The arrangements for the two first books were made by W. S. in person.

No such precautions were necessary for the books brought out by P.

Geddes & Col. as the head of the firm was in the secret. But, as it was

well known in Edinburgh and elsewhere that William Sharp was keenly

interested in the ‘Celtic Movement,’ he thought it well to collaborate

with me on an Anthology of Celtic Poetry entitled _Lyra Celtica_ (and

published by the firm), for which he prepared an Introduction and Notes.

On the 6th January, in a letter to Mrs. William Rossetti he wrote “Just

back from France where I went so far with my wife on her way to Central

Italy. Her health has given way, alas, and she has been sent out from

this killing climate for 3 or 4 months at any rate.”

At the end of January he wrote to me:

“Only a brief line to thank you for your letter about _me_ and _Fiona_.

Every word you say is true and urgent, and even if I did not know it to

be so I would pay the most searching heed to any advice from you, in

whose insight and judgment mentally as well as spiritually I have such

deep confidence. Although in the main I had come to exactly the same

standpoint I was wavering before certain alluring avenues of thought....

If I live to be an elderly man, time enough for one or more of my big

philosophical and critical works. Meanwhile—the flame!

The only thing of the kind I will now do—and that not this year—will be

the “Introduction to the Study of Celtic Literature”: but for that I

have the material to hand, and shall largely use in magazines first....

Well, we shall begin at once! February will be wholly given over to

finishing _Wives in Exile_ and _The Washer of the Ford_.”

On the 1st February he left town and settled down to work at the

Pettycur Inn, Kinghorn, Fife. His Diary gives the following record of

work:

“_Feb. 3rd._ Wrote the Preface to _The Washer of the Ford_.

“_Feb. 7th._ Dictated (1750 words) article on Modern Romantic Art, for

the Glasgow Herald—Also _World_ article.

“_Feb. 9th._ Wrote ‘The Festival of the Birds.’

“_Feb. 10th._ Glasgow Herald Article (1500 words) on The Art of the

Goldsmith, and wrote ‘The Blessing of the Fishes.’”

* * * * *

In the middle of February William had written to Mr. R. Murray

Gilchrist, one of the few friends who then knew the secret of the

pseudonym:

MY DEAR GILCHRIST,

Fiona Macleod has suddenly begun to attract a great deal of attention.

There have been leaders as well as long and important reviews: and now

the chief North of Scotland paper, _The Highland News_, is printing

two long articles devoted in a most eulogistic way to F. M. and her

influence “already so marked and so vital, so that we accept her as the

leader of the Celtic Renaissance in Scotland.” There is, also, I hear,

to be a Magazine article on her. This last week there have been long and

favourable reviews in the _Academy_ and _The New Age_.

I am glad you like my other book, I mean W. S’s! [_Ecce Puella_] There

are things in it which are as absolutely out of my real self as it is

possible to be: and I am glad that you recognise this. I have not yet

seen my book of short stories published in America under the title _The

Gypsy Christ_, though it has been out some weeks: and I have heard

from one or two people about it. America is more indulgent to me just

now than I deserve. For a leading American critic writes of _The Gypsy

Christ_ that, “though it will offend some people and displease others,

it is one of the most remarkable volumes I have read for long. The

titular story has an extraordinary, even a dreadful impressiveness:

‘Madge o’ the Pool’ is more realistic than ‘realism’: and alike in

the scathing society love-episode, ‘The Lady in Hosea,’ and in that

brilliant Algerian _conte_, ‘The Coward,’ the author suggests the method

and power of Guy de Maupassant.”

I hope to get the book soon, and to send you a copy. As I think I told

you, the setting of the G/C is entirely that which I knew through you.

I have made use of one or two features—exaggerated facts and half

facts—which I trust will not displease you. Do you remember my feeling

about those gaunt mine-chimneys: I always think of them now when I think

of the G/C. Fundamentally, however, the story goes back to my own early

experiences—not as to the _facts_ of the story, of course.... Then

again, Arthur Sherburne Hardy, who is by many considered the St. Beuve

of American criticism—in surety and insight—has given his opinion of a

book i. e. of all he has seen of it (a comedy of the higher kind) for

which Stone and Kimball have given me good terms—_Wives in Exile_—that

it is “quite unlike anything else—at once the most brilliant, romantic,

and witty thing I have read for long—to judge from the opening chapters

and the scheme. It will stand by itself, I think.”

Personally, I think it shows the best handicraft of anything W. S. has

done in fiction. It is, of course, wholly distinct in manner and method

from F. M.’s work. It _ought_ to be out by May. Sunshine and blithe

laughter guided my pen in this book. Well, I have given you my gossip

about myself: and now I would much rather hear about _you_. I wish you

were here to tell me all about what you have been doing, thinking, and

dreaming.

Yours,

W. S.

I received the following letter from him in Rome:

LONDON, 21st Feb.

I am sure _The Highland News_ must have delighted you. Let me know what

you think of Fiona’s and W. S.’s letters.... I am so sorry you are

leaving Siena.... I follow every step of your movements with keenest

interest. But oh the light and the colour, how I envy you!

I am hoping you are pleased with _Lyra Celtica_. It is published today

only—so of course I have heard nothing yet from outsiders. Yesterday

I finished my Matthew Arnold essay[3]—and in the evening wrote the

first part of my F. M. story, “Morag of the Glen”—a strong piece of

work I hope and believe though not finished yet. I hope to finish it by

tonight. I am so glad you and Mona liked the first of “The Three Marvels

of Hy” (pronounced _Eo_ or _Hee_) so well. Pieces like “The Festival of

the Birds” seem to be born out of my brain almost in an inspirational

way. I hardly understand it. Yes, you were in the right place to read

it—St. Francis’ country. That beautiful strange Umbria! After all, Iona

and Assisi are not nearly so remote from each other as from London or

Paris. I send you the second of the series “The Blessing of the Flies.”

It, too, was written at Pettycur—as was “The Prologue.” ... There is

a strange half glad, half morose note in this Prologue which I myself

hardly apprehend in full significance. In it is interpolated one of the

loveliest of the ‘legendary moralities’ which I had meant to insert in

Section I—that of ‘The King of the Earth.’ I will send it to you before

long....

To a correspondent he wrote about the “Three Marvels of Hy”: “They

are studies in old Religious Celtic sentiment so far as that can be

recreated in a modern heart that feels the same beauty and simplicity

of the Early Christian faith.”

And to me again: “... I know you will rejoice to hear that there can be

no question that F. M’s deepest and finest work is in this “_Washer of

the Ford_” volume. As for the spiritual lesson that nature has taught

me, and that has grown within me otherwise, I have given the finest

utterance to it that I can. In a sense my inner life of the spirit is

concentrated in the three pieces “The Moon-Child,” “The Fisher of Men,”

and “The Last Supper.” Than the last I shall never do anything better.

Apart from this intense inner flame that has been burning within me so

strangely and deeply of late—I think my most imaginative work will be

found in the titular piece “The Washer of the Ford,” which still, tho’

written and revised some time ago, haunts me! and in that and the pagan

and animistic “Annir Choille.” We shall read those things in a gondola

in Venice?”

He joined me in Venice on the 16th May—glad of sunshine and rest. We

journeyed back to England by way of the Lakes, in a time of early

roses, and returned to London to find the first copies of _The Washer

of the Ford_ awaiting us. Two out of many letters concerning the book

that came to him from friends who were in the secret and watched the

development of the “F. M.” work, were a strong incentive to further

effort.

The first is from Mr. Frank Rinder:

MY DEAR WILL,

From my heart I thank you for the gift of this book. It adds to the sum

of the precious, heaven-sent things in life. It will kindle the fire of

hope, of aspiration and of high resolve in a thousand hearts. As one of

those into whose life you have brought a more poignant craving for what

is beautiful in word and action, I thank you for writing it.

Your friend,

FRANK.

The second was from Mr. Janvier:

SAINT REMY DE PROVENCE,

June 22, 1896.

MY DEAR WILL,

If _The Washer of the Ford_ were the first of Fiona’s books I am

confident that the sex of its author would not pass unchallenged. A

great part of it is essentially masculine—all the “Seanachas,” and

“The Annir Choille,” and the opening of “The Washer”: not impossible

for a woman to write, but unlikely. Nor would a woman have written

“The Annir Choille,” I think, as it is written here. Fiona has shown

her double sex in this story more completely, it seems to me, than in

any other. It is written with a man’s sense of decency and a woman’s

sense of delicacy—and the love of both man and woman is in it to a

very extraordinary degree. The fighting stories seem to me to be pure

man—though I suppose that there are Highland women (like Scott’s

“Highland Widow”) capable of their stern savagery. But on these alone,

Fiona’s sex scarcely could have been accepted unchallenged. But what

seems to me to show plainest, in all the stories together, is not the

trifle that they are by a man or by a woman but that they have come

out of your inspired soul. They seem to be the result of some outside

force constraining you to write them. And with their freshness they

have a curious primordial flavour—that comes, I suppose, from the deep

roots and full essences of life which are their substance of soul. Being

basic, elementary, they are independent of time; or even race. In a

literary—technically literary—way they seem to me to be quite your most

perfect work. I am sensitive to word arrangement, and some of your work

has made me rather disposed to swear at you for carelessness. You have

not always taken the trouble to hunt for the word that you needed. But

these stories are as nearly perfect in finish, I think, as literary

endeavour can make them. And they have that effect of flow and ease that

can only come—at least, I can imagine it only as arriving—from the most

persistent and laborious care. In the detail of make-up, I am especially

impressed by the insertion of the Shadow Seers just where the key is

changed radically. They are at once your justifying pieces for what has

gone before, and an orchestral interlude before the wholly different

Seanachas begin. Of all in the book, my strongest affection is for “The

Last Supper.” It seems to me to be the most purely beautiful, and the

profoundest thing that you have done.

I feel that some strong new current must have come into your life; or

that the normal current has been in some way obstructed or diverted—for

the animating spirit of these new books reflects a radical change

in your own soul. The Pagan element is entirely subordinated to and

controlled by the inner passions of the soul. In a word you have lifted

your work from the flesh-level to the soul-level....

What you say in your letter of worry and ill-health saddens me. It is

unjust that your rare power of creation should be hampered in any way.

But it seems to me that there must be great consolation in your certain

knowledge that you have greatly created, in spite of all.

Always affectionately yours,

T. A. J.

CHAPTER XVII

“RUNES OF THE SORROW OF WOMEN”

_Green Fire_

During the most active years of the Fiona Macleod writings, the author

was usually in a highly wrought condition of mental and emotional

tension, which produced great restlessness, so that he could not long

remain contentedly anywhere. We spent the summer of 1896 moving about

from one place to another that had special interest for him. First we

went to Bamborough, for sea-bathing (he was a fine swimmer), and to

visit the little Holy Isle of the Eastern Shores, Lindisfarne, Iona’s

daughter. Thence to the Clyde to be near his mother and sisters. From

Inverness we went to the Falls of Lora, in Ossian’s country, and later

we moved to one of William’s favourite haunts, Loch Tarbert, off Loch

Fyne, where our friends Mr. and Mrs. Frank Rinder had taken a house

for the summer. There I left him with his secretary-sister, Mary, and

returned to London to recommence my work on _The Glasgow Herald_. The

two following letters to me told of the progress of his work:

September 23d.

