My dear Sir,
I have to thank you very cordially for your book and the long and interesting letter which accompanied it. It must be to you also that I am indebted for an unrevised proof-copy of The Light of the West.
Everything connected with the study of the Celtic past has an especial and deep interest for me, and there are few if any periods more significant than that of the era of St. Columba. His personality has charmed me, in the old and right sense of the word ‘charm’: but I have come to it, or it to me, not through books (though of course largely through Adamnan) so much as through a knowledge gained partly by reading, partly by legendary love and hearsay, and mainly by much brooding on these, and on every known saving and record of Colum, in Iona itself. When I wrote certain of my writings (e. g. “Muime Chriosd” and “The Three Marvels of Iona”) I felt, rightly or wrongly, as though I had in some measure become interpretative of the spirit of “Colum the White.”
Again, I have long had a conviction—partly an emotion of the imagination, and partly a belief insensibly deduced through a hundred avenues of knowledge and surmise—that out of Iona is again to come a Divine Word, that Iona, the little northern isle, will be as it were the tongue in the mouth of the South.
Believe me, sincerely yours,
Fiona Macleod.
“The House of Usna”—one of three Celtic plays, on which F. M. had been working for several months, was brought out under the auspices of The Stage Society, of which William Sharp was the first Chairman. Mr. Frederick Whelen, the founder of that Society, had met my husband at Hindhead when we were staying with his uncle and aunt, Mr. and Mrs. Grant Allen, at their charming house, The Croft, built among the heather and the pines on the hill-top just by the edge of the chasm called “The Devil’s Punch Bowl.”
The older man was keenly interested in the project, did his utmost to help towards its realisation. “The House of Usna” was performed at the Fifth Meeting of the Society at the Globe Theatre April 29th, 1900, together with two short plays by Maeterlinck, The Interior and The Death of Tintagiles. The music, composed especially for the short drama in three scenes, was by Mr. Y. M. Capel, and the play was produced under the direction of Mr. Granville Barker. According to one critic: “It had beauty and it had atmosphere, two very rare things on the stage, but I did not feel that it quite made a drama, or convince, as a drama should, by the continuous action of inner or outer forces. It was, rather, passion turning upon itself, and with no language but a cry.”
The author took the greatest interest in the rehearsals, and in the performance. He thoroughly enjoyed the double play that was going on, as he moved about the theatre, and chatted to his friends during the intervals, with little heed of the risks he ran of detection of authorship. The drama itself was printed three months later in The National Review, and eventually published in book form in America by Mr. T. B. Mosher, in 1903.
In 1900, too, the second of these dramas, “The Immortal Hour,” appeared in the November number of The Fortnightly Review. It was published posthumously in England (Foulis) and in America (Mosher). The third play, “The Enchanted Valleys,” was never finished. It had been the author’s intention to publish these dramas in book form under the third title, and to dedicate it to Mr. W. L. Courtney, who, as Editor of the Fortnightly, had been a good friend to Fiona Macleod.