The House of Dreams,
20th Dec., 1898.
... It has been a memorable time here. I have written some of my best work—including two or three of the new things for The Dominion of Dreams—viz. “The Rose of Flame,” “Honey of the Wild Bees,” and “The Secrets of the Night.”
What a glorious day it has been. The most beautiful I have ever seen at Pettycur I think. Cloudless blue sky, clear exquisite air tho’ cold, with a marvellous golden light in the afternoon. Arthur’s Seat, the Crags and the Castle and the 14 ranges of the Pentlands all clear-cut as steel, and the city itself visible in fluent golden light. The whole coast-line purple blue, down to Berwick Law and the Bass Rock, and the Isle of May 16 miles out in the north sea.
And now I listen to the gathering of the tidal waters under the stars. There is an infinite solemnity—a hush, something sacred and wonderful. A benediction lies upon the world. Far off I hear the roaming wind. Thoughts and memories crowd in on me. Here I have lived and suffered—here I have touched the heights—here I have done my best. And now, here, I am going through a new birth.
‘Sic itur ad astral!’
During the years that F. M. developed so rapidly her creator felt the necessity pressing hard on him to sustain, as far as he could, the reputation of W. S. He valued such reputation as he had and was anxious not to let it die away; yet there was a great difference in the method of production of the two kinds of work. The F. M. writing was the result of an inner impulsion, he wrote because he had to give expression to himself whether the impulse grew out of pain or out of pleasure. But W. S., divorced as much as could be from his twin self, wrote because he cared to, because the necessities of life demanded it. He was always deeply interested in his critical work, for he was a constant student of Literature in all its forms, and of the Literature of different countries—in particular of France, America and Italy. This form of study, this keen interest, was a necessity to W. S.; but fiction was to him a matter of choice. He deliberately set himself to write the two novels Wives in Exile and Silence Farm, because he felt W. S. ought to produce some such work as a normal procedure and development; and also he felt it imperative to show some result of the seclusion he was known to seek for purposes of work. He was deeply interested in both books. Wives in Exile was the easier to write, as it gave an outlet to the vein of whimsicality in him, to his love of fun. He delighted in the weaving of any plot, or in any extravaganza. The book was a great relief and rest to him and was a real tonic to his mind.
A little later, when he realised that something more was expected of him and was too ill to attempt anything in the shape of comedy, he therefore set himself to write a tragic tale of the Lowlands, founded on a true incident. Into this he put serious interested work, but there was one consideration that throughout had a restraining effect on him—he never forgot that the book should not have obvious kinship to the work of F. M., that he should keep a considerable amount of himself in check. For there was a midway method, that was a blending of the two, a swaying from the one to the other, which he desired to avoid, since he knew that many of the critics were on the watch. Therefore, he strained the realistic treatment beyond what he otherwise would have done, in order to preserve a special method of presentment. Nevertheless, that book was the one he liked best of all the W. S. efforts, and he considered that it contained some of his most satisfactory work. Wives in Exile was published in June of 1896 by Mr. Grant Richards, and Silence Farm in 1897.
The following letter from Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton was a great pleasure. It is, I believe, the only written expression of what the author terms the “inwardness of Aylwin”:
The Pines, Putney Hill,