I am now well in writing trim I am glad to say. Two days ago I wrote

the long-awaited “Rune of the Passion of Woman” the companion piece in

a sense to the ‘Chant of Woman’ in _Pharais_—and have also done the

_Savoy_ story “The Archer” (about 4,500 words) and all but done “Ahez

the Pale.” Today I hope to get on with the “Lily Leven.” ...

I must make the most of this day of storm for writing. I had a splendid

long sleep last night, and feel ‘spiff.’ ... I am not built for mixed

companies, and like them less and less in proportion as the imperative

need of F. M. and W. S. for greater isolation grows. I realise more and

more the literal truth of what George Meredith told me—that renunciation

of ordinary social pleasures (namely of the ordinary kind in the

ordinary way) is a necessity to any worker on the high levels: and

unless I work that way I shall not work at all.

26th Sept.

... Yesterday turned out a splendid breezy day, despite its bad opening:

one of the most beautiful we have had, altho’ too cold for bathing, and

too rough for boating. I went off by myself for a long sail—and got

back about 4. Later I went alone for an hour or so to revise what had

stirred me so unspeakably, namely the third and concluding “Rune of the

Sorrow of Women.” This last Rune tired me in preliminary excitement and

in the strange semi-conscious fever of composition more than anything of

the kind since I wrote the first of the three in _Pharais_ one night of

storm when I was alone in Phenice Croft.

I have given it to Mary to copy, so that I can send it to you at once.

Tell me what you think and feel about it. In a vague way not only

you, Mona, Edith and others swam into my brain, but I have never so

absolutely felt the woman-soul within me: it was as though in some

subtle way the soul of Woman breathed into my brain—and I feel vaguely

as if I had given partial expression at least to the inarticulate voice

of a myriad women who suffer in one or other of the triple ways of

sorrow. For work, and rebuilding energy, I am thankful I came here. You

were right: I was not really fit to go off to the Hebrides alone, at

the present juncture, and might well have defeated my own end. Tomorrow

morning I shall be writing—probably at From the Hills of Dream.

From Tighnabruaich Hotel, a lovely little village in the Kyles of Bute,

he wrote to me:

I am glad to be here, for though the weather has changed for the

worse I am so fond of the place and neighbourhood. But what I

care for most is I am in a strong Fiona mood, though more of dream

and reverie—creatively—than of actual writing: indeed it is likely

all my work here, or nearly all shall be done through dream and

mental-cartooning. I have written “The Snow Sleep of Angus Ogue” for the

winter _Evergreen_, and am glad to know it is one of F. M.’s deepest and

best utterances.

_The Evergreen_ was a Quarterly started by Prof. Geddes, of which W. S.

was Editor. Five numbers only were issued. During the autumn William

had prepared for publication by P. Geddes & Coll a re-issue of the

Tales contained in _The Sin-Eater_ and _The Washer of the Ford_, in the

form of a paper covered edition in three volumes, _Barbaric Tales_,

_Spiritual Tales_, _Tragic Romances_. Each volume contained a new tale.

Mr. W. B. Yeats considered that “Of the group of new voices none is

more typical than the curious mysterious voice that is revealed in

these stories of Miss Fiona Macleod.... She has become the voice (of

these primitive peoples and elemental things) not from mere observation

of their ways, but out of an absolute identity of nature.... Her

art belongs in kind, whatever be its excellence in its kind, to a

greater art, which is of revelation, and deals with invisible and

impalpable things. Its mission is to bring us near to those powers and

principalities, which we divine in mortal hopes and passions.

* * * * *

Mr. W. E. Henley had shown considerable interest in the “F. M.” Tales,

and had written an appreciative letter to the author, who immediately

acknowledged it:

1:4:97.

DEAR MR. HENLEY,

I thank you for your kind letter. Any work of recognition from you means

much to me. Your advice is wise and sane, I am sure—and you may be

certain that I shall bear it in mind. It will be difficult to follow—for

absolute simplicity is the most difficult of all styles, being, as it

must be, the expression of a mind at once so imaginative in itself, so

lucid in its outlook, and so controlled in its expression, that only a

very few rarely gifted individuals can hope to achieve the isolating

ideal you indicate.

The three latest things I have written are the long short-story “Morag

of the Glen,” “The Melancholy of Ulad,” and “The Archer.” I would

particularly like to know what you think of the style and method of

“The Archer” (I mean, apart from the arbitrary fantasy of the short

supplementary part—which affords the clue to the title)—as there I have

written, or tried to write, with the accent of that life as I know it.

F. M.

The central story of “The Archer” was one of the Tales which the author

valued most, and rewrote many times. In its final form—“Silas,” in

the Tauchnitz volume of F. M. Tales—it stands without the opening and

closing episodes. Concerning the “fantasy of the short supplementary

part” a curious coincidence happened. That arbitrary fantasy is the

record of a dream, or vision, which the author had at Tarbert. In a

letter from Mr. Yeats received shortly after, the Irish poet related a

similar experience which he had had—a vision of a woman shooting arrows

among the stars—a vision that appeared also the same night to Mr.

Arthur Symons. I remember the exchange of letters that passed between

the three writers; unfortunately Fiona’s letter to Mr. Symons, and

the latter’s answer, are not available. But I have two of the letters

on the subject which, through the courtesy of Mr. Yeats, I am able to

quote; both, unfortunately are undated. F. M. describes a second vision

which, however, had no connection with the coincidence.

Mr. Yeats wrote:

TILLYRA CASTLE,

CO. GALWAY.

MY DEAR SHARP,

Many thanks for your letter. You must have written it the very morning I

was writing to Miss Macleod. I have just returned from the Arran Islands

where I had gone on a fishing boat, and where I go again at the end

of this week. I am studying on the islands for the opening chapter of

a story I am about to set out upon. I met two days ago an old man who

hears the fairies he says every night and complains much that their

singing keeps him awake. He showed me a flute which he had got thinking

that if he played it they might be pleased and so cease teasing him. I

have met much curious lore here and in Arran.

I have had some singular experiences myself. I invoked one night the

spirits of the moon and saw between sleep and waking a beautiful woman

firing an arrow among the stars. That night she appeared to Symons who

is staying here, and so impressed him that he wrote a poem on her the

only one he ever wrote to a dream, calling her the fountain of all song

or some such phrase. She was the symbolic Diana. I invoked a different

spirit another night and it appeared in dreams to an old French Count,

who was staying here, and was like Symons ignorant of my invocations. He

locked his door to try to keep it out. Please give my greetings to Miss

Macleod.

Yours Sincerely,

W. B. YEATS.

F. M. wrote in acknowledgment of a long critical letter from Mr. Yeats,

to whom “she” had sent _The Washer of the Ford_:

TARBERT ON LOCH FYNE.

DEAR MR. YEATS,

Unforeseen circumstances have prevented my writing to you before this,

and even now I must perforce be more brief than I would fain be in

response to your long and deeply interesting as well as generous letter.

Alas, a long pencilled note (partly apropos of your vision of the woman

shooting arrows, and of the strange coincidence of something of the same

kind on my own part) has long since been devoured by a too voracious

or too trustful gull—for a sudden gust of wind blew the quarto-sheet

from off the deck of the small yacht wherein I and my dear friend and

confrère of whom you know were sailing, off Skye.... How good of you to

write to me as you did. Believe me, I am grateful. There is no other

writer whose good opinion could please me more—for I love your work, and

take an endless delight in your poetry, and look to you as not only one

of the rare few on whose lips is the honey of Magh Mell but as one the

dark zone of whose mind is lit with the strange stars and constellations

of the spiritual life. Most cordially I thank you for your critical

remarks. Even where I do not unreservedly agree, or where I venture to

differ (as for example, in the matter of the repetition of the titular

words in “The Washer of the Ford” poem) I have carefully pondered all

you say. I am particularly glad you feel about the “Annir Choille” as

you do. Some people whom I would like to please do not care for it: yet

I am sure you are right in considering it one of the most vital things I

have been able to do.

With what delight I have read your lovely lovely poem “O’Sullivan Rue

to the Secret Rose!” I have read it over and over with ever deepening

delight. It is one of your finest poems, I think: though perhaps it

can only be truly appreciated by those who are familiar with legendary

Celtic history. We read it to each other, my friend and I, on a

wonderful sundown “when evening fed the wave with quiet light,” off one

of the Inner Hebrides (Colonsay, to the South of Oban).... I cannot

quite make up my mind, as you ask, about your two styles. Personally,

I incline not exactly to a return to the earlier but to a marriage of

the two: that is, a little less remoteness, or subtlety, with a little

more of rippling clarity. After reading your Blake paper (and with vivid

interest and delight) I turned to an early work of yours which I value

highly, _Dhoya_: and I admit that my heart moved to _it_. Between them

lies, I think, your surest and finest line of work—with the light deft

craft of _The Celtic Twilight_.

I hope you are soon going to issue the promised volume of poems. When

my own book of verse is ready—it is to be called _From the Hills of

Dream_—it will give me such sincere pleasure to send you a copy. By

the bye, I must not forget to thank you for introducing my work to

Mr. Arthur Symons. He wrote to me a pleasant letter, and asked me to

contribute to the _Savoy_, which I have done. I dare say my friend (who

sends you comradely greetings, and says he will write in a day or two)

will tell you more from me when he and you meet.

I had a strange vision the other day, wherein I saw the figure of a

gigantic woman sleeping on the green hills of Ireland. As I watched, the

sun waned and the dark came and the stars began to fall. They fell one

by one, and each fell into the woman—and lo, of a sudden, all was bare

running water, and the drowned stars and the transmuted woman passed

from my seeing. This was a waking dream, an open vision: but I do not

know what it means, though it was so wonderfully vivid. In a vague way

I realise that something of tremendous moment is being matured just

now. We are on the verge of vitally important developments. And all the

heart, all the brain, of the Celtic races shall be stirred. There is a

shadow of mighty changes. Myself, I believe that new spirits have been

embodied among us. And some of the old have come back. We shall perish,

you and I and all who fight under the “Lifting of the Sunbeam”—but we

shall pioneer a wonderful marvellous new life for humanity. The other

day I asked an old islesman where her son was buried. “He was not

buried,” she said, “for all they buried his body. For a week ago I saw

him lying on the heather, and talking swift an’ wild with a Shadow.”

_The Shadows are here._

I must not write more just now.

My cordial greetings to you,

Sincerely,

FIONA MACLEOD.

No sooner had W. S. returned to London than he fell ill with nervous

prostration, and rheumatism. It was soon obvious that he could not

remain in town, and that for a short time at any rate he must cease

from pen-work. It therefore seemed an opportune moment for him to go to

New York, and attend to his publishing interests there, especially as

Messrs. Stone & Kimball had recently failed.

Before starting he had read and reviewed with much interest a volume of

poems by the American poet, Mrs. Elizabeth Stoddard, and had received a

pleased acknowledgment from her husband Richard A. Stoddard:

NEW YORK,

Oct. 30, 1896.

MY DEAR SHARP,

I am greatly obliged to you for what you have written about my wife’s

poetry, any recognition of which touches me more nearly than anything

that could be said about my own verse.... My wife has told you, I

presume, how much I enjoyed your wife’s _Women’s Voices_, just before

I went into the Hospital, and how I composed a bit of verse in my head

when I couldn’t see to feed myself. Do you ever compose in that silent

way? I have taught myself to do without pens, ink, and paper, in verse;

but I can’t do so in prose, which would print itself in the thing I

call my mind. Give my kindest regards and warmest good wishes to your

Elizabeth, whose charming book is a favourite with _my_ Elizabeth as

well, as with

Yours sincerely,

R. H. STODDARD.

Later, Mr. Stedman wrote an account of a dinner given to Mr. Stoddard

to which W. S. was invited:

BRONXVILLE, N. Y.,

Feb. 17, 1897.

