FIONA MACLEOD

To turn suddenly from this curious Persian life and thought to the still

more curious life and thought of ancient Scotland is indeed a violent

change. Nothing could be more dissimilar than the two types of paganism

out of which they spring; and if Fiona Macleod's work may have its

dangers for the precarious faith of modern days, they are certainly

dangers which attack the soul in a different fashion from those of Omar.

The revelation of Fiona Macleod's identity with William Sharp came upon

the English-reading world as a complete surprise. Few deaths have been

more lamented in the literary world than his, and that for many reasons.

His biography is one of the most fascinating that could be imagined. His

personality was a singularly attractive one,--so vital, so

indefatigable,--with interests so many-sided, and a heart so sound in

all of them. It is characteristic of him that in his young days he ran

away for a time with gipsies, for he tells us, "I suppose I was a gipsy

once, and before that a wild man of the woods." The two great influences

of his life were Shelley and D.G. Rossetti. The story of his literary

struggles is brimful of courage and romance, and the impression of the

book is mainly that of ubiquity. His insatiable curiosity seems to have

led him to know everybody, and every place, and everything.

At length Fiona Macleod was born. She arose out of nowhere, so far as

the reading public could discover. Really there was a hidden shy self in

Sharp, which must find expression impossible except in some secret way.

We knew him as the brilliant critic, the man of affairs, and the wide

and experienced traveller. We did not know him, until we discovered that

he was Fiona, in that second life of his in the borderland where flesh

and spirit meet.

First there came _Pharais_ in 1893, and that was the beginning of much.

Then came _The Children of To-morrow_, the forerunner of Fiona Macleod.

It was his first prose expression of the subjective side of his nature,

together with the element of revolt against conventionalities, which was

always strongly characteristic of him. It introduced England to the

hidden places of the Green Life.

The secret of his double personality was confided only to a few friends,

and was remarkably well kept. When pressed by adventurous questioners,

some of these allies gave answers which might have served for models in

the art of diplomacy. So Sharp wrote on, openly as William Sharp, and

secretly as Fiona Macleod. Letters had to reach Fiona somehow, and so it

was given out that she was his cousin, and that letters sent to him

would be safely passed on to her. If, however, it was difficult to keep

the secret from the public, it was still more difficult for one man to

maintain two distinct personalities. William Sharp of course had to

live, while Fiona might die any day. Her life entailed upon him another

burden, not of personification only, but of subject and research, and he

was driven to sore passes to keep both himself and her alive. For each

was truly alive and individual--two distinct people, one of whom thought

of the other as if she were "asleep in another room." Even the double

correspondence was a severe burden and strain, for Fiona Macleod had her

own large post-bag which had to be answered, just as William Sharp had

his. But far beyond any such outward expressions of themselves as these,

the difficulty of the double personality lay in deep springs of

character and of taste. Sharp's mind was keenly intellectual, observant,

and reasoning; while Fiona Macleod was the intuitional and spiritual

dreamer. She was indeed the expression of the womanly element in Sharp.

This element certainly dominated him, or rather perhaps he was one of

those who have successfully invaded the realm of alien sex. In his

earlier work, such as _The Lady of the Sea_,--"the woman who is in the

heart of woman,"--we have proof of this; for in that especially he so

"identified himself with woman's life, seeing it through her own eyes

that he seems to forget sometimes that he is not she." So much was this

the case that Fiona Macleod actually received at least one proposal of

marriage. It was answered quite kindly, Fiona replying that she had

other things to do, and could not think of it; but the little incident

shows how true the saying about Sharp was, that "he was always in love

with something or another." This loving and love-inspiring element in

him has been strongly challenged, and some of the women who have judged

him, have strenuously disowned him as an exponent of their sex. Yet the

fact is unquestionable that he was able to identify himself in a quite

extraordinary degree with what he took to be the feminine soul.

