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.
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 Underworld, but the Upperworld 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:
My dear Robert,
A little ago, on sitting down in my club to answer some urgent notes (and whence I now write) my heart leapt with pleasure, and an undeserving stranger received Part I of a beaming welcome—for the waiter announced that “Mr. Gilchrist would like to see you, Sir.” Alas, it was no dear Peaklander, but only a confounded interviewer about the Stage Society!...
Elizabeth and I leave England on the morning of the 12th—and go first to the South of Provence, near Marseilles: after Yule-tide we’ll go on to Italy, perhaps first to Shelley’s Spezzia or to Pegli of the Orange Groves near Genoa: and there we await you, or at furthest a little later, say in Florence. We shall be away till the end of March.
Meanwhile ‘tis all unpleasantness and incertitude: much to do and little pleasure in the doing: a restlessness too great to be salved short of departure, and the longed for mental and nervous rest far away.
I have just returned from a flying visit to Dorset, and saw Thomas Hardy. He is well, and at work: the two happiest boons of fortune for all our kinship—and therein I hope you are at one with him. I wish you could run up and see our first Stage Society production this weekend (Sunday) when we bring out a short play by Hardy and R. L. Stevenson and Henley’s ‘Macaire.’ (I resigned my Chairmanship but was re-elected: and so am extra busy before I go.)
Your loving friend,
Will.
P. S. Miss Macleod’s drama ‘The Immortal Hour’ is in the November Fortnightly, also her article “The Gael and His Heritage” in the November Nineteenth Century.
And in addition to these a study on the Dramas of Gabriele d’Annunzio appeared in The Fortnightly, in September, signed “W. S.”
To Mr. Macleay he sent an account of the work he had on hand:
Aix-en-Provence,
30th Nov., 1900.
Dear Mr. Macleay,
Your friendly note has reached me here, where I have been some time, this being my best centre in Provence at this season for my special studies in Provencal literature and history. My wife and I expect to remain here till about Christmas time, and then to go on to Italy.
Pressure of urgent work—chiefly a lengthy volume on the Evolution of the Fine Arts in the Nineteenth Century, primarily for transatlantic publication—prevented my being much in Scotland this autumn. I was a brief while in Galloway visiting friends, and for a week or so at Portpatrick, and a few days in Edinburgh—c’est tout.
At one time there was a chance that I might be near Taynuilt, and I looked forward greatly to see Mr. Alexander Carmichael again. He is a splendid type of the true Highlander, and of a nature incomparably sweet and refined—and I have the greatest admiration of him in all ways....
A remarkable family, and I would to Heaven there were more such families in the Highlands now. Yes, what a book Carmina Gadelica is! It ought to become as precious to the Scottish Gael as the Greek Anthology to all who love the Hellenic ideal, but with a more poignant, a more personal appeal.... I can’t tell you about Miss Macleod’s historical romance for the good reason that I don’t know anything about its present prospects myself. Personally I regret the long postponement, as I think (judging from what I have seen) that it would be a success as a romance of history. Miss Macleod, however, became dissatisfied with what she had done, or its atmosphere, or both, and has not touched it again for some months past—though the last time she spoke of the subject she said she hoped it would be ready by midsummer.... I am myself heavily engaged in work, including many commissions. I’ve finished an essay on “Impressionism” (“The Impressionist” I call it) for the forthcoming new monthly, The North Liberal Review, and am now in the throes of a long Quarterly article. Then I have a Provencal book on hand, and (interlusive) a Provencal romance.
You will, of course, keep all I have said of myself and doings, and still more importantly of Miss Macleod, to yourself. I don’t think she wants anyone save friends and acquaintances to know that she is abroad, and for her health. And above all needing rest as she is, she dreads the slightest addition to a correspondence already beyond her capacities.
Before I left London I read with deep interest the opening instalments of Neil Munro’s new book Doom Castle. It promises, I think, to be his chef-d’œuvre.
Write to me again soon, with news of your doings and prospects.
Yours sincerely,
William Sharp.
The Provencal romance that he was mentally projecting—the never written Gypsy Trail—was in part to have dealt with his early gipsy experiences. One among other things which revived this strain of memory was our near vicinage to Les Sainte-Maries, in Provence, where the bones of Sarah, the gipsy servant of “les Maries,” are enshrined; also he had recently read the vivid description of the gathering of the gipsy tribes at that Shrine on her Feast day, written by the Provencal novelist Jean Aicard, in his Le Roi des Camargues.