MY DEAR SHARP,

I have received your long letter of the 25th Jany, and also a shorter

one of the 30th written at Mr. George Cotterell’s house. I will say at

the outset that I feel guilty at seeing the name of that loveable man

and true poet; for although a year has passed since the completion of

my (Victorian) “Anthology” I have been positively unable to write the

letter which I have in my heart for him.

... The most important social matter here this winter relating to our

Guild will be a large important dinner to be given on March 25th by

the Author’s Club and his other friends, to Richard Henry Stoddard. We

are going to try to make an exception to the rule that New York is not

good to her own, and to render a tribute somewhat commensurate with

Stoddard’s life long services, and his quality as poet and man. A few

invitations are going to be sent to literary men abroad, and I have

been able to write about them to Besant, Dobson, Garnett and yourself.

Of course I do not expect that you will come over here, and I am quite

sure you will write a letter which can be read at the dinner, for I

have in mind your personal friendship with Stoddard and affectionate

comprehension of his genius and career....

On the 13th of April Mr. Stedman wrote again to report on the

proceedings:

Your letter to the Stoddard Banquet was by far the best and most

inclusive of the various ones received, and it was read out to the 150

diners and met with high favour. I mailed you the full report of the

affair, but believe I have not written you since it came off. It proved

to be the most notable literary occasion yet known in this city—was

brilliant, magnetic, enthusiastic throughout. I felt a pride in my

office as Chairman. The hall was one of the handsomest in America, the

speaking of the most eloquent type, and full of laughter and tears. The

Stoddards were deeply gratified by your letter.

E. C. S.

My husband arrived in New York on All Hallow E’en and went direct to

the hospitable house of Mr. Alden whence he wrote to me:

METUCHEN, N. J.,

1st Nov., 1896.

... Of course nothing can be done till Wednesday. All America is aflame

with excitement—and New York itself is at fever-heat. I have never seen

such a sight as yesterday. The whole enormous city was a mass of flags

and innumerable Republican and Democratic insignia—with the streets

thronged with over two million people. The whole business quarter made

a gigantic parade that took 7 hours in its passage—and the business men

alone amounted to over 100,000. Everyone—as indeed not only America, but

Great Britain and all Europe—is now looking eagerly for the final word

on Tuesday night. The larger issues are now clearer: not merely that

the Bryanite 50-cent dollar (instead of the standard 100 cent) would

have far reaching disastrous effects, but that the whole struggle is one

of the anarchic and destructive against the organic and constructive

forces. However, this tremendous crisis will come to an end—pro tem. at

any rate—on Tuesday night....

During his absence, F. M.’s romance, _Green Fire_, was published. The

title was taken from a line in ‘Cathal of the Woods,’ ‘O green fire

of life, pulse of the world, O Love!’ And the deeper meaning of the

expression ‘Green Life’—so familiar to all who knew ‘Fiona Macleod’—is

suggested in a sentence at the close of the book: “Alan knew that

strange nostalgia of the mind for impossible things. Then, wrought for

a while from his vision of green life, and flamed by another green fire

than that born of earth, he dreamed his dream.”

To me, the author wrote from New York:

“ ... I am indeed glad you like _Green Fire_ so well. And you are right

in your insight: Annaik _is_ the real human magnet. Ynys is an idealised

type, what I mean by Ideala or Esclarmoundo, but she did not take hold

of me like Annaik. Alan, too, is a variation of the Ian type. But Annaik

has for me a strange and deep attraction: and I am sure the abiding

personal interest must be in _her_. You are the only one who seems

to have understood and perceived this—certainly the only one who has

noticed it. Some day I want to tell Annaik’s story in full....”

The author had read much Breton lore during his study of French

Literature, and as his interest had for a time been centred on the

land of the kindred Celt, he determined to make it the setting of a

new Romance. He had never been there, so drew on his imagination for

the depiction of the places he knew of by hearsay only. The result,

when later he judged the book in cool criticism, he considered to be

unsatisfactory as to structure and balance. He realised, that although

the Fiona impetus produced the first chapter and the latter part, the

plot and melodramatic character of the Breton story are due to W. S.;

that the descriptions of nature are written by F. M. and W. S. in

fusion, are in character akin to the descriptions in “The Children of

Tomorrow,” written by W. S. in his transition stage. Consequently, when

in 1905, he discussed with me what he wished preserved of his writings,

he asked my promise that I would never republish the book in its

entirety.

In order to preserve what he himself cared for, he rewrote the Highland

portion of the book, named it “The Herdsman” and included it in _The

Dominion of Dreams_. (In the Uniform Edition, it is placed, together

with a series of detached Thought-Fragments from _Green Fire_, in

_The Divine Adventure_, Vol. IV.) He never carried out his intention

of writing Annaik’s story in full. Had he done so it would have been

incorporated in a story, partly reminiscent of his early sojourn among

the gipsies, and have been called _The Gypsy Trail_.

Some months later Mr. W. B. Yeats wrote to W. S.:

“I have read ‘Green Fire’ since I saw you. I do not think it is one of

your well-built stories, and I am certain that the writing is constantly

too self-consciously picturesque; but the atmosphere, the romance of

much of it, of ‘The Herdsman’ part in particular haunts me ever since I

laid it down.

‘Fiona Macleod’ has certainly discovered the romance of the remote

Gaelic places as no one else has ever done. She has made the earth by

so much the more beautiful.”

And Mr. George Russell (A. E.) wrote to F. M. from Dublin:

DEAR FIONA MACLEOD,

My friend, Willie Yeats, has just come by me wrapt in a faery whirlwind,

his mouth speaking great things. He talked much of reviving the Druidic

mysteries and vaguely spoke of Scotland and you. These stirring ideas

of his are in such a blaze of light that, but for the inspiration of a

presence always full of enthusiasm, I would get no ideas at all from

him. But when he mentioned your name and spoke of the brotherhood of

the Celts and what ties ought to unite them, I remembered a very kindly

letter which I had put on one side waiting for an excuse to write again.

So I take gladly Yeats’ theory of what ought to be and write....

Thoughts inspired by what is written or said are aimed at the original

thinker and from every quarter converge on his inner nature. Perhaps

you have felt this. It means that these people are putting fetters on

you, binding you to think in a certain way (what they expect from you);

and there is a danger of the soul getting bent so that after its first

battle it fights no more but repeats dream upon dream its first words

in answer to their demand and it grows more voice and less soul every

day. I read _Green Fire_ a few weeks ago and have fallen in love with

your haunted seas. Your nature spirit is a little tragic. You love

the Mother as I do but you seem for ever to expect some revelation of

awe from her lips where I would hide my head in her bosom. But the

breathless awe is true also—to “meet on the Hills of Dream,” that

would not be so difficult. I think you know that? Some time when the

power falls on me I’ll send a shadow of myself over seas just to get

the feeling of the Highlands. I have an intuition that the “fires”

are awakening somewhere in the North West. I may have met you indeed

and not known you. We are so different behind the veil. Some who are

mighty of the mighty there are nothing below and then waking life keeps

no memory of their victorious deeds in sleep. And if I saw you your

inner being might assume some old Druidic garb of the soul, taking that

form because you are thinking the Druidic thought. The inner being is

protean and has a thousand changes of apparel. I sat beside a friend

and while he was meditating, the inner being started up in Egyptian

splendour robed in purple and gold. He had chanced upon some mood of an

ancient life. I write to you of these things judging that you know of

them to some extent here: that your inner nature preserves the memory

of old initiations, so I talk to you as a comrade on the same quest.

You know too I think that these alluring visions and thoughts are of

little import unless they link themselves unto our humanity. It means

only madness in the end. I know people whose lamps are lit and they

see wonderful things but they themselves will not pass from vision

into action. They follow beauty only like the dwellers in Tyre whom

Ezekiel denounced “They have corrupted their wisdom by reason of their

brightness.” Leaving these mystic things aside what you say about art

is quite true except that I cannot regard art as the “quintessential

life” unless art comes to mean the art of living more than the art of

the artists.... Sometime, perhaps, if it is in the decrees of the gods

(our true selves) we may meet and speak of these things. But don’t get

enslaved by your great power of expression. It ties the mind a little.

There was an old Hermetist who said “The knowledge of It is a divine

silence and the rest of all the senses....”

You ask me to give my best. Sometimes I think silence is the best. I can

feel the sadness of truth here, but not the joy, and there must always

be as exquisite a joy as there is pain in any state of consciousness....

A. E.

CHAPTER XVIII

FROM THE HILLS OF DREAM

_The Laughter of Peterkin_

On the wanderer’s return to England his volume of poems _From the Hills

of Dream_ was published by P. Geddes & Coll. The first edition was

dedicated to our godson Arthur Allhallow, younger son of Prof. and Mrs.

Patrick Geddes, who was born on that Hallow E’en the anniversary of our

Wedding-day. The volume consists of poems, runes and lyrics, written by

F. M. between 1893 and 1896; and a series of “prose rhythms” entitled

“The Silence of Amor.”

A sympathetic letter from Mr. Ernest Rhys, the Welsh poet, drew a quick

response:

MURRAYFIELD, MIDLOTHIAN,

23: 11: 96.

DEAR MR. RHYS,

On my coming from the West to Edinburgh, for a few days, I found your

very welcome and charming letter, among others forwarded to me from the

Outlook Tower.

It gratifies me very much that you, whose work I so much admire and with

whose aims and spirit I am in so keen sympathy, care so well for the

“Hills of Dream.” These are hills where few inhabit, but comrade always

knows comrade there—and so we are sure to meet one another, whether one

carry a “London Rose” or a sheaf of half-barbaric Hill-Runes. It may

interest you to know that the name which seems to puzzle so many people

is (though it does exist as the name “Fiona,” not only in Ossian but at

the present day, though rarely) the Gaelic diminutive of “Fionaghal” (i.

e. Flora). For the rest—I was born more than a thousand years ago, in

the remote region of Gaeldom known as the Hills of Dream. There I have

lived the better part of my life, my father’s name was Romance, and that

of my mother was Dream. I have no photograph of their abode, which is

just under the quicken-arch immediately west of the sunset-rainbow. You

will easily find it. Nor can I send you a photograph of myself. My last

fell among the dew-wet heather, and is now doubtless lining the cells of

the wild bees.

All this authentic information I gladly send you!

Sincerely yours,

FIONA MACLEOD.