It seems to have something to do with the Celtic genius. One can always

understand a Scottish Celt better by comparing him with an Irish one or

a Welsh; and it will certainly prove illuminative in the present case to

remember Mr. W.B. Yeats while one is thinking of Fiona Macleod. To the

present writer it seems that the woman-soul is apparent in both, and

that she is singing the same tune; the only difference being, as it

were, in the quality of the voice, Fiona Macleod singing in high

soprano, and Mr. Yeats in deep and most heart-searching contralto.

The Fiona Macleod side of Sharp never throve well in London. Hers was

the fate of those who in this busy world have retained the faculty and

the need for dreaming. So Sharp had to get away from London--driven of

the spirit into the wilderness--that his other self might live and

breathe. One feels the power of this second self especially in certain

words that recur over and over again, until the reader is almost

hypnotised by their lilting, and finds himself in a kind of sleep. That

dreaming personality, with eyes half closed and poppy-decorated hair,

could never live in the bondage of the city cage. The spirit must get

free, and the longing for such freedom has been well called "a barbaric

passion, a nostalgia for the life of the moor and windy sea."

There are two ways of loving and understanding nature. Meredith speaks

of those who only see nature by looking at it along the barrel of a gun.

The phrase describes that large company of people who feel the call of

the wild indeed, and long for the country at certain seasons, but must

always be doing something with nature--either hunting, or camping out,

or peradventure going upon a journey like Baal in the Old Testament. But

there is another way, to which Carlyle calls attention as characteristic

of Robert Burns, and which he pronounces the test of a true poet. The

test is, whether he can wander the whole day beside a burn "and no'

think lang." Such was Fiona's way with nature. She needed nothing to

interest her but the green earth itself, and its winds and its waters.

It was surely the Fiona side of Sharp that made him kiss the grassy turf

and then scatter it to the east and west and north and south; or lie

down at night upon the ground that he might see the intricate patterns

of the moonlight, filtering through the branches of the trees.

In all this, it is needless to say, Mr. Yeats offers a close parallel.

He understands so perfectly the wild life, that one knows at once that

it is in him, like a fire in his blood. Take this for instance--

"They found a man running there;

He had ragged long grass-coloured hair;

He had knees that stuck out of his hose;

He had puddle water in his shoes;

He had half a cloak to keep him dry,

Although he had a squirrel's eye."

Such perfect observation is possible only to the detached spirit, which

is indeed doing nothing to nature, but only letting nature do her work.

In the sharp outline of this imagery, and in the mind that saw and the

heart that felt it, there is something of the keenness of the squirrel's

eye for nature.

Fiona's favourite part of nature is the sea. That great and many-sided

wonder, whether with its glare of phosphorescence or the stillness of

its dead calm, fascinates the poems of Sharp and lends them its spell.

But of the prose of Fiona it may be truly said that everything

"... doth suffer a sea-change,

Into something rich and strange."

These marvellous lines were never more perfectly illustrated than here.

As we read we behold the sea, now crouching like a gigantic tiger, now

moaning with some Celtic consciousness of the grim and loathsome

treasures in its depths, ever haunted and ever haunting. It is probable

that Sharp never wrote anything that had not for his ear an undertone of

the ocean. Sitting in London in his room, he heard, on one occasion, the

sound of waves so loud that he could not hear his wife knocking at the

door. Similarly in Fiona Macleod's writing seas are always rocking and

swinging. Gulfs are opening to disclose the green dim mysteries of the

deeper depths. The wind is running riot with the surface overhead, and

the sea is lord in all its mad glory and wonder and fear.

Mr. Yeats has the same characteristic, but again it is possible to draw

a fantastic distinction like that between the soprano and the alto. It

is lake water rather than the ocean that sounds the under-tone of Mr.

Yeats' poetry--

"I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavement grey,

I hear it in the deep heart's core."

The oldest sounds in the world, Mr. Yeats tells us are wind and water

and the curlew: and of the curlew he says--

"O curlew, cry no more in the air,

Or only to the waters of the West;

Because your crying brings to my mind

Passion-dimmed eyes and long heavy hair

That was shaken out over my breast:

There is enough evil in the crying of wind."

