxial bloom is on every tree. But today, after long

 drought, the weather has broken, and a heavy rain has begun.

 

  Yours,

  WILL.

 

... _The Progress of Art in the Century_ was a longer piece of work

than the author anticipated. It was finished in the summer of 1900, and

published in _The Nineteenth Century Series_ in 1902 by The Linscott

Publishing Co. in America, and by W. & R. Chambers in England. In the

early winter the author wrote again to Mr. Gilchrist:

 

 

  CHORLEYWOOD,

  Nov., 1899.

 

  MY DEAR ROBERT,

 

 The reason for another note so soon is to ask if you cannot arrange

 to come here for a few days about November-end, and for this reason.

 You know that the Omar Khayyàm Club is the “Blue Ribbon” so to speak

 of Literary Associations, and that its occasional meetings are more

 sought after than any other. As I think you know, I am one of the 49

 members—and I much want you to be my guest at the forthcoming meeting on

 Friday Dec. 1st, the first of the new year.

 

 The new President is Sir George Robertson (“Robertson of Chitral”)—and

 he has asked me to write (and recite) the poem which, annually or

 biennially, some one is honoured by the club request to write. The

 moment she heard of it, Elizabeth declared that it must be the occasion

 of your coming here—so don’t disappoint her as well as myself!...

 

  Ever affectly, yours,

 

  WILL.

 

PART II  ( FIONA MACLEOD  ) CHAPTER XXI ( THE DIVINE ADVENTURE )

_Celtic_

 

 

In the early summer of 1900 the volume entitled _The Divine Adventure:

Iona: By Sundown Shores_, with a dedication to me, was published by

Messrs. Chapman & Hall.

 

Various titles had been discarded, among others “The Reddening of the

West,” also “The Sun-Treader” intended for a story, projected but

never written, to form a sequel to “The Herdsman.” The titular essays

had previously appeared in various periodicals; the two first in _The

Fortnightly_. As the author explained in a letter to Mr. Macleay,

Fiona’s Highland champion:

 

 

 ... There is a sudden departure from fiction ancient or modern in

 something of mine that is coming out in the November and December issues

 of _The Fortnightly Review_.

 

 “The Divine Adventure” it is called—though this spiritual essay is

 more ‘remote,’ i. e. unconventional, and in a sense more ‘mystical,’

 than anything I have done. But it is out of my inward life. It is an

 essential part of a forthcoming book of spiritual and critical essays

 or studies in the spiritual history of the Gael, to be called _The

 Reddening of the West_....

 

 A book I look forward to with singular interest is Mr. Arthur Symon’s

 announced _Symbolist Movement in Literature_.

 

 This is the longest letter I have written for—well, I know not when.

 But, then, you are a good friend.

 

  Believe me, yours most sincerely,

  FIONA MACLEOD.

 

To Mons. Anatole Le Braz, the Breton romance-writer and folklorist, F.

had written previously:

 

 

 DEAR M. LE BRAZ,

 

 Your letter was a great pleasure to me. It was the more welcome as

 coming from one who is not