Dear Fiona Macleod,
My friend, Willie Yeats, has just come by me wrapt in a faery whirlwind, his mouth speaking great things. He talked much of reviving the Druidic mysteries and vaguely spoke of Scotland and you. These stirring ideas of his are in such a blaze of light that, but for the inspiration of a presence always full of enthusiasm, I would get no ideas at all from him. But when he mentioned your name and spoke of the brotherhood of the Celts and what ties ought to unite them, I remembered a very kindly letter which I had put on one side waiting for an excuse to write again. So I take gladly Yeats’ theory of what ought to be and write....
Thoughts inspired by what is written or said are aimed at the original thinker and from every quarter converge on his inner nature. Perhaps you have felt this. It means that these people are putting fetters on you, binding you to think in a certain way (what they expect from you); and there is a danger of the soul getting bent so that after its first battle it fights no more but repeats dream upon dream its first words in answer to their demand and it grows more voice and less soul every day. I read Green Fire a few weeks ago and have fallen in love with your haunted seas. Your nature spirit is a little tragic. You love the Mother as I do but you seem for ever to expect some revelation of awe from her lips where I would hide my head in her bosom. But the breathless awe is true also—to “meet on the Hills of Dream,” that would not be so difficult. I think you know that? Some time when the power falls on me I’ll send a shadow of myself over seas just to get the feeling of the Highlands. I have an intuition that the “fires” are awakening somewhere in the North West. I may have met you indeed and not known you. We are so different behind the veil. Some who are mighty of the mighty there are nothing below and then waking life keeps no memory of their victorious deeds in sleep. And if I saw you your inner being might assume some old Druidic garb of the soul, taking that form because you are thinking the Druidic thought. The inner being is protean and has a thousand changes of apparel. I sat beside a friend and while he was meditating, the inner being started up in Egyptian splendour robed in purple and gold. He had chanced upon some mood of an ancient life. I write to you of these things judging that you know of them to some extent here: that your inner nature preserves the memory of old initiations, so I talk to you as a comrade on the same quest. You know too I think that these alluring visions and thoughts are of little import unless they link themselves unto our humanity. It means only madness in the end. I know people whose lamps are lit and they see wonderful things but they themselves will not pass from vision into action. They follow beauty only like the dwellers in Tyre whom Ezekiel denounced “They have corrupted their wisdom by reason of their brightness.” Leaving these mystic things aside what you say about art is quite true except that I cannot regard art as the “quintessential life” unless art comes to mean the art of living more than the art of the artists.... Sometime, perhaps, if it is in the decrees of the gods (our true selves) we may meet and speak of these things. But don’t get enslaved by your great power of expression. It ties the mind a little. There was an old Hermetist who said “The knowledge of It is a divine silence and the rest of all the senses....”
You ask me to give my best. Sometimes I think silence is the best. I can feel the sadness of truth here, but not the joy, and there must always be as exquisite a joy as there is pain in any state of consciousness....
A. E.
CHAPTER XVIII
FROM THE HILLS OF DREAM
The Laughter of Peterkin