During my husband’s first visit to Provence he had been much interested in meeting certain members of Les Félibres, the Provencal literary and linguistic Nationalists. He visited Frederick Mistral in his charming country home and noticed the similarity of physical type shared by the Provencal and himself. I, also, was struck by the likeness between the two men and thought that Mistral might easily have passed for elder brother of his Scots confrère. At Avignon we saw Madame Roumanille, the sister of Felix Gras, and widow of one of the founders of Les Félibres, and her poet-daughter, Térèse, who inherited her father’s gift. At Aix we met Mistral’s god-daughter Madame Marie Gasquet, daughter of the poet M. Gerard, another of the original group of workers in the old Langue d’Œuil. Madame Gasquet was the wife of the young poet, Joachim Gasquet, between whom and my husband there grew up a warm friendship.
PROVENCE
Maniace
New Year’s Day found us at Palermo where my husband was enchanted at being presented with a little pottle of freshly gathered wild strawberries; a week later we traversed the island to Taormina, whence he wrote to Mrs. Janvier:
Monte Venere, Taormina,
25th Jan., 1901.
... Today it was too warm to work contentedly indoors even upon our little terrace with its superb views over Etna and the Ionian Sea—so at 9 a.m. Elizabeth and I, with a young painter-friend came up here to a divine spot on the slopes of the steep and grand-shouldered Hill of Venus, bringing with us our writing and sketching materials and also fruit and wine and light luncheon. It is now about 3 p.m. and we have lain here for hours in the glorious warmth and cloudless sunglow—undisturbed by any sounds save the soft sighing of the sea far below, the fluttering of a young goatherd with his black flock on a steep across a near ravine, and the occasional passing of a muleteer or of a mountaineer with his wine-panier’d donkeys. A vast sweep of sea is before us and beneath. To the left, under the almond boughs, are the broad straits which divide Sicily from Calabria—in front, the limitless reach of the Greek sea—to the right, below, the craggy heights and Monte Acropoli of Taormina—and, beyond, the vast slope of snow-clad Etna....
I have just been reading (for the hundredth time) in Theocritus. How doubly lovely he is, read on the spot. That young shepherd fluting away to his goats at this moment might be Daphnis himself. Three books are never far from here: Theocritus, the Greek Anthology, and the Homeric Hymns. I loved them before: now they are in my blood.
Legend has it that near this very spot Pythagoras used to come and dream. How strange to think that one can thus come in touch with two of the greatest men of antiquity—for within reach from here (a pilgrimage to be made from Syracuse) is the grave of Æschylus. Perhaps it was here that Pythagoras learned the secret of that music (for here both the sea-wind and the hill-wind can be heard in magic meeting) by which one day—as told in Iamblicus—he cured a young man of Taormina (Tauromenion) who had become mad as a wild beast, with love. Pythagoras, it is said, played an antique air upon his flute, and the madness went from the youth....
I shall never forget the journey across Sicily. I forget if I told you in my letter that it had been one of my dreams since youth to read the Homeric Hymns and Theocritus in Sicily—and it has been fulfilled: even to the unlikeliest, which was to read the great Hymn to Demeter at Enna itself. And that I did—in that wild and remote mountain-land. Enna is now called Castrogiovanni—but all else is unchanged—though the great temples to Demeter and Persephone are laid low. It was a wonderful mental experience to read that Hymn on the very spot where Demeter went seeking—torch in hand, and wind-blown blue peplos about her—her ravished daughter, the beautiful Pherephata or Persephone. However, I have already told you all about that—and the strange coincidence of the two white doves, (which Elizabeth witnessed at the moment I exclaimed) and about our wonderful sunset-arrival in Greek Tauromenion....
To the same friend he described our visit to Syracuse:
Casa Politi,
Strada Dionysio,
7th Feb.,:01.
... I must send you at least a brief line from Syracuse—that marvellous ‘Glory of Hellas’ where ancient Athens fell in ruin, alas, when Nicias lost here the whole army and navy and Demosthenes surrendered by the banks of the Anapus—the Syracuse of Theocritus you love so well—the Syracuse where Pindar heard some of his noblest odes sung, where Plato discoursed with his disciples of New Hellas, where (long before) the Argonauts had passed after hearing the Sirens singing by this fatal shore, and near where Ulysses derided Polyphemus—and where Æschylus lived so long and died.