Early in 1897 Mr. Yeats wrote from Paris to F. M. concerning aims

and ideals he was endeavouring to shape into expression for the

re-vivifying of Celtic Ireland, and out of which has evolved the Irish

National Theatre:

MY DEAR MISS MACLEOD,

I owe you a letter for a long time, and can only promise to amend and

be more prompt in future. I have had a busy autumn, always trying to

make myself do more work than my disposition will permit, and at such

times I am the worst of correspondents. I have just finished a certain

speech in _The Shadowy Waters_, my new poem, and have gone to _The Café

du Musée de Cluny_ to smoke and read the Irish news in the _Times_. I

should say I wrote about your book of poems as you will have seen in the

_Bookman_. I have just now a plan I want to ask you about? Our Irish

Literary and Political literary organisations are pretty complete (I am

trying to start a Young Ireland Society, among the Irish here in Paris

at the moment) and I think it would be very possible to get up Celtic

plays through these Societies. They would be far more effective than

lectures and might do more than anything else we can do to make the

Irish Scotch and other Celts recognise their solidarity. My own plays

are too elaborate, I think, for a start, and have also the disadvantage

that I cannot urge my own work in committee. If we have one or two

short direct prose plays, of (say) a mythological and folklore kind, by

you and by some writer (I may be able to move O’Grady, I have already

spoken to him about it urgently) I feel sure we could get the _Irish

Literary Society_ to make a start. They have indeed for some time talked

of doing my _Land of Heart’s Desire._ My own theory of poetical or

legendary drama is that it should have no realistic, or elaborate, but

only a symbolic and decorative setting. A forest, for instance, should

be represented by a forest pattern and not by a forest painting. One

should design a scene, which would be an accompaniment not a reflection

of the text. This method would have the further advantage of being

fairly cheap, and altogether novel. The acting should have an equivalent

distance to that of the play from common realities. The plays might be

almost, in some cases, modern mystery plays. Your _Last Supper_, for

instance, would make such a play, while your story in _The Savoy_ would

arrange as a strong play of merely human tragedy. I shall try my own

hand possibly at some short prose plays also, but not yet. I merely

suggest these things because they are a good deal on my mind, and not

that I wish to burden your already full hands. My “Shadowy Waters” is

magical and mystical beyond anything I have done. It goes but slowly

however, and I have had to recast all I did in Ireland some years ago.

Mr. Sharp heard some of it in London in its first very monotonous form.

I wish to make it a kind of grave ecstasy.

I am also at the start of a novel which moves between the Islands of

Aran and Paris, and shall have to go again to Aran about it. After

these books I start a long cherished project—a poetical version of the

great Celtic epic tale Deirdre, Cuchullin at the Ford, and Cuchullin’s

death, and Dermot and Grainne. I have some hopes that Mr. Sharp will

come to Paris on his way back to England. I have much to talk over with

him, I am feeling more and more every day that our Celtic movement is

approaching a new phase. Our instrument is sufficiently prepared as far

as Ireland is concerned, but the people are less so, and they can only

be stirred by the imagination of a very few acting on all.

My book _The Secret Rose_ was to have been out in December but it has

been postponed till February. If I have any earlier copies you shall

have one. I am specially curious to know what you think of a story

called “The Adoration of the Magi” which is a half prophecy of a very

veiled kind.

Yours truly,

W. B. YEATS.

The prolonged strain of the heavy dual work added to by an eager

experimentation with certain psychic phenomena with which he had long

been familiar but wished further to investigate, efforts in which at

times he and Mr. W. B. Yeats collaborated—began to tell heavily on

him, and to produce very disquieting symptoms of nervous collapse. We

decided therefore that he should pass the dead months of the year, as

he called December and January, in the South of France. From St. Remy

while on a visit to Mr. and Mrs. Janvier he wrote to me:

“I am not going to lament that even the desire to think-out anything has

left me—much less the wish to write—for I am sure that is all in the

order of the day towards betterness. But I do now fully realise that

I must give up everything to getting back my old buoyancy and nervous

strength—and that prolonged rest and open air are the paramount needs....

However, enough of this, henceforth I hope to have to think of and

report on the up-wave only.

I am seated in a little room close to the window—and as I look out I

first see the boughs of a gigantic sycamore through which the mistral

is roaring with a noise like a gale at sea. Beyond this is a line of

cypresses, and apparently within a stone’s throw are the extraordinary

wildly fantastic mountain-peaks of St. Remy. I have never seen anything

like them. No wonder they are called the Dolomites of France. They are,

too, in aspect unspeakably ancient and remote.

We are practically in the country, and in every way, with its hill-air

and beauty, the change from Tarascon is most welcome.... There is a

strange but singularly fascinating blend of north and south here just

now. The roar of the mistral has a wild wintry sound, and the hissing of

the wood fire is also suggestive of the north: and then outside there

are the unmistakable signs of the south and those fantastic unreal like

hills. I never so fully recognise how intensely northern I am than when

I am in the south....”

The following fragment of a diary—all there is for 1897—gives a record

of the work he had in progress: also shows his way of noting (or not

noting!) his outgoing expenses:

_January 1st, 1897._—A day of extreme beauty at Sainte-Maxime (Var). In

the morning wrote letters etc., and then walked into Sainte-Maxime and

posted them, and sent a telegram to Elizabeth, to be delivered at dinner

time, with New Year greetings and Fair Wishes.

Worked at “Ahez the Pale,” and, having finished the revision of it from

first to last, did it up with “The Archer,” and then sent (with long

letter of general instructions about the re-issue of F. M.’s tales in 3

vols., Spiritual Tales, Barbaric Tales, and Tragic Romances) to Lilian

Rea, at the Outlook Tower.

After dinner went a long walk by the sea. Noticed a peculiarity by which

tho’ the sea was dead calm, and on the eastern side of the littoral of

Ste. Maxime made hardly a ripple, the noise on the further side was like

that of a rushing train or of a wind among pinewoods. I walked round,

and found oily waves beating heavily on the shore. Tidal, possibly.

Expenses today: Letters 3.90, Telegrams 5.90, Poor Man 30. Board &c., at

hotel.

Total ” ”.

After his return to London he wrote to Mrs. Janvier:

GROSVENOR CLUB,

March 10, 1897.

... Although I have had an unpleasant mental and physical set-back the

last three days, I am steadily (at least I hope so) gaining ground—but

I have never yet regained the health or spirits I was in at St. Remy,

tho’ even there far more worn in mind and body than even _you_ guessed.

But with the spring I shall get well.

I am heart and soul with Greece in this war of race and freedom—and

consider the so-called “Concert” a mockery and a sham. It is a huge

Capitalist and Reactionary Bogus Company. Fortunately the tide of

indignation is daily rising here—and even the Conservative papers are

at one with the Liberal on the central points. Were I a younger man—or

rather were I free—I would now be in Greece or on my way to join the

Hellenes. As you will see by enclosed, I am one of the authors who have

sent a special message to the Athenian President of the Chamber. It is a

stirring time, and in many ways....

March 22d.

... What a whirl of excitement life is, just now. I am all on fire about

the iniquities of this Turkish-Finance triumph over honour, chivalry,

and the old-time sense that the world _can_ be well lost. There are

many other matters, too, for deep excitement—international, national,

literary, artistic, personal. It is the season of sap, of the young

life, of green fire. Heart-pulses are throbbing to the full: brains are

effervescing under the strong ferment of the wine of life: the spiral

flames of the spirit and the red flower of the flesh are fanned and

consumed and recreated and fanned anew every hour of every day....

This is going to be a strange year in many ways: a year of spiritual

flames moving to and fro, of wild vicissitudes for many souls and for

the forces that move through the minds of men. The West will redden in

a new light—the ‘west’ of the forlorn peoples who congregate among our

isles in Ireland—‘the West’ of the dispeopled mind.

The common Soul is open—one can see certain shadows and lights as though

in a mirror.... [The letter ends abruptly.]

Towards the end of April I went to Paris to write upon the two

“Salons,” and my husband, still very unwell, went to St. Margaret’s

Bay, whence he wrote to me:

Sunday (on the shore by the sea, and in the sunshine). I wonder what

you are doing today? I feel very near you in spirit as I always do

when I have been reading, hearing, or seeing any beautiful thing—and

this forenoon I have done all three, for I am looking upon the beauty

of sunlit wind-swept sea, all pale green and white, and upon the deep

blue sky above the white cliffs, upon the jackdaws and gulls dense

black or snowy against the azure, upon the green life along and up the

cliff-face, upon the yellow-green cystus bushes below—and am listening

to the sough of the wind, soft and balmy, and the rush and break of

the sunlit waves among the pebbly reaches just beyond me—and have been

reading Maeterlinck’s two essays, “The Deeper Life” and “The Inner

Beauty.”

I am longing to be regularly at work again—and now feel as if at last I

can do so....

More and more absolutely, in one sense, are W. S. and F. M. becoming

two persons—often married in mind and one nature, but often absolutely

distinct. I am filled with a passion of dream and work....

Friendship, deepening into serene and beautiful flame, is one of the

most ennobling and lovely influences the world has....

WILFION.

P. S. Again some more good tidings. Constables have accepted my giving

up _The Lily Leven_ indefinitely—and instead have agreed to my proposal

to write a child’s book (dealing with the Celtic Wonderworld) to be

called _The Laughter of Peterkin_....

From Paris I went to St. Remy for a short visit to our friends the

Janviers, and my birthday found me still there. My husband had been

considerably perplexed how he was to celebrate the day for me from a

distance. On the early morning of the 17th of May the waiter brought

me my coffee and my letters to my room as usual, and told me gravely

that a large packet had arrived for me, during the night, with orders

that it should not be delivered to me till the morning. Should it be

brought up stairs? The next moment the door was pushed open and in came

the radiant smiling unexpected apparition of my Poet! In a little town

an event of this sort is soon known to everyone, and that evening when

he and I went for a walk, and sauntered through the little boulevards,

we found we were watched for and greeted by everyone, and heads were

popped out of windows just to see “les amants.”

After his equally rapid return to town he wrote to me:

“It seems very strange to be here and at work again—or rather it is the

interlude that seems so strange and dreamlike. This time last week it

was not quite certain if I could get away, as it depended partly upon

finishing the Maeterlinck Essay and partly upon the postponement of due

date for the monograph on Orchardson. Then Richard Whiteing came in.

Then at last I said that since fortune wouldn’t hurry up it could go to

the devil—and I would just go to my dear wife: and so I went. And all is

well. Only a week ago today since I left! How dramatic it all is—that

hurried journey, the long afternoon and night journey from Paris, the

long afternoon and night journey to Tarascon—the drive at dawn and

sunrise through beautiful Provence—the meeting you—the seeing our dear

friends there again. And then that restful Sunday, that lovely birthday!”

And again a few days later:

“Herewith my typed copy of your Wilfion’s last writing. Called ‘The

Wayfarer’ though possibly, afterwards, ‘Where God is, there is Light,’

it is one of the three Spiritual Moralities of which you know two

already, ‘The Fisher of Men’ and ‘The Last Supper.’ In another way,

the same profound truth is emphasised as in the other two—that Love is

the basic law of spiritual life. ‘The Redeemer liveth’ in these three:

Compassion, Beauty, Love—the three chords on which these three harmonies

of Fiona’s inner life have been born....”

“The Wayfarer” was published in _Cosmopolis_, and afterwards included

in _The Winged Destiny_.

On the 10th of June the author went for a night to Burford Bridge, in

order to have some talks with George Meredith. While there he began to

write “_The Glory of the King_,” and two days later he finished it on

reaching home.

In the summer of 1897 he visited Ireland for the first time. In Dublin

he met Mr. George Russell—whose beautiful verse was first published

over the initials A. E.—Mr. Standish O’Grady and other writers with

whom he had been in correspondence; and he greatly enjoyed a visit to

Mr. Edward Martin at Tillyra Castle in Galway.

Among several enthusiastic letters I received the following:

... I find it almost impossible to attempt to tell you the varied and

beautiful delights of this lovely place. ... The country is strange

and fascinating—at once so austere, so remote, so unusual, and so

characteristic....

Lord Morris, and Martin and I go off today “to show me the beauties

of the wild coast of Clare.” It is glorious autumnal weather, with

unclouded sky, and I am looking forward to the trip immensely. We

leave at 11, and drive to Ardrahan, and there get a train southward

into County Clare, and at Ennis catch a little loopline to the coast.