In all this you hear the crying of the wind and the swiftly borne scream

of the curlew on it, and you know that lake water will not be far away.

This magic power of bringing busy city people out of all their

surroundings into the green heart of the forest and the moorland, and

letting them hear the sound of water there, is common to them both.

Fiona Macleod is a lover and worshipper of beauty. Long before her, the

Greeks had taught the world their secret, and the sweet spell had

penetrated many hearts beyond the pale of Greece. It was Augustine who

said, "Late I have loved thee, oh beauty, so old and yet so new, late I

have loved thee." And Marius the Epicurean, in Pater's fine phrase, "was

one who was made perfect by love of visible beauty." It is a direct

instinct, this bracing and yet intoxicating love of beauty for its own

sake. Each nation produces a spiritual type of it, which becomes one of

the deepest national characteristics, and the Celtic type is easily

distinguished. No Celt ever cared for landscape. "It is loveliness I

ask, not lovely things," says Fiona; and it is but a step from this to

that abstract mystical and spiritual love of beauty, which is the very

soul of the Celtic genius. It expresses itself most directly in colours,

and the meaning of them is far more than bright-hued surfaces. The pale

green of running water, the purple and pearl-grey of doves, still more

the remote and liquid colours of the sky, and the sad-toned or the gay

garments of the earth--these are more by far to those who know their

value than pigments, however delicate. They are either a sensuous

intoxication or else a mystic garment of the spirit. Seumas, the old

islander, looking seaward at sunrise, says, "Every morning like this I

take my hat off to the beauty of the world." And as we read we think of

Mr. Neil Munro's lord of Doom Castle walking uncovered in the night

before retiring to his rest, and with tears welling in his eyes

exclaiming that the mountains are his evening prayer. Such mystics as

these are in touch with far-off things. Sharp, indeed, was led

definitely to follow such leading into regions of spiritualism where not

many of his readers will be able or willing to follow him, but Fiona

Macleod left the mystery vague. It might easily have defined itself in

some sort of pantheistic theory of the universe, but it never did so.

"The green fire" is more than the sap which flows through the roots of

the trees. It is as Alfred de Musset has called it, the blood that

courses through the veins of God. As we realise the full force of that

imaginative phrase, the dark roots of trees instinct with life, and the

royal liquor rising to its foam of leaves, we have something very like

Fiona's mystic sense of nature. Any extreme moment of human experience

will give an interpretation of such symbolism--love or death or the mere

springtide of the year.

It is not without significance that Sharp and Mr. Yeats and Mr. Symons

all dreamed on the same night the curious dream of a beautiful woman

shooting arrows among the stars. All the three had indeed the beautiful

woman in the heart of them, and in far-darting thoughts and imaginations

she was ever sending arrows among the stars. But Mr. Yeats is calmer and

less passionate than Fiona, as though he were crooning a low song all

the time, while the silent arrows flash from his bow. Sometimes, indeed,

he will blaze forth flaming with passion in showers of light of the

green fire. Yet from first to last, there is less of the green fire and

more of the poppies in Mr. Yeats and it is Fiona who shoots most

constantly and farthest among the stars.

_Haunted_, that is the word for this world into which we have entered.

The house without its guests would be uninhabitable for such poets as

these. The atmosphere is everywhere that of a haunted earth where

strange terrors and beauties flit to and fro--phantoms of spectral lives

which seem to be looking on while we play out our bustling parts upon

the stage. They are separate from the body, these shadows, and belong to

some former life. They are an ancestral procession walking ever behind

us, and often they are changing the course of our visible adventures by

the power of sins and follies that were committed in the dim and

remotest past. Certainly the author is, as he says, "Aware of things and

living presences hidden from the rest." "The shadows are here." The

spirits of the dead and the never born are out and at large. These or

others like them were the folk that Abt Vogler encountered as he played

upon his instrument--"presences plain in the place."

One of the most striking chapters in that very remarkable book of Mr.

