... 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.”