Then for two hours we drive to the famous Cliffs of Moher, gigantic

precipices facing the Atlantic—and then for two hours move round the

wild headlands of Blackhead—and so, in the afternoon, to the beautiful

Clare ‘spa’ of Lisdoonvarna, where we dine late and sleep. Next day

we return by some famous Round Tower of antiquity, whose name I have

forgotten. Another day soon we are to go into Galway, and to the Aran

Isles.

On Thursday Yeats arrives, also Dr. Douglas Hyde, and possibly Standish

O’Grady—and Lady Gregory, one of the moving spirits in this projected

new Celtic Drama. She is my host’s nearest neighbour, and has a lovely

place (Coole Park) about five miles southwest from here, near Gort.

I drove there, with Sir N. G. yesterday, in a car, through a strange

fascinating austere country.

The people here are distinct from any I have seen—and the women in

particular are very striking with their great dark eyes, and lovely

complexions and their picturesque ‘snoods.’

The accent is not very marked, and the voices are low and pleasant, and

the people courteous to a high degree.

In the evening we had music—and so ended delightfully my first

delightful day in the west....

I forgot to tell you that I arrived late—and of course at Athenry

only—some 14 miles from here. I had to wait some time till a car could

be got—and what a drive I had! The man said that “Plaze God, he would

have me at Tull-lyra before the gintry had given me up entoirely”—and he

was as good as his word! The night was dark, and the roads near Athenry

awful after the recent gale and rains—and it was no joke to hold on to

the car. Whenever we came to a particularly bad bit (and I declared

afterwards that he took some of the stone dykes at a leap) he cried—“Now

thin yer honour, whin I cry _Whiroo!_ you hould on an’ trust to God”—and

then came his wild _Whiroo!_ and the horse seemed to spring from the

car, and the jarvey and I to be flying alongside, and my rope-bound

luggage to be kicking against the stars—and then we came down with a

thud, and when I had a gasp of refound breath I asked if the road was as

smooth and easy all the way, whereat my friend laughed genially and said

“Be aisy at that now—shure we’re coming to the bad bit soon!” ...

Not far from here is a fairy-doctor, I am going to see him some day. It

is strange that when one day Lady Gregory took one of Russell’s mystical

drawings (I think of the Mōr Reega) and showed it to an old woman, she

at once exclaimed that that was the “photograph” of the fairy queen she

had often seen, only that the strange girdle of fan-flame was round her

waist and not on her head as in the drawing. An old man here also has

often met “the secret people,” and when asked to describe one strange

“fairy lord” he has encountered more than once, it was so like G. R’s

drawing that that was shown him among several others, and he at once

picked it out!

It is a haunted land.

In haste (and hunger),

WILF.

P. S. I have been thinking much over my long-projected consecutive work

(i. e. as W. S.)—in five sequel books—on the drama of life as seen in

the evolution of the dreams of youth—begun, indeed, over ten years ago

in Paris—but presciently foregone till ten maturing years should pass.

But now the time has come when I may, and should, and indeed, now,

_must_, write this _Epic of Youth_. That will be its general collective

name—and it will interest you to know the now definitely fixt names of

these five (and all very long) books; each to be distinct and complete

in itself, yet all sequently connected: and organic and in the true

sense dramatic evolution of some seven central types of men and women

from youth to maturity and climax, along the high and low, levels.

Name: _The Epic of Youth._

I. The Hunters of Wisdom.

II. The Tyranny of Dreams.

III. The Star of Fortune.

IV. The Daughters of Vengeance.

V. The Iron Gates.

This will take five years to do—so it is a big task to set, before the

end of 1902!—especially as I have other work to do, and F. M.’s, herself

as ambitious. But method, and maturer power and thought, can accomplish

with far less nervous output, what otherwise was impossible, and only at

a killing or at least perilous strain.

So wish me well!

But the pressure of health, of the needs of daily livelihood, and of

the more dominating ambitions of F. M. prevented the fulfilment of this

scheme.

Many times he talked of it, drafted out portions of it—but it remained

unaccomplished, and all that exists of it is the beginning chapters

of the first book written in Paris ten years before, and then called

_Cæsar of France_.

London proved to be impossible to him owing to the excitable condition

of his brain. Therefore he took rooms in Hastings whence he wrote to me:

Nov. 21, 1897.

I am so glad to be here, in this sunlight by the sea. Light and

motion—what a joy these are. The eyes become devitalised in the pall of

London gloom....

There is a glorious amplitude of light. The mind bathes in these

illimitable vistas. Wind and Wave and Sun: how regenerative these elder

brothers are.

Solomon says there is no delight like wisdom, and that wisdom is the

heritage of age: but there is a divine unwisdom which is the heritage

of youth—and I would rather be young for a year than wise for a cycle.

There are some who live without the pulse of youth in the mind: on the

day, in the hour, I no longer feel that quick pulse, I will go out like

a blown flame. To be young; to keep young: that is the story and despair

of life....

Among the Christmas publications of 1897 appeared _The Laughter of

Peterkin_ by Fiona Macleod. This book, issued by Messrs. Archibald

Constable and illustrated by Mr. Sunderland Rollinson, was a new

departure for the author, an interlude in the midst of more strenuous

original work, for it was the re-telling of three old tales of Celtic

Wonderland: “The Four White Swans,” or “The Children of Lir,” “The

Fate of the Sons of Turenn,” and “Darthool and the Sons of Usna.”

Some years later, after the publication of Lady Gregory’s “Gods and

Fighting Men,” Mr. Alfred Nutt wrote to F. M. and suggested that she

should again turn her attention to the re-telling of some of the

beautiful old Celtic tales and legends. My husband, however, realised

that he had far more dreams haunting the chambers of his mind than he

could have time to give expression to. Therefore, very regretfully, he

felt constrained to forego what otherwise would have been a work of

love.

CHAPTER XIX

WIVES IN EXILE

_Silence Farm_

The production of the Fiona Macleod work was accomplished at a heavy

cost to the author as that side of his nature deepened and became

dominant. The strain upon his energies was excessive: not only from

the necessity of giving expression to the two sides of his nature;

but because of his desire, that, while under the cloak of secrecy F.

M. should develop and grow, the reputation of William Sharp should

at the same time be maintained. Moreover each of the two natures had

its own needs and desires, interests and friends. The needs of each

were not always harmonious one with the other, but created a complex

condition that led to a severe nervous collapse. The immediate result

of the illness was to cause an acute depression and restlessness that

necessitated a continual change of environment. In the early part

of 1898 he went in turn to Dover, to Bournemouth, Brighton, and St.

Margaret’s Bay. He was much alone, except for the occasional visit of

an intimate friend; for I could go to him at the week-ends only, as I

had the work in London to attend to. The sea, and solitude, however,

proved his best allies.

To Mrs. Janvier he wrote:

... I am skirting the wood of shadows. I am filled with vague fears—and

yet a clear triumphant laughter goes through it, though whether of life

or death no one knows. I am also in a duel with other forces than those

of human wills—and I need all my courage and strength. At the moment I

have recovered my physic control over certain media. It cannot last more

than a few days at most a few weeks at a time: but in that time _I am

myself_....

Let there be peace in your heart: peace and hope transmuted into joy: in

your mind, the dusking of no shadow, the menace of no gloom, but light,

energy, full life: and to you in your whole being, the pulse of youth,

the flame of green fire....

At the end of April he wrote to R. Murray Gilchrist from St. Margaret’s

Bay:

MY DEAR FRIEND,

I know you will have been sorry to hear that I have been ill—and had to

leave work, and home. The immediate cause was a severe and sudden attack

of influenza which went to membranes of the head and brain, and all but

resulted in brain fever. This evil was averted—but it and the possible

collapse of your friend Will were at one time, and for some days, an

imminent probability.

I have now been a fortnight in this quiet sea-haven, and am practically

myself again. Part of my work is now too hopelessly in arrears ever to

catch up. Fortunately, our friend Miss F. M. practically finished her

book just before she got ill too—and there is a likelihood that _There

is But One Love_ [published in the following year under the title of

_The Dominion of Dreams_] will come out this Spring. A few days will

decide....

Your friend and Sunlover,

(in the deep sense you know I mean—for I

have suffered much, but am now again fronting

life gravely and with laughing eyes),

WILL.

and again after his return to London:

RUTLAND HOUSE.

MY DEAR ROBERT,

... After months of sickness, at one time at the gates of death, I am

whirled back from the Iron Gates and am in the maelstrom again—fighting

with mind and soul and body for that inevitable losing game which we

call victory. Well, the hour waits: and for good or ill I put forth that

which is in me. The Utmost for the Highest. There is that motto for all

faithful failures....

I am busy of course. And so, too, our friend F. M.—with an elixir of

too potent life. The flame is best: and the keener, the less obscured

of smoke. So I believe: upon this I build. _Cosmopolis_ will ere long

have “The Wayfarer” of hers—_Good Words_ “The Wells of Peace”—_Harpers_,

something—_Literature_ a spiritual ballad—and so forth. But her life

thought is in another and stranger thing than she has done yet.[4] ...

Your friend W. S. is busy too, with new and deeper and stronger work.

The fugitive powers impel. I look eagerly to new work of yours: above

all to what you colour with yourself. I care little for anything that

is not quick with that volatile part of one which is the effluence of

the spirit within. Write to me soon: by return best of all. You can help

me—as I, I hope, can help _you_.

It is only the fullest and richest lives that know what the _heart_ of

loneliness is.

You are my comrade, and have my love,

WILL.

Two, among the many letters he wrote to me during that Spring—so full

of suffering for him and anxiety for me—are, I think, very indicative

of the two phases of his nature. The first relates to views we held in

common; the second gives an insight into the primitive elemental soul

that so often swayed him, and his work.

March 29, 1898.

... Yes, in essentials, we are all at one. We have both learned

and unlearned so much, and we have come to see that we are wrought

mysteriously by forces beyond ourselves, but in so seeing we know that

there is a great and deep love that conquers even disillusion and

disappointment....

Not all the wishing, not all the dreaming, not all the will and hope

and prayer we summon can alter that within us which is stronger than

ourselves. This is a hard lesson to learn for all of us, and most for

a woman. We are brought up within such an atmosphere of conventional

untruth to life that most people never even perceive the hopeless

futility in the arbitrary ideals which are imposed upon us—and the

result for the deeper natures, endless tragic miscarriage of love,

peace, and hope. But, fortunately, those of us who to our own suffering

_do_ see only too clearly, can still strike out a nobler ideal—one

that does not shrink from the deepest responsibilities and yet can so

widen and deepen the heart and spirit with love that what else would be

irremediable pain can be transmuted into hope, into peace, and even into

joy.

People talk much of this and that frailty or this or that circumstance

as being among the commonest disintegrants of happiness. But far more

fatal for many of us is that supreme disintegrant, the Tyranny of

Love—the love which is forever demanding _as its due_ that which is

wholly independent of bonds, which is as the wind which bloweth where

it listeth or where it is impelled, by the Spirit. We are taught such

hopeless lies. And so men and women start life with ideals which seem

fair, but are radically consumptive: ideals that are not only bound to

perish, but that could not survive. The man of fifty who could be the

same as he was at twenty is simply a man whose mental and spiritual

life stopped short while he was yet a youth. The woman of forty who

could have the same outlook on life as the girl of 19 or 20 would

never have been other than one ignominiously deceived or hopelessly

self-sophisticated. This ought not to be—but it must be as long as young

men and women are fed mentally and spiritually upon the foolish and

cowardly lies of a false and corrupt conventionalism.