Fielding Hall's, _The Soul of a People_, is that in which he describes

the nats, the little dainty spirits that haunt the trees of Burmah. But

it is not only the Eastern trees that are haunted, and Sharp is always

seeing tree-spirits, and nature-spirits of every kind, and talking with

them. Now and again he will give you a natural explanation of them, but

that always jars and sounds prosaic. In fact, we do not want it; we

prefer the "delicate throbbing things" themselves, to any facts you can

give us instead of them, for to those who have heard and seen beyond the

veil, they are far more real than any of your mere facts. Here we think

of Mr. Yeats again with his cry, "Come into the world again wild bees,

wild bees." But he hardly needed to cry upon them, for the wild bees

were buzzing in every page he wrote.

A world haunted in this fashion has its sinister side, allied with the

decaying corpses deep in the earth. When passion has gone into the world

beyond that which eye hath seen and ear heard, it takes, in presence of

the thought of death, a double form. It is in love with death and yet it

hates death. So we come back to that singular sentence of Robert Louis

Stevenson's, "The beauty and the terror of the world," which so

adequately describes the double fascination of nature for man. Her spell

is both sweet and terrible, and we would not have it otherwise The

menace in summer's beauty, the frightful contrast between the laughing

earth and the waiting death, are all felt in the prolonged and deep

sense of gloom that broods over much of Fiona's work, and in the

second-sight which very weirdly breaks through from time to time,

forcing our entrance into the land from which we shrink.

Mr. Yeats is not without the same sinister and moving undergloom,

although, on the whole, he is aware of kindlier powers and of a timid

affection between men and spirits. He actually addresses a remonstrance

to Scotsmen for having soured the disposition of their ghosts and

fairies, and his reconstructions of the ancient fairyland are certainly

full of lightsome and pleasing passages. Along either lane you may

arrive at peace, which is the monopoly neither of the Eastern nor of the

Western Celt, but it is a peace never free from a great wistfulness.

"How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true;

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face."

That there is much paganism in all this must be obvious to any one who

has given any attention to the subject. The tale of _The Annir-Choille_

confesses it frankly enough, where the young Christian prince is brought

back by the forest maiden from his new faith to the ancient pagan world.

Old gods are strewn everywhere upon the waysides down which Fiona leads

us, and there are many times when we cannot disentangle the spiritual

from the material, nor indeed the good from the evil influences. Dr.

John Brown used to tell the story of a shepherd boy near Biggar, who one

day was caught out on the hill in a thunder-storm. The boy could not

remember whether thunder-storms were sent by God or Satan, and so to be

quite safe, he kept alternately repeating the ejaculations, "Eh, guid

God," and "Eh, bonny deil." One often thinks of Fiona in connection with

that story. You are seldom quite sure whether it is a Christian or a

pagan deity whom you are invoking, but there is no question as to the

paganism of the atmosphere which you often breathe.

As a matter of fact, William Sharp began in frank and avowed paganism,

and passed from that through various phases into a high spirituality.

His early utterances in regard to Art, in which he deprecated any

connection between Art and a message, and insisted upon its being mere

expression, were of course sheer paganism. In 1892, before Fiona was

born, he published one of those delightful magazines which run through a

short and daring career and then vanish as suddenly as they arose. In

fact his magazine, _The Pagan Review_, from first to last had only one

number. It was edited by Mr. Brooks and William Sharp, and its articles

were contributed by seven other people. But these seven, and Mr. Brooks

as well, turned out eventually all to be William Sharp himself. It was

"frankly pagan; pagan in sentiment, pagan in convictions, pagan in

outlook.... The religion of our forefathers has not only ceased for us

personally, but is no longer in any vital and general sense a sovereign

power in the realm." He finished up with the interesting phrase, "Sic

transit gloria Grundi," and he quotes Gautier: "'Frankly I am in earnest

this time. Order me a dove-coloured vest, apple-green trousers, a pouch,

a crook; in short, the entire outfit of a Lignon shepherd. I shall have

a lamb washed to complete the pastoral....' This is the lamb."