It seems almost incredible when one is in the beautiful little Greek Theatre up on the rising ground behind modern Syracuse to believe that so many of the greatest plays of the greatest Greek tragedians (many unknown to us even by name) were given here under the direction of Æschylus himself. And now I must tell you of a piece of extraordinary good fortune. Yesterday turned out the superbest of this year—a real late Spring day, with the fields full of purple irises and asphodels and innumerable flowers, and the swallows swooping beneath the multitudes of flowering almonds. We spent an unforgettable day—first going to the Castle of ancient Euryalos—perhaps the most wonderful I have ever known. Then, in the evening, I heard that today a special choral performance was to be given in the beautiful hillside Greek Theatre in honour of the visit of Prince Tommaso (Duke of Genoa, the late King’s brother, and Admiral of the Fleet). Imagine our delight! And what a day it has been—the ancient Æschylean theatre crammed once more on all its tiers with thousands of Syracusans, so that not a spare seat was left—while three hundred young voices sang a version of one of the choral sections of “The Suppliants” of Æschylus—with it il Principe on a scarlet dais where once the tyrant Dionysius sat! Over head the deep blue sky, and beyond, the deep blue Ionian sea. It was all too wonderful....
While we were at Taormina the news came of the death of Queen Victoria. An impressive memorial service was arranged by Mr. Albert Stopford, an English resident there, and held in the English Chapel of Sta. Caterina.
To attend it the Hon. Alexander Nelson Hood came from the “Nelson property” of Bronte where he was wintering with his father, Viscount Bridport, Duke of Bronte, who for forty years had been personal Lord in Waiting to the Queen. To the son we were introduced by Mr. Stopford; and a day or two later we started on our first visit to that strange beautiful Duchy on Ætna, that was to mean so much to us.
Greatly we enjoyed the experience—the journey in the little Circum-Ætnean train along the great shoulder of Etna, with its picturesque little towns and its great stretches of devastating lava; the first sight of the Castle of Maniace—in its shallow tree-clad valley of the Simeto flanked by great solemn hills—as we turned down the winding hill-road from the great lava plateau where the station of Maletto stands; the time-worn quadrangular convent-castle with its Norman chapel, and its great Iona cross carved in lava erected in the court-yard to the memory of Nelson; the many interesting relics of Nelson within the castle, such as his Will signed Nelson and Bronte on each page, medals, many fine line engravings of the battles in which he, and also Admiral Hood, took part; the beautiful Italian garden, and wild glen gardens beyond. No less charming was the kindly welcome given to us by the fine, hale old Courtier who—when his son one afternoon had taken my husband for a drive to see the hill-town of Bronte, and the magnificent views of and from Ætna, with its crowning cover of snow—told me, as we sat in the comfortable central hall before a blazing log fire, many reminiscences of the beloved Queen he had served so long.
In the spring we returned to England, through Italy; and from Florence, where we took rooms for a month, F. M. wrote to an unknown correspondent:
18th March, 1901.
My dear unknown friend,
You must forgive a tardy reply to your welcome letter, but I have been ill, and am not yet strong. Your writing to me has made me happy. One gets many letters: some leave one indifferent; some interest; a few are like dear and familiar voices speaking in a new way, or as from an obscure shore. Yours is of the last. I am glad to know that something in what I have written has coloured anew your own thought, or deepened the subtle music that you yourself hear—for no one finds the colour of life and the music of the spirit unless he or she already perceive the one and love the other. Somewhere in one of my books—I think in the latest, The Divine Adventure, but at the moment cannot remember—I say that I no longer ask of a book, is it clever, or striking, or is it well done, or even is it beautiful, but—out of how deep a life does it come. That is the most searching test. And that is why I am grateful when one like yourself writes to tell me that intimate thought and emotion deeply felt have reached some other and kindred spirit....
I am writing to you from Florence. You know it, perhaps? The pale green Arno, the cream-white, irregular, green-blinded, time-stained houses opposite, the tall cypresses of the Palatine garden beyond, the dove-grey sky, all seem to breathe one sigh ... La Pace! L’Oblio!