No wonder that so many fine natures, men and women, are wrought to

lifelong suffering. They are started with impossible ideals: and while

some can never learn that their unhappiness is the result, not of the

falling short of others, but of the falsity of those ideals which they

had so cherished—and while others learn first strength to endure the

transmutations and then power to weld these to far nobler and finer uses

and ends—for both there is suffering. Yet, even of that we make too

much. We have all a tendency to nurse grief. The brooding spirit craves

for the sunlight, but it will not leave the shadows. Often, _Sorrow_ is

our best ally.

The other night, tired, I fell asleep on my sofa. I dreamed that a

beautiful spirit was standing beside me. He said: “My Brother, I have

come to give you the supreme gift that will heal you and save you.” I

answered eagerly: “Give it me—what is it?” And the fair radiant spirit

smiled with beautiful solemn eyes, and blew a breath into the tangled

garden of my heart—and when I looked there I saw the tall white Flower

of Sorrow growing in the Sunlight.”

(To E. A. S.)

ST. MARGARET’S BAY,

May, 1898.

I have had a very happy and peaceful afternoon. The isolation, with sun

and wind, were together like soft cream upon my nerves: and I suppose

that within twenty minutes after I left the station I was not only

serenely at peace with the world in general, but had not a perturbing

thought. To be alone, alone ‘in the open’ above all, is not merely

healing to me but an imperative necessity of my life—and the chief

counter agent to the sap that almost every person exercises on me,

unless obviated by frequent and radical interruption.

By the time I had passed through the village I was already ‘remote’

in dreams and thoughts and poignant outer enjoyment of the lovely

actualities of sun and wind and the green life: and when I came to

my favourite coign where, sheltered from the bite of the wind, I

could overlook the sea (a mass of lovely, radiant, amethyst-shadowed,

foam-swept water), I lay down for two restful happy hours _in which not

once a thought of London or of any one in it, or of any one living_,

came to me. This power of living absolutely in the moment is worth not

only a crown and all that a crown could give, but is the secret of

youth, the secret of life.

O how weary I am of the endless recurrence of the ordinary in the lives

of most people—the beloved routine, the cherished monotonies, the

treasured certainties. I grudge them to none: they seem incidental to

the common weal: indeed they seem even made for happiness. But I know

one wild heart at least to whom life must come otherwise, or not at all.

Today I took a little green leaf o’ thorn. I looked at the sun through

it, and a dazzle came into my brain—and I wished, ah I wished I were a

youth once more, and was ‘sun-brother’ and ‘star-brother’ again—to lie

down at night, smelling the earth, and rise at dawn, smelling the new

air out of the East, and know enough of men and cities to avoid both,

and to consider little any gods ancient or modern, knowing well that

there is only ‘The Red God’ to think of, he who lives and laughs in the

red blood....

There is a fever of the ‘green life’ in my veins—below all the ordinary

littlenesses of conventional life and all the common place of exterior:

a fever that makes me ill at ease with people, even those I care for,

that fills me with a weariness beyond words and a nostalgia for sweet

impossible things.

This can be met in several ways—chiefly and best by the practical yoking

of the imagination to the active mind—in a word, to work. If I can do

this, well and good, either by forced absorption in contrary work (e.

g. Cæsar of France), or by letting that go for the time and let the

more creative instinct have free play: or by some radical change of

environment: or again by some irresponsible and incalculable variation

of work and brief day-absences.

At the moment, I am like a man of the hills held in fee: I am willing

to keep my bond, to earn my wage, to hold to the foreseen: and yet any

moment a kestrel may fly overhead, mocking me with a rock-echo, where

only sun and wind and bracken live—or an eddy of wind may have the sough

of a pine in it—and then, in a flash—there’s my swift brain-dazzle in

answer, and all the rapid falling away of these stupid half-realities,

and only a wild instinct to go to my own....

It was in this mood that he wrote to a friend:

... but then, life is just like that. It is glad only ‘in the open,’

and beautiful only because of its dreams. I wish I could live all my

hours out of doors: I envy no one in the world so much as the red deer,

the eagle, the sea-mew. I am sure no kings have so royal a life as the

plovers and curlews have. All these have freedom, rejoice continually on

the wind’s wing, exalt alike in sun and shade: to them day is day, and

night is night, and there is nothing else.

His sense of recovery was greatly heightened by a delightful little

wander in Holland in May, with Mr. Thomas A. Janvier, a jovial, breezy

companion. Of all he saw the chief fascination proved to be Eiland

Marken, as he wrote to me:

We are now in the south Zuyder Zee, with marvellous sky effects, and low

lines of land in the distance. Looking back at Eiland Marken one sees

six clusters of houses, at wide intervals, dropped casually into the sea.

We had a delightful time in that quaintest of old world places,

where the women are grotesque, the men grotesquer, and the children

grotesquest—as for the tubby, capped, gorgeous-garbed, blue-eyed,

yellow-haired, imperturbable babies, they alone are worth coming to

see....

The following is a letter from his other self:

23d July, 1898.

MY DEAR MR. RHYS,

On my coming to Edinburgh for a few days I find the book you have so

kindly sent to me. It is none the less welcome because it comes as no

new acquaintance: for on its appearance a friend we have in common sent

it to me. Alas, that copy lies among the sea-weed in a remote Highland

loch; for the book, while still reading in part, slipped overboard the

small yacht in which I was sailing, and with it the MS. of a short story

of mine appropriately named “Beneath the Shadow of the Wave”! The two

may have comforted each other in that solitude: or the tides may have

carried them southward, and tossed them now to the Pembroke Stacks, now

to the cliffs of Howth. Perhaps a Welsh crab may now be squeaking (they

do say that crabs make a whistling squeak!) with a Gaelic accent, or the

deep-sea congers be reciting Welsh ballads to the young-lady-eels of the

Hebrides. Believe me, your book has given me singular pleasure. I find

in it the indescribable: and to me that is one of the tests, perhaps

the supreme test (for it involves so much) of imaginative literature.

A nimble air of the hills is there; the rustle of remote woods; the

morning cry, that is so ancient, and that still so thrills us.

I most eagerly hope that you will recreate in beauty the all but lost

beauty of the old Cymric singers. There is a true originality in this,

as in anything else. The green leaf, the grey wave, the mountain

wind—after all, are they not murmurous in the old Celtic poets, whether

Alban or Irish or Welsh: and to translate, and recreate anew, from

these, is but to bring back into the world again a lost wandering beauty

of hill-wind or green leaf or grey wave. There is, I take it, no one

living who could interpret Davyth ap Gwilym and other old Welsh singers

as you could do. I long to have the Green Book of ‘the Poet of the

Leaves’ in English verse, and in English verse such as that into which

you could transform it....

F. M.

The Welsh poet replied:

NEWCASTLE-ON-TYNE,

27th Dec., 1898.

DEAR “FIONA MACLEOD,”

‘I believe I never wrote to thank you for your story in the _Dome_,

which I read eventually in an old Welsh tower. It was the right place

to read such a fantasy of the dark and bright blindness of the Celt: and

I found it, if not of your very best, yet full of imaginative stimulus.

Not many weeks ago, in very different surroundings, Mr. Sharp read me

a poem—two poems—of yours. So I feel that I have the sense, at least,

of your continued journeys thro’ the divine and earthly regions of

the Gael, and how life looks to you, and what colours it wears. What

should we do were it not for that sense of the little group of simple

and faithful souls, who love the clay of earth because heaven is wrapt

in it, and stand by and support their lonely fellows in the struggle

against the forces upon forces the world sends against them? I trust at

some time it may be my great good fortune to see you and talk of these

things, and hear more of your doings.

ERNEST RHYS.

From the little rock-perched, sea-girt Pettycur Inn, my husband wrote

to Mrs. Janvier:

THE HOUSE OF DREAMS,

20th Dec., 1898.

... It has been a memorable time here. I have written some of my best

work—including two or three of the new things for _The Dominion of

Dreams_—viz. “The Rose of Flame,” “Honey of the Wild Bees,” and “The

Secrets of the Night.”

What a glorious day it has been. The most beautiful I have ever seen at

Pettycur I think. Cloudless blue sky, clear exquisite air tho’ cold,

with a marvellous golden light in the afternoon. Arthur’s Seat, the

Crags and the Castle and the 14 ranges of the Pentlands all clear-cut

as steel, and the city itself visible in fluent golden light. The whole

coast-line purple blue, down to Berwick Law and the Bass Rock, and the

Isle of May 16 miles out in the north sea.

And now I listen to the gathering of the tidal waters under the

stars. There is an infinite solemnity—a hush, something sacred and

wonderful. A benediction lies upon the world. Far off I hear the roaming

wind. Thoughts and memories crowd in on me. Here I have lived and

suffered—here I have touched the heights—here I have done my best. And

now, here, I am going through a new birth.

‘_Sic itur ad astral!_’

During the years that F. M. developed so rapidly her creator felt

the necessity pressing hard on him to sustain, as far as he could,

the reputation of W. S. He valued such reputation as he had and was

anxious not to let it die away; yet there was a great difference in

the method of production of the two kinds of work. The F. M. writing

was the result of an inner impulsion, he wrote because he had to give

expression to himself whether the impulse grew out of pain or out of

pleasure. But W. S., divorced as much as could be from his twin self,

wrote because he cared to, because the necessities of life demanded

it. He was always deeply interested in his critical work, for he was a

constant student of Literature in all its forms, and of the Literature

of different countries—in particular of France, America and Italy.

This form of study, this keen interest, was a necessity to W. S.; but

fiction was to him a matter of choice. He deliberately set himself to

write the two novels _Wives in Exile_ and _Silence Farm_, because he

felt W. S. ought to produce some such work as a normal procedure and

development; and also he felt it imperative to show some result of the

seclusion he was known to seek for purposes of work. He was deeply

interested in both books. _Wives in Exile_ was the easier to write, as

it gave an outlet to the vein of whimsicality in him, to his love of

fun. He delighted in the weaving of any plot, or in any extravaganza.

The book was a great relief and rest to him and was a real tonic to his

mind.

A little later, when he realised that something more was expected

of him and was too ill to attempt anything in the shape of comedy,

he therefore set himself to write a tragic tale of the Lowlands,

founded on a true incident. Into this he put serious interested work,

but there was one consideration that throughout had a restraining

effect on him—he never forgot that the book should not have obvious

kinship to the work of F. M., that he should keep a considerable

amount of himself in check. For there was a midway method, that was

a blending of the two, a swaying from the one to the other, which he

desired to avoid, since he knew that many of the critics were on the

watch. Therefore, he strained the realistic treatment beyond what he

otherwise would have done, in order to preserve a special method of

presentment. Nevertheless, that book was the one he liked best of all

the W. S. efforts, and he considered that it contained some of his most

satisfactory work. _Wives in Exile_ was published in June of 1896 by

Mr. Grant Richards, and _Silence Farm_ in 1897.

The following letter from Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton was a great

pleasure. It is, I believe, the only written expression of what the

author terms the “inwardness of _Aylwin_”:

THE PINES, PUTNEY HILL,

Oct. 19, 1898.

MY DEAR SHARP,

I had no idea that you were in England, and had no means of finding your

address.

You read only a portion of _Aylwin_—as far, I think, as the discovery

that Winifred had been the model of Wilderspin. I always intended to

send you other portions, but procrastination ruined my good intentions.

