F. M.
Mr. Yeats replied:
18 Woburn Buildings,
London, Saturday.
My dear Miss Macleod,
I have been a long while about thanking you for your book of poems, but I have been shifting from Dublin to London and very busy about various things—too busy for any quiet reading. I have been running hither and thither seeing people about one thing and another. But now I am back in my rooms and have got things straight enough to settle down at last to my usual routine. Yesterday I began arranging under their various heads some hitherto unsorted folk-stories on which I am about to work, and today I have been busy over your book. I never like your poetry as well as your prose, but here and always you are a wonderful writer of myths. They seem your natural method of expressions. They are to you what mere words are to others. I think this is partly why I like you better in your prose, though now and then a bit of verse comes well, rising up out of the prose, in your simplest prose the most, the myths stand out clearly, as something objective, as something well born and independent. In your more elaborate prose they seem subjective, an inner way of looking at things assumed by a single mind. They have little independent life and seem unique; your words bind them to you. If Balzac had written with a very personal, very highly coloured style, he would have always drowned his inventions with himself. You seem to feel this, for when you use elaborate words you invent with less conviction, with less precision, with less delicacy than when you forget everything but the myth. I will take as example, a prose tale.
That beautiful story in which the child finds the Twelve Apostles eating porridge in a cottage, is quite perfect in all the first part, for then you think of nothing but the myth, but it seems to me to fade to nothing in the latter part. For in the latter part the words rise up between you and the myth. You yourself begin to speak and we forget the apostles, and the child and the plate and the porridge. Or rather the more mortal part of you begins to speak, the mere person, not the god. You, as I think, should seek the delights of style in utter simplicity, in a self-effacing rhythm and language; in an expression that is like a tumbler of water rather than like a cup of wine. I think that the power of your work in the future will depend on your choosing this destiny. Certainly I am looking forward to “The Laughter of the Queen.” I thought your last prose, that pilgrimage of the soul and mind and body to the Hills of Dream promised this simple style. It had it indeed more than anything you have done.
To some extent I have an advantage over you in having a very fierce nation to write for. I have to make everything very hard and clear, as it were. It is like riding a wild horse. If one’s hands fumble or one’s knees loosen one is thrown. You have in the proper sense far more imagination than I have and that makes your work correspondingly more difficult. It is fairly easy for me, who do so much of my work by the critical, rather than the imaginative faculty, to be precise and simple, but it is hard for you in whose mind images form themselves without ceasing and are gone as quickly perhaps.
But I am sure that I am right. When you speak with the obviously personal voice in your verse, or in your essays you are not that Fiona who has invented a new thing, a new literary method. You are that Fiona when the great myths speak through you....
Yours,