But then—life has made those words “Peace,” “Forgetfulness,” very sweet for me. Perhaps for you this vague breath of another Florence than that which Baedeker described might have some more joyous interpretation. I hope so....
You are right in what you say, about the gulf between kindred natures being less wide than it seems. But do not speak of the spiritual life as “another life”: there is no ‘other’ life: what we mean by that is with us now. The great misconception of Death is that it is the only door to another world.
Your friend,
Fiona Macleod.
IL CASTELLO DI MANIACE, BRONTE, SICILY
From a photograph taken by the Hon. Alex. Nelson Hood
The October number of The Fortnightly Review contained a series of poems by F. M. entitled “The Ivory Gate,” and at the same time an American edition of From the Hills of Dream—altered from the original issue—was published by Mr. T. Mosher, to whom the poet wrote concerning the last section of the English Edition:
12th Nov., 1901.
Dear Mr. Mosher,
What a lovely book Mimes is! It is a pleasure to look at it, to handle it. The simple beauty of the cover-design charms me. And the contents ... yes, these are beautiful, too.
I think the translation has been finely made, but there are a few slips in interpretative translation, and (as perhaps is inevitable) a lapse ever and again from the subtle harmony, the peculiar musical undulant rhythm of the original. In a creative translation, the faintest jar can destroy the illusion: and more than once I was rudely reminded that a foreigner mixt this far-carried honey and myrrh. Yet this is only “a counsel of perfection,” by one who perhaps dwells overmuch upon the ideal of a flawless raiment for beautiful thought or dream. Nor would I seem ungracious to a translator who has so finely achieved a task almost as difficult as that set to Liban by Oisin in the Land of the Ever-Living, when he bade her take a wave from the shore and a green blade from the grass and a leaf from a tree and the breath of the wind and a man’s sigh and a woman’s thought, and out of them all make an air that would be like the single song of a bird. Do you wish to tempt me? Tempt me then with a proposal as to “The Silence of Amor,” to be brought out as Mimes is!
The short prose-poems would have to be materially added to, of course: and the additions would for the most part individually be longer than the short pieces you know....
Sincerely yours,
Fiona Macleod.
In sending a copy of the American edition of From the Hills of Dream to Mr. Yeats, the author explained that, though it contained new material,
... there will be much in it familiar to you. But even here there are changes which are recreative—as, for example, in the instance of “The Moon-Child,” where one or two touches and an added quatrain have made a poem of what was merely poetic.
The first 10 poems are those which are in the current October Fortnightly Review. But when these are reprinted in a forthcoming volume of new verse ... it will also contain some of the 40 ‘new’ poems now included in this American edition, and the chief contents will be the re-modelled and re-written poetic drama The Immortal Hour, and with it many of the notes to which I alluded when I wrote last to you. In the present little volume it was not found possible to include the lengthy, intimate, and somewhat esoteric notes: among which I account of most interest for you those pertinent to the occult myths embodied in The Immortal Hour.
You will see, however, that one or two dedicatory pages—intended for the later English new book—have here found a sectional place: and will, I hope, please you.
Believe me,
Your friend truly,
F. M.
Mr. Yeats replied:
18 Woburn Buildings,
London, Saturday.
My dear Miss Macleod,
I have been a long while about thanking you for your book of poems, but I have been shifting from Dublin to London and very busy about various things—too busy for any quiet reading. I have been running hither and thither seeing people about one thing and another. But now I am back in my rooms and have got things straight enough to settle down at last to my usual routine. Yesterday I began arranging under their various heads some hitherto unsorted folk-stories on which I am about to work, and today I have been busy over your book. I never like your poetry as well as your prose, but here and always you are a wonderful writer of myths. They seem your natural method of expressions. They are to you what mere words are to others. I think this is partly why I like you better in your prose, though now and then a bit of verse comes well, rising up out of the prose, in your simplest prose the most, the myths stand out clearly, as something objective, as something well born and independent. In your more elaborate prose they seem subjective, an inner way of looking at things assumed by a single mind. They have little independent life and seem unique; your words bind them to you. If Balzac had written with a very personal, very highly coloured style, he would have always drowned his inventions with himself. You seem to feel this, for when you use elaborate words you invent with less conviction, with less precision, with less delicacy than when you forget everything but the myth. I will take as example, a prose tale.
That beautiful story in which the child finds the Twelve Apostles eating porridge in a cottage, is quite perfect in all the first part, for then you think of nothing but the myth, but it seems to me to fade to nothing in the latter part. For in the latter part the words rise up between you and the myth. You yourself begin to speak and we forget the apostles, and the child and the plate and the porridge. Or rather the more mortal part of you begins to speak, the mere person, not the god. You, as I think, should seek the delights of style in utter simplicity, in a self-effacing rhythm and language; in an expression that is like a tumbler of water rather than like a cup of wine. I think that the power of your work in the future will depend on your choosing this destiny. Certainly I am looking forward to “The Laughter of the Queen.” I thought your last prose, that pilgrimage of the soul and mind and body to the Hills of Dream promised this simple style. It had it indeed more than anything you have done.
To some extent I have an advantage over you in having a very fierce nation to write for. I have to make everything very hard and clear, as it were. It is like riding a wild horse. If one’s hands fumble or one’s knees loosen one is thrown. You have in the proper sense far more imagination than I have and that makes your work correspondingly more difficult. It is fairly easy for me, who do so much of my work by the critical, rather than the imaginative faculty, to be precise and simple, but it is hard for you in whose mind images form themselves without ceasing and are gone as quickly perhaps.
But I am sure that I am right. When you speak with the obviously personal voice in your verse, or in your essays you are not that Fiona who has invented a new thing, a new literary method. You are that Fiona when the great myths speak through you....
Yours,
W. B. Yeats.
I like your verses on Murias and like them the better perhaps because of the curious coincidence that I did in summer verses about lovers wandering ‘in long forgotten Murias.’
During the spring William Sharp had prepared a volume of selections from the poems of Swinburne, with an Introduction by himself, for publication in the Tauchnitz Collection of British Authors. Mr. Swinburne consented that the selection should be made in accordance with the critical taste of the Editor, with which however he was not in complete agreement. He expressed his views in a letter dated from The Pines, Putney Hill:
Oct. 6th.
Dear Mr. Sharp,
Many thanks for the early copy you have had the kindness to send on to me. I am pleased to find the Nympholept in a leading place, as I think it one of the best and most representative things I ever did. I should have preferred on all accounts that In the Bay had filled the place you have allotted to Ave atque Vale, a poem to which you are altogether too kind, in my opinion, as others have been before you. I never had really much in common with Baudelaire tho’ I retain all my early admiration for his genius at its best. I wish there were fewer of such very juvenile crudities as you have selected from my first volume of poems: it is trying to find such boyish attempts as The Sundew, Aholibah, Madonna Mia, etc., offered as examples of the work of a man who has written so many volumes since in which there is nothing that is not at least better and riper than they. I wish too that Mater Triumphalis had not been separated from its fellow poem—a much fitter piece of work to stand by itself. On the other hand, I am very cordially obliged to you for giving the detached extract from Anactoria. I should greatly have preferred that extracts only should have been given from Atalanta in Calydon, which sorely needs compression in the earlier parts. Erectheus, which would have taken up so much less space, would also, I venture to think, have been a better and a fairer example of the author’s work. Mr. Watts Dunton’s objections to the book is the omission of Super Flumina Babylonis. I too am much surprised to find it excluded from a selection which includes so much that might well be spared—nay, would be better away. I would like to have seen one of what I call my topographical poems in full. The tiny scrap from Loch Torridon was hardly worth giving by itself. I do not understand what you find obscure or melancholy in The Garden of Cymodoce. It was written simply to express my constant delight in the recollection of Sark. I hope you will not think anything in this note captious or ungracious. Candour always seems to be the best expression possible of gratitude or goodwill.
Ever sincerely yours,
A. Swinburne.
In December of 1901 F. M. wrote, ostensibly from Argyll, to Dr. Goodchild: “I had hoped by this time to have had some definite knowledge of what I am to do, where to go this winter. But circumstances keep me here.... Our friend, too (meaning himself as W. S.), is kept to England by the illness of others. My plans though turning upon different issues are to a great extent dependent, later, on his....
I have much to do, and still more to think of, and it may be bring to life through the mysterious resurrection of the imagination.
What long months of preparation have to go to any writing that contains life within it.—Even the slightest, the most significant, as it seems! We, all of us who live this dual life of the imagination and the spirit, do indeed mysteriously conceive, and fare thereafter in weariness and heaviness and long travail, only for one small uncertain birth. It is the common law of the spirit—as the obverse is the common law of womanhood.”
And again:
“Life becomes more and more strange, complex, interwrought, and intentional. But it is the end that matters—not individuals.”
Owing to my Mother’s serious illness I could not leave England early in November, as we had intended. London was impossible for my husband for he, too, was ill. At first he went to Hastings, whence he wrote to Mrs. Philpot—author of The Sacred Tree:
Hastings,
Dec. 20, 1901.
My dear Friend,
You would have enjoyed “being me” yesterday. I had a most delightful day at Rye with Henry James who now lives there for many months in the year. I went over early, lunched, and then we went all over that wonderfully picturesque old Cinque Port. A lovely walk in a frost-bound still country, and then back by the sombre old Land Gate, over the misty marshes down below, and the flame red Cypres Tower against a plum coloured sunset, to Henry James’ quaint and picturesque old house to tea. It was in every way a memorable and delightful day, and not least the great pleasure of intercourse with that vivid brilliant and alive mind. He is as of course, you realise, an artist to the finger tips. Et ils sont rares ces diables d’esprit. I wish it were spring! I long to hear the missel thrush in the blossoming pear tree: and the tingling of the sap, and the laughter in the blood. I suppose we are all, all of us ever dreaming of resurrections....
The English climate proved equally impossible, so W. S. went to Bordighera to be near Dr. Goodchild. But he was too restless to remain long anywhere, and moved on to Rome and finally to Sicily. He wrote to Mr. Rhys after the New Year from Il Castello di Maniace:
My dear Ernest,
As I think I wrote to you, I fell ill with a form of fever,—and had a brief if severe recurrence of it at Rome: and so was glad some time ago to get on to my beloved ‘Greek’ Taormina, where I rapidly ‘convalesced.’ A few days ago I came on here, to the wilds inlands of the Sicilian Highlands, to spend a month with my dear friend here, in this wonderful old ‘Castle-Fortress-Monastery-Mansion—the Castel’ Maniace itself being over 2,000 feet in the highlands beyond Etna, and Maletto, the nearest station about 3,000.
How you and Grace would rejoice in this region. Within a day’s easy ride is Enna, sacred to Demeter, and about a mile or so from Castel’ Maniace, in a wild desolate region of a lava wilderness, is the lonely heron-haunted moorland-lake wherein tradition has it Persephone disappeared....
W. S.
I joined him early in February at Maniace and we remained with Mr. Hood for a month of sunshine and flowers. Among other guests came Miss Maud Valerie White. She was wishful that the pleasant days spent there together should be commemorated, and proposed that W. S. should write a short poem, that she would set to Sicilian airs, and that the song should be dedicated to our host. To that end Mr. Hood summoned to the Castello one of the peasant bagpipe players, who one evening walked round and round the hall, playing the airs that are played each Christmas by the pipers before the shrines to the Madonna in the various churches. The result of that evening was a song, “Buon’ Riposo,” written by William Sharp, set to music by Miss Valerie White, and published by Messrs. Chappell.
BUON RIPOSO
When, like a sleeping child
Or a bird in the nest,
The day is gathered
To the earth’s breast ...
Hush!... ‘tis the dream-wind
Breathing peace,
Breathing rest
Out of the gardens of Sleep in the West.
O come to me ... wandering
Wind of the West!
Gray Doves of slumber
Come hither to nest....
Ah, sweet now the fragrance
Below the dim trees
Of the White Rose of Rest
That blooms in the gardens of Sleep in the West.
On leaving Maniace W. S. wrote to Dr. Goodchild:
Friday, 7th March, 1902.
To-morrow we leave here for Taormina.... And, not without many regrets, I am glad to leave—as, in turn, I shall be glad (tho’ for other reasons) when the time comes to leave Taormina. My wife says I am never satisfied, and that Paradise itself would be intolerable for me if I could not get out of it when I wanted. And there is some truth in what she says, though it is a partial truth, only. I think external change as essential to some natures as passivity is to others: but this may simply mean that the inward life in one person may best be hypnotised by ‘a still image,’ that of another may best be hypnotised by a wavering image or series of wavering images. It is not change of scene one needs so much as change in these wavering images. For myself, I should, now, in many ways be content to spend the most of my life in some quiet place in the country, with a garden, a line of poplars and tall elms, and a great sweep of sky....
Your friend affectionately,
William Sharp.
To Mrs. Philpot.
Taormina,
April 3, 1902.
Dear Friend,
... It would take pages to describe all the flowers and other near and far objects which delight one continually. Persephone has scattered every treasure in this her birth-island. From my room here in the Castello-a-Mare—this long terraced hotel is built on the extreme edge of a precipitous height outside the Messina Gate of Taormina—I look down first on a maze of vividly green almond trees sloping swiftly down to the deep blue sea, and over them the snowy vastness of Etna, phantom-white against the intense blue, with its hitherside 11,000 feet of gulfs of violet morning shadow. About midway this is broken to the right first by some ancient cactus-covered fragments of antiquity at the corner of a winding path, and then by the bend of Santa Caterina garden wall with fine tall plume-like cypresses filled with a living green darkness, silhouetted against the foam-white cone.
My French windows open on the terrace, it is lovely to go out early in the morning to watch sunrise (gold to rose-flame) coming over Calabria, and the purple-blue emerald straits of Messina and down by the wildly picturesque shores of these island coasts and across the Ionian sea, and lying like a bloom on the incredible vastness of Etna and its rise from distant Syracuse and Mt. Hybla to its cone far beyond the morning clouds when clouds there are—or to go out at sunrise and see a miracle of beauty being woven anew—or at night when there is no moon, but only the flashing of the starry torches, the serpentine glitter of lights, the soft cry of the aziola, and the drowsy rhythmic cadence of the sea in the caves and crags far below. Just now the hum of bees is almost as loud as the drowsy sighing of the sea: among the almonds a boy is singing a long drowsy Greek-like chant, and on the mass of wild rock near the cypresses a goatherd is playing intermittently on a reed pipe. A few yards to the right is a long crescent-shaped terrace garden filled with roses, great shrublike clumps of white and yellow marguerite, myrtle, lilies, narcissus, sweet-scented blossom-covered geranium, oranges hanging in yellow flame, pale-gold lemons. Below the branches a “Purple Emperor” and a snow-white “May Queen” are hovering in butterfly wooing. On an oleander above a wilderness of pink and scarlet geraniums two blue tits are singing and building, building and singing.
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Since I wrote the above Easter has intervened. The strange half pagan, half Christian ceremonies interested me greatly, and in one of the ceremonials of one processional part I recognized a striking survival of the more ancient Greek rites of the Demeter and the Persephonæ-Kôrê cult.
To Mrs. Janvier.
Taormina.
... It is difficult to do anything here. I should like to come sometime without anything to do—without even a book to read: simply to come and dream, to re-live many of the scenes of this inexhaustible region of romance: to see in vision the coming and going of that innumerable company—from Ulysses and his wanderers, from Pythagoras and St. Peter, from that Pancrazio who had seen Christ in the flesh, from Æschylus, and Dionysius and Hiero and Gelon, from Pindar and Simonides and Theocritus, to Richard Cœur-de-Lion and Garibaldi and Lord Nelson—what a strange company!...
As for my own work, it is mostly (what there is of it!) dealing with the literature, etc., of the south. I do not know whether my long article on Contemporary Italian Poetry is to be in the April-June issue of The Quarterly, or the summer issue. I am more interested in a strange Greek drama I am writing—The Kôrê of Enna—than in anything I have taken up for a long time. My reading just now is mostly Greek history and Italian literature.... Looking on this deep blue, often violet sea, with the foam washing below that perhaps laved the opposite shores of Greece, and hearing the bees on the warm wind, it is difficult to realise the wet and cold you have apparently had recently in New York—or the fogs and cold in London. I wish you could bask in and sun yourself on this sea-terrace, and read me the last you have written of “Captain Dionysius” while I give you tea!
During our first visit to Sicily, though my husband realised the beauty of the island, he could not feel its charm or get in touch with the spirit of the place because he was overborne by the sense of battle and bloodshed that he felt pervaded it. When I suggested how much the fascination of the beautiful island had seized hold of me he would say: “No, I cannot feel it for the ground is sodden and every leaf drips with blood.” To his great relief, on his return there he found, as he said, that he had got beyond the surface of things, had pierced down to the great essentials of the ancient land, and had become one of her devoted lovers.