You and my dear friend Mrs. Sharp were very kind to it, I remember,

and this encourages me to hope that when you come to read it in its

entirety, you will like it better than ever. Although it is of course

primarily a love-story, and, as such, will be read by the majority of

readers, it is intended to be the pronouncement of something like a

new gospel—the gospel of love as the great power which stands up and

confronts a materialistic cosmogony and challenges it and conquers it.

This gospel of course is more fully expressed in “The Coming of Love” of

which I send you a copy. “The Coming of Love” is of course a sequel to

_Aylwin_, although, for certain reasons, it preceded in publication the

novel. _Aylwin_ appears in the last year of the present century, and I

had a certain object in delaying it for a little while longer because

I believe that should it have more than an ephemeral existence as to

which I am of course very doubtful, it will appeal fifty years hence

to fifty people where it now only appeals to one. I cannot think that,

when a man has felt the love-passion as deeply as Aylwin feels it, he

will find it possible, whatever physical science may prove, to accept

a materialistic theory of the universe. He must either commit suicide

or become a maniac.... Henry Aylwin and Percy Aylwin, the Tarno Rye of

“The Coming of Love,” spring from the same Romany ancestors and they

inherited therefore the most passionate blood in the Western World. Each

of them is driven to a peculiar spiritualistic cosmogony by the love of

a girl—Winifred Wynne and Rhona Boswell, though the two girls are the

exact opposite of each other in temperament.

But you really must let me get a glimpse of you somehow before you leave

England again.

Your affectionate

“AYLWIN.”

CHAPTER XX

THE DOMINION OF DREAMS

For the January number of _The Fortnightly Review_ for 1899 “Fiona”

wrote a long study on “A Group of Celtic Writers” and what she held to

be “the real Celticism.” The writers specially noted are W. B. Yeats,

Dr. Douglas Hyde, George Russell (A. E.), Nora Hopper, Katherine Tynan

Hinkson, and Lionel Johnson. With regard to the Celtic Revival the

writer considered that “there has been of late too much looseness of

phrase concerning the Celtic spirit, the Celtic movement, and that

mysterious entity Celticism. The ‘Celtic Renascence,’ the ‘Gaelic

glamour,’ these, for the most part, are shibboleths of the journalist

who if asked what it is that is being re-born, or what differentiating

qualities has the distinction of Gaelic from any other ‘glamour,’ or

what constitutes ‘glamour’ itself, would as we say in the North, be

fair taken aback.... What is called ‘the Celtic Renascence’ is simply

a fresh development of creative energy coloured by nationality, and

moulded by inherited forces, a development diverted from the common way

by accident of race and temperament. The Celtic writer is the writer

the temper of whose mind is more ancient, more primitive, and in a

sense more natural than that of his compatriot in whom the Teutonic

strain prevails. The Celt is always remembering; the Anglo Saxon has

little patience which lies far behind or far beyond his own hour. And

as the Celt comes of a people who grew in spiritual outlook as they

began what has been revealed to us by history as a ceaseless losing

battle, so the Teuton comes of a people who has lost in the spiritual

life what they have gained in the moral and the practical—and I use

moral in its literal and proper sense. The difference is a far greater

one than may be recognised readily. The immediate divergence is, that

with the Celt ancestral memory and ancestral instinct constitute a

distinguishable factor in his life and his expression of life, and that

with his Teutonic compatriot vision, dream, actuality and outlook, are

in the main restricted to what in the past has direct bearing upon the

present, and to what in the future is also along the line of direct

relation to the present.... All that the new generation of Celtic or

Anglo-Celtic (for the most part Anglo-Celtic) writers hold in conscious

aim, is to interpret anew ‘the beauty at the heart of things,’ not

along the line of English tradition but along that of racial instinct,

coloured and informed by individual temperament.”

* * * * *

Naturally the article was favourably commented upon in Ireland. The

immediate result in the English press was the appearance in _The Daily

Chronicle_ of January 28th of a long unsigned article entitled “Who is

Fiona Macleod: A Study in two styles” to suggest that in response to

the cry of “Author!” so repeatedly made, “we may, in our search for

Miss Macleod, turn to Mr. William Sharp himself and say with literal

truth ‘Thou art beside thyself!’”

The writer advanced many proofs in support of his contention, drawn

from a close study of the writings and methods of work of W. S. and F.

M.; and asked, in conclusion: “Will Mr. Sharp deny that he is identical

with Miss Macleod? That Miss Macleod is Mr. Sharp, I, for one, have not

a lingering doubt and I congratulate the latter on the success, the

real magic and strength of the work issued under his assumed name.”

At first the harassed author ignored the challenge; but a few months

later F. M. yielded to the persuasion of her publishers—who had a book

of hers in the press—and wrote a disclaimer which appeared in _The

Literary World_ and elsewhere.

In April 1899 _The Dominion of Dreams_ was published by Messrs. A.

Constable & Co.

To Mr. Frank Rinder the author wrote:

MY DEAR FRANK,

Today I got three or four copies of _The Dominion of Dreams_. I wish you

to have one, for this book is at once the deepest and most intimate that

F. M. has written.

Too much of it is born out of incurable heartache, “the nostalgia for

impossible things.” ... My hope is that the issues of life have been

woven to beauty, for its own sake, and in divers ways to reach and help

or enrich other lives.... “The Wells of Peace” must, I think, appeal

to many tired souls, spiritually athirst. That is a clue to the whole

book—or all but the more impersonal part of it, such as the four opening

stories and “The Herdsman”; this is at once my solace, my hope and my

ideal. If ever a book (in the deeper portion of it) came out of the

depths of a life it is this: and so, I suppose it shall live—for by a

mysterious law, only the work of suffering, or great joy, survives, and

that in degree to its intensity....

F. M.’s influence is now steadily deepening and, thank God, along the

lines I have hoped and dreamed.... In the writings to come I hope a

deeper and richer and truer note of inward joy and spiritual hope

will be the living influence. In one of the stories in this book,

“The Distant Country” occurs a sentence that is to be inscribed on my

gravestone when my time comes.

“Love is more great than we conceive and Death is the keeper of unknown

redemptions.”

Lovingly,

WILL.

To another correspondent he wrote:

... Well, if it gains wide and sincere appreciation I shall be glad: if

it should practically be ignored I shall be sorry: but, beyond that,

I am indifferent. I know what I have tried to do: I know what I have

done: I know the end to which I work: I believe in the sowers who will

sow and the reapers who will reap, from some seed of the spirit in this

book: and knowing this, I have little heed of any other considerations.

Beauty, in itself, for itself, is my dream: and in some expression

of it, in the difficult and subtle art of words, I have a passionate

absorption.”

In a letter to Mr. Macleay W. S. explained that Fiona’s new book is

the logical outcome of the others: the deeper note, the _vox humana_,

of these. I think it is more than merely likely that _this_ is the

last book of its kind. I have had to live my books—and so must follow

an inward law—that is truth to art as well as to life I think. There

is, however, a miscellaneous volume (of ‘appreciations,’ and mystical

studies) and also a poetic volume which I suppose should be classed

with it. I imagine that, thereafter, her development will be on

unexpected lines, both in fiction and the drama: judging both from

what I know and what I have seen. In every sense I think you are right

when you speak of ‘surprise’ as an element in what we may expect from

her.... I suppose some of that confounded controversy about Miss M. and

myself will begin again....

* * * * *

To Mr. W. B. Yeats the author wrote about the book, and described our

plans for the summer:

Monday, 1899.

MY DEAR YEATS,

... As you well know, all imaginative work is truly alive only when it

has died into the mind and been born again. The mystery of dissolution

is the common mean of growth. Resurrection is the test of any spiritual

idea—as of the spiritual life itself, of art, and of any final

expression of the inward life.... I have been ill—and seriously—but

am now better, though I have to be careful still. All our plans for

Scandinavia in the autumn are now over—partly by doctor’s orders, who

says I must have hill and sea air native to me—Scotland or Ireland.

So about the end of July my wife and I intend to go to Ireland. It

will probably be to the east coast, 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.

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.

M. 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 only an author whose writings have a constant

charm for me, but as from a Celtic comrade and spiritual brother who is

also the foremost living exponent of the Breton genius. It may interest

you to know that I am preparing an _étude_ on Contemporary Breton (i. e.

Franco-Breton) Literature; which, however, will be largely occupied with

consideration of your own high achievement in prose and verse.

It gives me sincere pleasure to send to you by this post a copy of the

‘popular’ edition of Adamnan’s _Life of St. Colum_—which please me by

accepting. You will find, below these primitive and often credulous

legends of Iona a beauty of thought and a certain poignant exquisiteness

of sentiment that cannot but appeal to you, a Breton of the Bretons....

It seems to me that in writing the spiritual history of Iona I am

writing the spiritual history of the Gael, of all our Celtic race. The

lovely wonderful little island sometimes appears to me as a wistful

mortal, in his eyes the pathos of infinite desires and inalienable

ideals—sometimes as a woman, beautiful, wild, sacred, inviolate, clad in

rags, but aureoled with the Rainbows of the west.

“Tell the story of Iona, and you go back to God, and end in God.” (The

first words of my ‘spiritual history’)....

But you will have already wearied of so long a letter. My excuse is ...

that you are Anatole Le Braz, and I am your far-away but true comrade,

FIONA MACLEOD.

On the 30th Dec. W. S. wrote to Mr. Frank Rinder:

Just a line, dear Frank, both as dear friend and literary comrade, to

greet you on New Year’s morning, and to wish you health and prosperity

in 1900. I would like you very much to read some of this new Fiona work,

especially the opening pages of “Iona,” for they contain a very deep and

potent spiritual faith and hope, that has been with me ever since, as

there told, as a child of seven, old Seumas Macleod (who taught me so

much—was indeed the _father_ of Fiona)—took me on his knees one sundown

on the island of Eigg, and made me pray to “Her.” I have never written

anything mentally so spiritually autobiographical. Strange as it may

seem it is almost all literal reproduction of actuality with only some

dates and names altered.

But enough about that troublesome F. M.!...

And to Mr. Gilchrist, “It was written _de profundis_, partly because of

a compelling spirit, partly to help others passionately eager to obtain

some light on this most complex and intimate spiritual destiny.”

Some months previously William had written to an unknown correspondent,

Dr. John Goodchild, poet, mystic and archeologist:

THE OUTLOOK TOWER,

EDINBURGH,

1898.

MY DEAR SIR,

I have to thank you very cordially for your book and the long and

interesting letter which accompanied it. It must be to you also that I

am indebted for an unrevised proof-copy of _The Light of the West_.

Everything connected with the study of the Celtic past has an especial

and deep interest for me, and there are few if any periods more

significant than that of the era of St. Columba. His personality has

charmed me, in the old and right sense of the word ‘charm’: but I

have come to it, or it to me, not through books (though of course

largely through Adamnan) so much as through a knowledge gained partly

by reading, partly by legendary love and hearsay, and mainly by much

brooding on these, and on every known saving and record of Colum, in

Iona itself. When I wrote certain of my writings (e. g. “Muime Chriosd”

and “The Three Marvels of Iona”) I felt, rightly or wrongly, as though

I had in some measure become interpretative of the spirit of “Colum the

White.”

Again, I have long had a conviction—partly an emotion of the

imagination, and partly a belief insensibly deduced through a hundred

avenues of knowledge and surmise—that out of Iona is again to come a

Divine Word, that Iona, the little northern isle, will be as it were the

tongue in the mouth of the South.

