arp could not remember what as
'Fiona Macleod' he had said to you in conversation."

Very different from these short stories I have been discussing are three
of the four contained in the volume entitled "Madge o' the Pool" (1896),
published as by William Sharp. Of the one that is somewhat in the manner
of certain of the "F.M." stories, the "Gypsy Christ," I have spoken.
Two, "The Coward" and "The Lady in Hosea," are but "the usual thing."
"Madge o' the Pool" is the one really worth while. In this story, with
such river pirates as we have met, sentimentalized, in "Our Mutual
Friend," as material, Sharp writes as realistically as he does in
"Silence Farm," and with a sympathy and pathos that his objective method
cannot exclude.

There are episodes or sketches, some of them what sharp calls "prose
imaginings," throughout his many books, that one may hardly call short
stories, or myths, or studies in folk-lore, or criticism, or any of the
other many kinds of writing that he essayed. Perhaps "memories" would be
the proper general term for writing of this kind. In almost every one of
these episodes or sketches there is a germ of a story, and some, I
suppose, regard them as but unrealized art. But I for one am glad Mr.
Sharp did not "work them up." In them are some of his best writing and
some of that most personal and intimate. I have spoken of "Aileen" and
"Barabal"; "Sheumas, a Memory," is another that is memorable, and
memorable too, are "The Sea Madness" and "The Triad." "The Triad" is
almost his _credo_, certainly a statement of the things he holds "most
excellent"--"primitive genius, primitive love, primitive memory." Here
Sharp recurs, as so often in his writing, to "ancestral memory," that
possession of men by which they are aware of what was in the world
before they were, through oneness with the universal memory into which
they are absorbed in dream or vision or of which they become aware by
what we call intuition. If such a power be restricted so that its
possessor recalls only certain parts of antiquity, he is virtually in
the state of him who believes he remembers what he remembers because of
previous incarnations. I have no personal opinion to express on the
subject, but if such memories exist in us because of our participation
in a universal memory or because of reincarnation, it is easy to explain
why Sharp is best in his writing of myths, his pictures of the wild
beauties of love and war and dream in barbari