l-known Greek legends. These, too, seem to me reweavings, and the
"Treud-nan-Ron" and "The Woman at the Crossways"; and "The Man on the
Moor," though its origin is far from their origins, is also a reweaving.
In certain of his writing of this time Sharp passes over virtually into
criticism or comparative mythology, as in "Queens of Beauty" and
"Orpheus and Oisin," and in many of the papers of "Where the Forest
Murmurs." These all have interest; but some smell much of the lamp; and
none of them are to be compared to the best of his "Seanchas," to "The
Harping of Cravetheen," or "Enya of the Dark Eyes," or "Silk o' the
Kine," or "Ula and Urla"; or to his Plays "The House of Usna" and "The
Immortal Hour," in which, for all the savagery, there is nobility, the
nobility that was in the old legends themselves, that nobility that
withstood even the hand of Macpherson, that nobility that has been
reproduced most nobly of all in the "Deirdre" of Synge.

I am not so sure that the tone of these old myths is always
distinctively Celtic, as it is undoubtedly in "The Annir Choile," and in
other "Seanchas" that reveal him at his best. There was viking blood in
Sharp, and it comes out, I think, in such tales as "The Song of the
Sword." How he came to write these barbaric tales I do not know, though
I have sometimes thought that the "Dhoya" (1891) of Mr. Yeats may have
suggested them, as the Hanrahan stories may have suggested certain of
the more modern tales. But whatever their genesis, the heroes and
heroines of the "Seanchas" seem to him like the heroes and heroines of
Homer and the Greek tragedians; and his friend whom he thought inspired
him to much of the "F.M." work stood, we must remember, as symbolical to
him of the women of Greek as well as of Celtic legend.

There are many indications, in his last writing, not only in that
unpublished book on "Greek Backgrounds" and in his articles in the
magazines on Sicily, all by William Sharp, but in the "Fiona Macleod"
work, that he would have come to write of Greek antiquity with an
enthusiasm very like that with which he wrote of Gaelic antiquity.
"W.S." is speaking with the voice of "F.M." when he says in a letter to
Mrs. Sharp, dated Athens, January 29, 1904: "It is a marvelous
homecoming feeling I have here. And I know a strange stirring, a kind of
spiritual rebirth."

One reason, perhaps, that the best work of Sharp has come out of his
consideration of the Celts of antiquity is t