The magazine was an extraordinarily clever production, and the fact that

he was its author is significant. For to the end of her days Fiona was a

pagan still, albeit sometimes a more or less converted pagan. In _The

Annir-Choille_, _The Sin-Eater_, _The Washer of the Ford_, and the

others, you never get away from the ancient rites, and there is one

story which may be taken as typical of all the rest, _The Walker in the

Night_:--

"Often he had heard of her. When any man met this woman his fate

depended on whether he saw her before she caught sight of him. If she

saw him first, she had but to sing her wild strange song, and he would

go to her; and when he was before her, two flames would come out of her

eyes, and one flame would burn up his life as though it were dry tinder,

and the other would wrap round his soul like a scarlet shawl, and she

would take it and live with it in a cavern underground for a year and a

day. And on that last day she would let it go, as a hare is let go a

furlong beyond a greyhound. Then it would fly like a windy shadow

from glade to glade, or from dune to dune, in the vain hope to reach a

wayside Calvary: but ever in vain. Sometimes the Holy Tree would almost

be reached; then, with a gliding swiftness, like a flood racing down a

valley, the Walker in the Night would be alongside the fugitive. Now and

again unhappy nightfarers--unhappy they, for sure, for never does weal

remain with any one who hears what no human ear should hearken--would be

startled by a sudden laughing in the darkness. This was when some such

terrible chase had happened, and when the creature of the night had

taken the captive soul, in the last moments of the last hour of the last

day of its possible redemption, and rent it this way and that, as a hawk

scatters the feathered fragments of its mutilated quarry."

We have said that nature may be either an intoxication or a sacrament,

and paganism might be defined as the view of nature in the former of

these two lights. But where you have a growing spirituality like that of

William Sharp, you are constantly made aware of the hieratic or

sacramental quality in nature also. It is this which gives its peculiar

charm and spell to Celtic folklore in general. The Saxon song of Beowulf

is a rare song, and its story is the swinging tale of a "pagan gentleman

very much in the rough," but for the most part it is quite destitute of

spiritual significance. It may be doubted if this could be said truly of

any Celtic tale that was ever told. Fiona Macleod describes _The Three

Marvels_ as "studies in old religious Celtic sentiment, so far as that

can be recreated in a modern heart that feels the same beauty and

simplicity in the early Christian faith"; and there is a constant sense

that however wild and even wicked the tale may be, yet it has its

Christian counterpart, and is in some true sense a strayed idealism.

At this point we become aware of one clear distinction between William

Sharp and Fiona Macleod. To him, literature was a craft, laboured at

most honestly and enriched with an immense wealth both of knowledge and

of cleverness; but to her, literature was a revelation, with divine

inspirations behind it--inspirations authentically divine, no matter by

what name the God might be called. So it came to pass that _The Pagan

Review_ had only one number. That marked the transition moment, when

Fiona Macleod began to predominate over William Sharp, until finally she

controlled and radically changed him into her own likeness. He passes on

to the volume entitled _The Divine Adventure_, which interprets the

spirit of Columba. Nature and the spiritual meet in the psychic phase

into which Sharp passed, not only in the poetic and native sense, but in

a more literal sense than that. For the Green Life continually leads

those who are akin to it into opportunities of psychical research among

obscure and mysterious forces which are yet very potent. With a nature

like his it was inevitable that he should be eventually lured

irresistibly into the enchanted forest, where spirit is more and more

the one certainty of existence.

For most of us there is another guide into the spirit land. In the

region of the spectral and occult many of us are puzzled and ill at

ease, but we all, in some degree, understand the meaning of ordinary

human love. Even the most commonplace nature has its magical hours now

and then, or at least has had them and has not forgotten; and it is love

that "leads us with a gentle hand into the silent land." This may form a

bond of union between Fiona Macleod and many who are mystified rather

than enlightened by psychic phenomena in the technical meaning of the

phrase. Here, perhaps, we find the key to the double personality which

has been so interesting in this whole study. It was William Sharp who

chose for his tombstone the inscription, "Love is more great than we

conceive, and death is the keeper of unknown redemptions." Fiona's work,

too, is full of the latent potency of love. Like Marius, she has

perceived an unseen companion walking with men through the gloom and

brilliance of the West and North, and sometimes her heart is so full

that it cannot find utterance at all. In the "dream state," that which

is mere nature for the scientist reveals itself, obscurely indeed and

yet insistently, as very God. God is dwelling in Fiona. He is smiling in

all sunsets. He is filling the universe with His breath and holding us

all in His "Mighty Moulding Hand."