Believe me, sincerely yours,

FIONA MACLEOD.

“The House of Usna”—one of three Celtic plays, on which F. M. had

been working for several months, was brought out under the auspices

of The Stage Society, of which William Sharp was the first Chairman.

Mr. Frederick Whelen, the founder of that Society, had met my husband

at Hindhead when we were staying with his uncle and aunt, Mr. and

Mrs. Grant Allen, at their charming house, The Croft, built among the

heather and the pines on the hill-top just by the edge of the chasm

called “The Devil’s Punch Bowl.”

The older man was keenly interested in the project, did his utmost

to help towards its realisation. “The House of Usna” was performed

at the Fifth Meeting of the Society at the Globe Theatre April 29th,

1900, together with two short plays by Maeterlinck, _The Interior_

and _The Death of Tintagiles_. The music, composed especially for the

short drama in three scenes, was by Mr. Y. M. Capel, and the play was

produced under the direction of Mr. Granville Barker. According to one

critic: “It had beauty and it had atmosphere, two very rare things on

the stage, but I did not feel that it quite made a drama, or convince,

as a drama should, by the continuous action of inner or outer forces.

It was, rather, passion turning upon itself, and with no language but a

cry.”

The author took the greatest interest in the rehearsals, and in the

performance. He thoroughly enjoyed the double play that was going

on, as he moved about the theatre, and chatted to his friends during

the intervals, with little heed of the risks he ran of detection of

authorship. The drama itself was printed three months later in _The

National Review_, and eventually published in book form in America by

Mr. T. B. Mosher, in 1903.

In 1900, too, the second of these dramas, “The Immortal Hour,” appeared

in the November number of _The Fortnightly Review_. It was published

posthumously in England (Foulis) and in America (Mosher). The third

play, “The Enchanted Valleys,” was never finished. It had been the

author’s intention to publish these dramas in book form under the third

title, and to dedicate it to Mr. W. L. Courtney, who, as Editor of the

_Fortnightly_, had been a good friend to Fiona Macleod.

To his unknown correspondent the dramatist wrote again:

Nov. 15, 1900.

DEAR DR. GOODCHILD,

I am glad that you have found pleasure in _The Immortal Hour_. I wonder

if you interpret the myth of Midir and Etain quite differently, or if

you, too, find in Midir the symbol of the voice of the other world; and

what you think of Dalua, the Fool, here and elsewhere. Your earnest

letter, written in spiritual comradeship, has been read by me again

and again. I do not say that the warning in it is not justified, still

less that it is not called for: but, on the other hand, I do not think

I follow you aright. Is it something in _The Immortal Hour_ (or in _The

Divine Adventure_ or more likely _The Dominion of Dreams_) that impelled

you to write as you did: or something seemingly implied, or inferred by

you?...

We seldom know how or where we really stand, or the mien and aspect

we unwittingly bear to the grave eyes of the gods. Is it the lust of

knowledge, of Hidden Things, of the Delight of the World, of the magic

of Mother-Earth, of the Flesh—to one or all—that you allude. The matter

touches me intimately.

You have (I had almost said mysteriously, but why so, for it would be

more mysterious if there were no secret help in spiritual comradeship)

helped me at more than one juncture in my life....

Most sincerely,

FIONA MACLEOD.

Dr. Goodchild replied:

BORDIGHERA,

Nov. 29, 1900.

MY DEAR MISS MACLEOD,

I left one or two of your questions unanswered in my last. I am no

Celtic scholar. It was your ‘Prayer of the Women’ which suggested to me

first how far you might feel for your sisters, and how far you might

journey to find succour....

A woman who gazes into Columba’s Well and sees how the bubbles burst

on its surface, needs all her own wisdom lest she be dizzy, and a hand

held out from the opposite side the spring may help her to gaze more

steadily. _Midhir_, I believe to be the same as the oriental _Mitherd_,

the Recipient of Light, and its translator in the _Midhc-Myth_, A

voice from the “Otherworld” as you say, but the wearer of the _Miter_,

speaking not from the _Under_world, but the _Upper_world i.e. He is a

High Priest speaking in the full light of the Sun.

_Etain_ is difficult, and my own ideas by no means formulated. I merely

suggest that ere your Etain was born, her name typified the strong hope

of the singer, his immortality, his knowledge that the Sun not merely

creates but re-creates in renewed beauty.

If you remember Cairbre, the son of Etain, you may also remember those

other Ethainn who sung before the Ark in a far country. The Father is

put on one side for the Mother, by the singer, the Mother for the Bride.

Even Milton, puritan though he was, must invoke a woman to the aid of

“adventurous song” and is careful not to change the sex when in the Muse

of Sinni and Silva is seen the Spirit of the Creator.

As regards Dalua, I know nothing of him by name except what you yourself

have written. Is there any connection between the name and Dala (the

Celtic) which is sometimes found in company with Brat and Death, in your

Celtic genealogies?

At the same time I have dimly guessed all my life how folly might be

better than the wisdom of wise men, and remembering dimly how much wiser

I was myself as a child than after I had grown up, I have incessantly

desired a return to that state of childish thought, and tried to learn

from children, when I had the chance, the secrets of their folly which

carried them so near to divinity, if they were not hurried away from

their vision by those about them.

J. A. G.

The Essay entitled “Celtic” had originally appeared in the

_Contemporary Review_ a few weeks before the publication of the new

volume, and had aroused considerable comment. In Britain it was

regarded as a clear statement of the aims and ideas of the so-called

Celtic Revival—(a term which “F. M.” greatly disliked). It was

otherwise in Ireland, and naturally so, considering the different

conditions on both sides of the Irish channel out of which the movement

had grown. On this side political considerations had not touched the

question; it was mainly concerned with the preservation of the old

language, with racial characteristic feelings, and their expression

in literature. On the other side of the water, the workers had many

more issues at heart than in the Highlands. So the Highland Celt and

the Irish Celts did not quite understand one another; an animated

correspondence ensued in private and in the press. The Irish press

was divided in its opinion on ‘Celtic,’ because the writers were not

of one mind among themselves in their methods of working towards the

one end all Celts have at heart. There were those, who being ardent

Nationalists regarded the Celtic literary movement as one with the

political, or as greatly coloured by it. This factor gave a special

element to the Irish phase of the movement which sharply differentiated

it from the movement in Scotland, Wales or Brittany. Other workers

were interested in the movement as a whole, in each of the “six

Celtic Nations,” and “The Celtic Association” was formed, with Lord

Castletown at its head, with a view of keeping each of the six branches

of the movement in touch with each other: the Irish, Scots, Welsh,

Manx, Breton, and Cornish or British. This Society desired to make a

Federation of these working sections an actuality, and to that end

decided to hold a Pan Celtic Congress every three years. The first of

these was held in Dublin, and to it my husband subscribed as W. S. and

as F. M., though, as an obvious precaution against detection, he did

not attend it.

Opinion in Ireland was divided as to the value of such a Federation;

certain of the enthusiasts believed that working for it drew strength

and work away from the central needs in Ireland. Another point

of dispute was the question of language; as to what did or would

constitute an Irish Literature—works written in the Erse only; or all

work, either in the Erse or the English tongue that gave expression to

and made vital the Celtic spirit and aspirations. F. M. deplored the

uniting of the political element to the movement—and naturally had no

inclination towards any such feeling.

William Sharp’s great desire was that the Celtic spirit should be kept

alive, and be a moulding influence towards the expression of the racial

approach to and yearning after spiritual beauty, whether expressed in

Gaelic or in the English tongue. He knew that there is a tendency,

with the young of those people in Scotland at least, to put aside the

beautiful old thoughts, or at all events their outward expression, with

the disuse of the older language which had clothed those thoughts;

he feared that to put silence upon them would be to lose them after

a generation or two. Therefore it was his great hope that the genius

of the race would prove strong enough to express itself in either

language; and he realised that its influence would be more potent and

widespread if also it found expression in the English language. Thus a

misunderstanding arose; one of approach to the subject rather than in

essentials.

The Irish Press was divided in opinion concerning “Celtic,” especially

_The Irish Independent_, _Freeman’s Journal_ and _All Ireland Review_.

In the latter a correspondence began. One writer welcomed the Essay

as coming from one “possessed, as no other writer of our time is

possessed, with a sense of the faculty and mission of the Celt, and

shows not only deep intuition but the power to see life steadily and to

see it as a whole.”

“A. E.” however, was of another opinion. He considered the essay to

be out of place “in a book otherwise inspired by the artist’s desire

to shape in a beautiful way”; to be semi-political and inaccurate as

an expression of the passionate aimes of the Irish Celt; and he took

exception to the expression of belief ‘there is no racial road to

beauty.’

F. M. replied and endeavoured to make more clear her position; but

without success, as a subsequent letter from the Irish poet proved.

Another writer showed that there was obviously a confusion of two ideas

between the disputants—and Mr. T. W. Rolleston closed the discussion

with a letter in which he quietly pointed out the misapprehensions on

both sides and concluded with the generous admission: “Fiona Macleod

is most emphatically a helper, not a hinderer in this work, and one of

the most potent we have. For my own part I think her essay ‘Celtic’

indicates the lines on which we may most successfully work.” William

Sharp realised that since his essay had given rise to misapprehension

of his aims and ideas, it would be well to further elucidate them;

that moreover, as “F. M.” wrote to Mr. Russell, “a truer understanding

has come to me in one or two points where we have been at issue.” He,

therefore, revised and enlarged his essay, and, with an added Foreword

of explanation, had it published separately in America by Mr. T. B.

Mosher; and, finally, he included it in _The Winged Destiny_.

In the early autumn the following letter came to my husband from

overseas:

BRONXVILLE, N. Y.,

Sept. 26, 1900.

MY DEAREST GUILIELMO,

In this last year of _my_ Century, among my little and exceptional

attempts to celebrate my coming birthday—I wish that you the most leal

and loved of our English friends, may receive for once a word from me

before its sun goes down. Probably you are in some Lodge of the lake of

your Northern Night, or off for the Mountains of the Moon. Still, even

your restless and untamed spirit must by this time have been satisfied

of wandering; at any rate, I doubt not this will in the end find you

somewhere, and then you will know that my heart began to go out to you

as I neared another milestone ... it has suffered enough and lost enough

to make it yearn fondly for the frank face and dear words of a kindred,

though fresher heart like yours. I have a few devoted sons, and you are

one of them....

My remembrances to Mrs. Sharp and to Fiona McL—— whether she be real

or hypothetical. If I could have spared the means, and had had the

strength, I would have completed my recovery by a voyage to you and

England last summer....

Ever devotedly yours,

E. C. STEDMAN.

The “restless spirit” was by no means tired of wandering. Partly owing

to the insistence of circumstance, partly from choice, we began that

autumn a series of wanderings that brought us back to London and to

Scotland for a few weeks only each summer. The climate of England

proved too severe; my husband had been seriously ill in the New Year.

Despite his appearance of great vitality, his extraordinary power

of recuperation after every illness—which in a measure was due to

his buoyant nature, to his deliberate turning of his mind away from

suffering or from failure and “looking sunwise,” to his endeavour to

get the best out of whatever conditions he had to meet—we realised

that a home in England was no longer a possibility, that it would be

wise to make various experiments abroad rather than attempt to settle

anywhere permanently. Indeed, we were both glad to have no plans, but

to wander again how and where inclination and possibilities dictated.

Early in October he wrote to Mr. Murray Gilchrist from London: