WILLIAM SHARP (FIONA MACLEOD) A MEMOIR COMPILED BY HIS WIFE ELIZABETH A. SHARP by ELIZABETH A. SHARP (best ebook reader ubuntu txt) đ
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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 fewâthat 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 Iâll 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 lifeâthe strain of double life. Still, there is much to be done yet.
But for that ...
Your friend,
WILLIAM SHARP.
Mr. Yeatsâ Review of _The Dominion of Dreams_ in the _Bookman_ (July
1899) was carefully critical; it was his desire âto 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.â And then he pointed out that âevery 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.â
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.
âFionaâ 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 authorâs 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 âDaluaâ he has in one notable instance followed your
suggestion about the too literary âlamentable elder voices.â The order
is slightly changed too: for âThe House of Sand and Foamâ is to be
withdrawn and âLostâ is to come after âDaluaâ and precede âThe Yellow
Moonrock.â
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 âThe Sad Queenâ in _The Dominion of Dreams_, âThe
Laughter of Scathachâ in _The Washer of the Ford_, and âThe Harping of
Cravetheenâ in _The Sin-Eater_. In art, I think âDaluaâ and âThe Sad
Queenâ and âEnya of the Dark Eyesâ 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 âAlasdair the Proud,â
âChildren of the Dark Star,â âEnya of the Dark Eyes,â and in the
earlier tales âCravetheen,â âThe Dan-nan-Ron,â 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.
AproposâI wish very much you would read, when it appears in the
_Fortnightly Review_âprobably either in October or Novemberâthe
spiritual âessayâ called âThe Divine Adventureââan 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. âThe Immortal Hourâ (the shortest, practically a one act play in
time) is in verse.
Sincerely yours,
FIONA MACLEOD.
These two plays were finally entitled âThe Immortal Hourâ and âThe
House of Usna.â The third, âThe Enchanted Valleys,â 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, thoâ very glad to be there,
in a nice hotel, after our fatigues and 10 hoursâ 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 bayâwith 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 DeirdrĂȘ 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....â
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 manâand 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 wifeâan ideal loveable
womanâa 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 thereaboutsâbut
not fiction. It is a volume of âSpiritual Essaysâ etc.âstudies 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. Hampsteadâpersonally,
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 KhayyĂ m Club is the âBlue Ribbonâ 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
membersâand 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 (âRobertson of Chitralâ)âand
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 hereâso donât disappoint her as well as myself!...
Ever affectly, yours,
WILL.
PART II ( FIONA MACLEOD ) CHAPTER XXI ( THE DIVINE ADVENTURE )
_Celtic_
In the early summer of 1900 the volume entitled _The Divine Adventure:
Iona: By Sundown Shores_, with a dedication to me, was published by
Messrs. Chapman & Hall.
Various titles had been discarded, among others âThe Reddening of the
West,â also âThe Sun-Treaderâ intended for a story, projected but
never written, to form a sequel to âThe Herdsman.â 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,
Fionaâs 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_.
âThe Divine Adventureâ it is calledâthough this spiritual essay is
more âremote,â i. e. unconventional, and in a sense more âmystical,â
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 Symonâs
announced _Symbolist Movement in Literature_.
This is the longest letter I have written forâwell, I know not when.
But, then, you are a good friend.
Believe me, yours most sincerely,
FIONA MACLEOD.
To Mons. Anatole Le Braz, the Breton romance-writer and folklorist, F.
had written previously:
DEAR M. LE BRAZ,
Your letter was a great pleasure to me. It was the more welcome as
coming from one who is not
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