The relation in which all this stands to Christianity is a very curious

question. The splendour, beauty, and spirituality of it all are evident

enough, but the references to anything like dogmatic or definite

Christian doctrine are confusing and obscure. Perhaps it was impossible

that one so literally a child of nature, and who had led such an

open-air life from his childhood, could possibly have done otherwise

than to rebel. It was the gipsy in him that revolted against

Christianity and every other form and convention of civilised life, and

claimed a freedom far beyond any which he ever used. We read that in his

sixth year, when already he found the God of the pulpit remote and

forbidding, he was nevertheless conscious of a benign and beautiful

presence. On the shore of Loch Long he built a little altar of rough

stones beneath a swaying pine, and laid an offering of white flowers

upon it. In the college days he turned still more definitely against

orthodox Presbyterianism; but he retained all along, not only belief in

the central truths that underlie all religions, but great reverence and

affection for them.

It is probable that towards the close he was approaching nearer to

formal Christianity than he knew. We are told that he "does not

reverence the Bible or Christian Theology in themselves, but for the

beautiful spirituality which faintly breathes through them like a vague

wind blowing through intricate forests." His quarrel with Christianity

was that it had never done justice to beauty, that it had a gloom upon

it, and an unlovely austerity. This indeed is a strange accusation from

so perfect an interpreter of the Celtic gloom as he was, and the retort

_tu quoque_ is obvious enough. There have indeed been phases of

Christianity which seemed to love and honour the ugly for its own sake,

yet there is a rarer beauty in the Man of Sorrows than in all the

smiling faces of the world. This is that hidden beauty of which the

saints and mystics tell us. They have seen it in the face more marred

than any man's, and their record is that he who would find a lasting

beauty that will satisfy his soul, must find it through pain conquered

and ugliness transformed and sorrow assuaged. The Christ Beautiful can

never be seen when you have stripped him of the Crown of Thorns, nor is

there any loveliness that has not been made perfect by tears. Thus

though there is truth in Sharp's complaint that Christianity has often

done sore injustice to beauty as such, yet it must be repeated that this

exponent of the Celtic heart somehow missed the element in Christianity

which was not only like, but actually identical with, his own deepest

truth.

Sharp often reminds one of Heine, with his intensely human love of life,

both in its brightness and in its darkness. Where that love is so

intense as it was in these hearts, it is almost inevitable that it

should sometimes eclipse the sense of the divine. Thus Sharp tells us

that "Celtic paganism lies profound still beneath the fugitive drift of

Christianity and civilisation, as the deep sea beneath the coming and

going of the tides." He was indeed so aware of this underlying paganism,

that we find it blending with Christian ideas in practically the whole

of his work. Nothing could be quoted as a more distinctive note of his

genius than that blend. It is seen perhaps most clearly in such stories

as _The Last Supper_ and _The Fisher of Men_. In these tales of

unsurpassable power and beauty, Fiona Macleod has created the Gaelic

Christ. The Christ is the same as He of Galilee and of the Upper Room in

Jerusalem, and His work the same. But he talks the sweet Celtic

language, and not only talks it but _thinks_ in it also. He walks among

the rowan trees of the Shadowy Glen, while the quiet light flames upon

the grass, and the fierce people that lurk in shadow have eyes for the

helplessness of the little lad who sees too far. Such tales are full of

a strange light that seems to be, at one and the same time, the Celtic

glamour and the Light of the World.

All the lovers of Mr. Yeats must have remembered many instances of the

same kind in his work. "And are there not moods which need heaven, hell,

purgatory, and faeryland for their expression, no less than this

dilapidated earth? Nay, are there not moods which shall find no

expression unless there be men who dare to mix heaven, hell, purgatory,

and faeryland together, or even to set the heads of beasts to the bodies

of men, or to thrust the souls of men into the heart of rocks? Let us go

forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart longs

for, and have no fear."

