William Sharp (Fiona Macleod): A Memoir Compiled by His Wife Elizabeth A. Sharp

by Elizabeth A. Sharp

Early in 1897 Mr. Yeats wrote from Paris to F. M. concerning aims and ideals he was endeavouring to shape into expression for the re-vivifying of Celtic Ireland, and out of which has evolved the Irish National Theatre:

My dear Miss Macleod,

I owe you a letter for a long time, and can only promise to amend and be more prompt in future. I have had a busy autumn, always trying to make myself do more work than my disposition will permit, and at such times I am the worst of correspondents. I have just finished a certain speech in The Shadowy Waters, my new poem, and have gone to The Café du Musée de Cluny to smoke and read the Irish news in the Times. I should say I wrote about your book of poems as you will have seen in the Bookman. I have just now a plan I want to ask you about? Our Irish Literary and Political literary organisations are pretty complete (I am trying to start a Young Ireland Society, among the Irish here in Paris at the moment) and I think it would be very possible to get up Celtic plays through these Societies. They would be far more effective than lectures and might do more than anything else we can do to make the Irish Scotch and other Celts recognise their solidarity. My own plays are too elaborate, I think, for a start, and have also the disadvantage that I cannot urge my own work in committee. If we have one or two short direct prose plays, of (say) a mythological and folklore kind, by you and by some writer (I may be able to move O’Grady, I have already spoken to him about it urgently) I feel sure we could get the Irish Literary Society to make a start. They have indeed for some time talked of doing my Land of Heart’s Desire. My own theory of poetical or legendary drama is that it should have no realistic, or elaborate, but only a symbolic and decorative setting. A forest, for instance, should be represented by a forest pattern and not by a forest painting. One should design a scene, which would be an accompaniment not a reflection of the text. This method would have the further advantage of being fairly cheap, and altogether novel. The acting should have an equivalent distance to that of the play from common realities. The plays might be almost, in some cases, modern mystery plays. Your Last Supper, for instance, would make such a play, while your story in The Savoy would arrange as a strong play of merely human tragedy. I shall try my own hand possibly at some short prose plays also, but not yet. I merely suggest these things because they are a good deal on my mind, and not that I wish to burden your already full hands. My “Shadowy Waters” is magical and mystical beyond anything I have done. It goes but slowly however, and I have had to recast all I did in Ireland some years ago. Mr. Sharp heard some of it in London in its first very monotonous form. I wish to make it a kind of grave ecstasy.

I am also at the start of a novel which moves between the Islands of Aran and Paris, and shall have to go again to Aran about it. After these books I start a long cherished project—a poetical version of the great Celtic epic tale Deirdre, Cuchullin at the Ford, and Cuchullin’s death, and Dermot and Grainne. I have some hopes that Mr. Sharp will come to Paris on his way back to England. I have much to talk over with him, I am feeling more and more every day that our Celtic movement is approaching a new phase. Our instrument is sufficiently prepared as far as Ireland is concerned, but the people are less so, and they can only be stirred by the imagination of a very few acting on all.

My book The Secret Rose was to have been out in December but it has been postponed till February. If I have any earlier copies you shall have one. I am specially curious to know what you think of a story called “The Adoration of the Magi” which is a half prophecy of a very veiled kind.

Yours truly,

W. B. Yeats.

The prolonged strain of the heavy dual work added to by an eager experimentation with certain psychic phenomena with which he had long been familiar but wished further to investigate, efforts in which at times he and Mr. W. B. Yeats collaborated—began to tell heavily on him, and to produce very disquieting symptoms of nervous collapse. We decided therefore that he should pass the dead months of the year, as he called December and January, in the South of France. From St. Remy while on a visit to Mr. and Mrs. Janvier he wrote to me:

“I am not going to lament that even the desire to think-out anything has left me—much less the wish to write—for I am sure that is all in the order of the day towards betterness. But I do now fully realise that I must give up everything to getting back my old buoyancy and nervous strength—and that prolonged rest and open air are the paramount needs....