WILLIAM SHARP (FIONA MACLEOD) A MEMOIR COMPILED BY HIS WIFE ELIZABETH A. SHARP by ELIZABETH A. SHARP (mobi ebook reader txt) 📕

_Shelley_

In the summer of 1885 we went to Scotland and looked forward to an

idyllic month on West Loch Tarbert. While staying with Mr. Pater in

Oxford my husband had seen the advertisement of a desirable cottage to

be let furnished, with service, and garden stocked with vegetables.

He knew the neighbourhood to be lovely, the attraction was great, so

we took the cottage for August, and in due time carried our various

MSS. and work to the idyllic spot. Beautiful the surroundings were

indeed:—An upland moor sloping to the loch, with its opposite hilly

shore thickly wooded. The cottage was simplicity itself in its

appointments, but—the garden was merely a bit of railed-in grass field

destitute of plants; the vegetables consisted of a sack of winter

potatoes quite uneatable, and the only service that the old woman

owner would give was to light the fires and wash up the dishes and

black our boots. Everything else devolved on me, for help I could

get nowhere and though my husband’s intentions and efforts in that

direction were admirable, their practical qualities ended there! Yet

to all the drawbacks we found compensation in the loveliness of the

moorland, the peace of the solitude, and in the magnificent sunsets.

One sunset I remember specially. We had gone for a wander westward. The

sun was setting behind the brown horizon-line of the moor, and the sky

was aflame with its glow. Suddenly we heard the sound of the pipes,

sighing a Lament. We stopped to listen. The sound came nearer, and we

saw walking over the brow of the upland an old man with bag-pipes and

streamers outlined against the orange sky. We drew aside into a little

hollow. As he neared we saw he was gray haired, his bonnet and clothes

were old and weatherworn. But in his face was a rapt expression as he

played to himself and tramped across the moor, out of the sunset toward

the fishing village that lay yonder in the cold evening light.

The summer was a wet one, and shortly after our return to town the poet

developed disquieting rheumatic symptoms. Nevertheless we were both

hard at work with the reviewing of pictures and books, and among other

things he was projecting a monograph on Shelley. It was about this

time I think that he decided to compete for a prize of £100 offered

by the Editor of _The People’s Friend_ for a novel suited to the

requirements of that weekly, and these requirements of course dictated

the sensational style of story. It was my husband’s one attempt to

write a novel in three volumes. He did not gain the prize but the

story ran serially through _The People’s Friend_, and was afterward

published in 1887 by Messrs. Hurst and Blackett. The scene is laid in

Scotland and in Australia, with a Prologue dealing with Cornwall, where

he had once spent a few days in order to act as best man to one of

his fellow-passengers on the sailing ship that brought him back from

Australia.

The following Review from _The Morning Post_ and letter from our

poet-friend Mathilde Blind will give an idea of the style and defects

of the novel:

“The many who have the mental courage to allow that they prefer the

objective to the subjective novel may pass some delightful hours

in the perusal of Mr. Sharp’s ‘The Sport of Chance.’ It has _primâ

facie_ an undeniable advantage to start with, i. e. it is unlike

almost anything hitherto written in the shape of a novel in three

volumes. Slightly old-fashioned, the author’s manner is simple and

earnest, while he shows much skill in unravelling the tangled skein

of a complicated plot. He deals also in sensationalism, but this is

of a peculiar kind, and it rarely violates the canons of probability.

To southerners his highly-coloured pictures of Highland peasant life,

with their accompaniments of visions and second sight, may savour of

exaggeration, but not so to those whose youth has been past amidst

similar surroundings. Many episodes of the shipwrecks of ‘The Fair

Hope’ and ‘The Australasian,’ are as effective as the best of those

written by authors who make a specialty of ‘Tales of the Sea.’ Hew

Armitage’s ‘quest,’ in Australia, is related with graphic force. The

descriptions of the natural features of the country, of life in the

bush, and at the outlying settlements, are all stamped with the vivid

fidelity that is one of the great merits of the book. Charles Lamb,

_alias_ Cameron, is a singular conception. Too consistently wicked,

perhaps, to escape the reproach of being a melo-dramatic villain, his

misdeeds largely contribute to the interest of this exciting novel.”

  Nov. 6, 1888.

  DEAR WILLIAM,

... Your “Sport of Chance” has helped me to while away the hours and

certainly you have crammed sensation enough into your three volumes to

furnish forth a round dozen or so. The opening part seemed to me very

good, especially the description of the storm off the Cornish coast,

and the mystery which gradually overclouds Mona’s life, but her death

and the advent of a new set of characters seems to me to cut the story

in two, while the sensational incidents are piled on like Ossa on

Olympus. What seemed best to me, and also most enjoyable to my taste at

least, are the personal reminiscences which I recognised in the voyage

out to Australia and the descriptions of its scenery, full of life and

freshness. Most of all I liked the weird picture of the phosphorescent

sea with its haunting spectral shapes. You have probably seen something

of the kind and ought to have turned it into a poem; if there had

been a description of some scene like it in your last volume I should

doubtless remember it.

  With best love to Lillie,

  Your sincere friend,

  MATHILDE BLIND.

The opening of the new year 1886—from which we hoped much—was

unpropitious. A wet winter and long hours of work told heavily on my

husband, whose ill-health was increased by the enforced silence of his

“second self” for whose expression leisure was a necessary condition.

In a mood of dejection induced by these untoward circumstances he sent

the following birthday greeting to his friend Eric S. Robertson:

  46 TALGARTH ROAD, W.

  MY DEAR FRIEND,

I join with Lillie in love and earnest good wishes for you as man and

writer. Accept the accompanying two sonnets as a birthday welcome.

There are two “William Sharp’s”—one of them unhappy and bitter enough

at heart, God knows—though he seldom shows it. This other poor devil

also sends you a greeting of his own kind. Tear it up and forget it, if

you will.

But sometimes I am very tired—very tired.

  Yours ever, my dear Eric,

TO ERIC SUTHERLAND ROBERTSON

(On his birthday, 18: 2: 86)

I

  Already in the purple-tinted woods

    The loud-voiced throstle calls—sweet echoings

    Down leafless aisles that dream of bygone springs:

  Already towards their northern solitudes

  The fieldfares turn, and soaring high, wheel broods

    Of wild swans with a clamour of swift wings:

    A tremor of new life moves through all things

  And earth regenerate thrills with joyous moods.

  Let not spring’s breath blow vainly past thine heart,

    Dear friend: for Time grows ruinously apace:

    Yon tall white lily in its holy grace

  The winds will draggle soon: for an unseen dart

    Moves ever hither and thither through each place,

  Nor know we when or how our lives ’twill part.

II

  A little thing it is indeed to die:

    God’s seal to sanctify the soul’s advance—

    Or silence, and a long enfevered trance.

  But no slight thing is it—ere the last sigh

  Leaves the tired heart, ere calm and passively

    The worn face reverent grows, fades the dim glance—

    To pass away and pay no recompense

  To Life, who hath given to us so gloriously.

  Not so for thee—within whose heart lie deep

    As ingots ‘neath the waves, thoughts true and fair.

    Nor ever let thy soul the burden bear,

  Of having life to live yet choosing sleep:

    Yea even if thine the dark and slippery stair,

  Better to toil and climb than wormlike creep.

In the early spring my husband was laid low with scarlet fever and

phlebitis. Recovery was slow, and at the press view of the Royal

Academy he caught a severe chill; the next day he was in the grip of a

prolonged attack of rheumatic fever. For many days his life hung in the

balance.

During much of the suffering and tedium of those long weeks the sick

man passed in a dream-world of his own; for he had the power at times

of getting out of or beyond his normal consciousness at will. At first

he imagined himself the owner of a gipsy travelling-van, in which

he wandered over the to him well-known and much-loved solitudes of

Argyll, resting where the whim dictated and visiting his many fisher

and shepherd friends. Later, during the long crises of the illness,

though unconscious often of all material surroundings, he passed

through other keen inner phases of consciousness, through psychic and

dream experiences that afterward to some extent were woven into the

Fiona Macleod writings, and, as he believed, were among the original

shaping influences that produced them. For a time he felt himself to

be practically dead to the material world, and acutely alive “on the

other side of things” in the greater freer universe. He had no desire

to return, and rejoiced in his freedom and greater powers; but, as he

described it afterward, a hand suddenly restrained him: “Not yet, you

must return.” And he believed he had been “freshly sensitised” as he

expressed it; and knew he had—as I had always believed—some special

work to do before he could again go free.

The illusion of his wanderings with the travelling van was greatly

helped by the thoughtfulness of his new friend Ernest Rhys who brought

him branches of trees in early leaf from the country. These I placed

upright in the open window; and the fluttering leaves not only helped

his imagination but also awoke “that dazzle in the brain,” as he always

described the process which led him over the borderland of the physical

into the “gardens” of psychic consciousness or, as he called it, “into

the Green Life.”

At the end of ten weeks he left his bed. As soon as possible I took

him to Northbrook, Micheldever, the country house of our kind friends

Mr. and Mrs. Henryson Caird, who put it at our disposal for six weeks.

Slowly his strength came back in these warm summer days, as he lay

contentedly in the sunshine. But as he began to exert himself new

disquieting symptoms developed. His heart proved to be badly affected

and his recovery was proportionately retarded.

The Autumn found us face to face with problems hard to solve, how to

meet not only current expenses but also serious debt, with a limited

stock of precarious strength. At the moment of blackest outlook the

invalid received a generous friendly letter from Mr. Alfred Austin

enclosing a substantial cheque. The terms in which it was offered were

as kindly sympathetic as the thought which prompted them. He had, he

said, once been helped in a similar way with the injunction to repay

the loan not to the donor but to some one else who stood in need.

Therefore he now offered it with the same conditions attached. During

the long months of illness it had been a constant source of regret

to us that we were unable to see Philip Marston or to read to him as

was our habit. We were anxious, too, for in the autumn he had been

prostrated by a heat stroke, followed by an epileptic seizure. At

last, on Christmas day 1886 William Sharp went to see him and spent an

hour or so with him. As he tells in his prefatory Memoir to Marston’s

“Song-tide” (_Canterbury Poets_): “He was in bed and I was shocked at

the change—as nearly a year had elapsed since I had seen him I found

the alteration only too evident.... Throughout the winter his letters

had been full of foreboding: ‘You will miss me, perhaps, when I am

gone, but you need not mourn for me. I think few lives have been so

deeply sad as mine, though I do not forget those who have blessed it.’”

This was the keynote to each infinitely sad letter.

“On the last day of January 1887 paralysis set in, and for fourteen

days, he lay speechless as well as sightless, but at last he was asleep

and