Mr. Yeats is continually identifying these apparently unrelated things;

and youth and peace, faith and beauty, are ever meeting in converging

lines in his work. No song of his has a livelier lilt than the _Fiddler

of Dooney_.

"I passed my brother and cousin:

They read in their books of prayer;

I read in my book of songs

I bought at Sligo fair.

When we come at the end of time,

To Peter sitting in state,

He will smile on the three old spirits,

But call me first through the gate.

And when the folk there spy me,

They will all come up to me,

With, 'Here is the fiddler of Dooney!'

And dance like a wave of the sea."

In a few final words we may try to estimate what all this amounts to in

the long battle between paganism and idealism. There is no question that

Fiona Macleod may be reasonably claimed by either side. Certainly it is

true of her work, that it is pure to the pure and dangerous to those who

take it wrongly. Meredith's great line was never truer than it is here,

"Enter these enchanted woods, ye who dare." The effect upon the mind,

and the tendency in the life, will depend upon what one brings to the

reading of it.

All this bringing back of the discarded gods has its glamour and its

risk. Such gods are excellent as curiosities, and may provide the

quaintest of studies in human nature. They give us priceless fragments

of partial and broken truth, and they exhibit cross-sections of the

evolution of thought in some of its most charming moments. Besides all

this, they are exceedingly valuable as providing us with that general

sense of religion, vague and illusive, which is deeper than all dogma.

But, for the unwary, there is the double danger in all this region that

they shall, on the one hand, be tempted to worship the old gods; or

that, on the other hand, even in loving them without definite worship,

the old black magic may spring out upon them. As to the former

alternative, light minds will always prefer the wonderfully coloured but

more or less formless figure in a dream, to anything more definite and

commanding. They will cry, "Here is the great god"; and, intoxicated by

the mystery, will fall down to worship. But that which does not command

can never save, and for a guiding faith we need something more sure than

this.

Moreover, there is the second alternative of the old black magic. A

discarded god is always an uncanny thing to take liberties with. While

the earth-spirit in all its grandeur may appeal to the jaded and

perplexed minds of to-day as a satisfying object of faith, the result

will probably be but a modern form of the ancient Baal-worship. It will

in some respects be a superior cult to its ancient prototype. Its

devotees will not cut themselves with knives. They will cut themselves

with sweet and bitter poignancies of laughter and tears, when the sun

shines upon wet forests in the green earth. This, too, is Baal-worship,

hardly distinguishable in essence from that cruder devotion to the

fructifying and terrifying powers of nature against which the prophets

of Israel made their war. In much that Fiona Macleod has written we feel

the spirit struggling like Samson against its bonds of green withes,

though by no means always able to break them as he did; or lying down in

an earth-bound stupor, content with the world that nature produces and

sustains. Here, among the elemental roots of things, when the heart is

satisfying itself with the passionate life of nature, the red flower

grows in the green life, and the imperative of passion becomes the final

law.

On the other hand, a child of nature may remember that he is also a

child of the spirit; and, even in the Vale Perilous, the spirit may be

an instinctive and faithful guide. Because we love the woods we need not

worship the sacred mistletoe. Because we listen to the sea we need not

reject greater and more intelligible voices of the Word of Life. And the

mention of the sea, and the memory of all that it has meant in Fiona

Macleod's writing, reminds us strangely of that old text, "Born of water

and of the Spirit." While man lives upon the sea-girt earth, the voices

of the ocean, that seem to come from the depths of its green heart, will

always call to him, reminding him of the mysterious powers and the

terrible beauties among which his life is cradled. Yet there are deeper

secrets which the spirit of man may learn--secrets that will still be

told when the day of earth is over, when the sea has ceased from her

swinging, and the earth-spirit has fled for ever. It is well that a man

should remember this, and remain a spiritual man in spite of every form

of seductive paganism.