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.