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

friendliness, he had little regret when he went on board the _Loch Tay_

for his homeward faring.

The return voyage, too, was eventful. The route lay round Cape Horn,

and the ship was driven by contrary winds down into the Antarctic seas,

where it encountered bitterly cold weather, and came close to drifting

icebergs.

The _Loch Tay_ reached England in June, and the wanderer came direct to

my mother’s house in London and stayed with us there for several weeks.

This first visit to London was uneventful, but full of quiet happiness

for us both. He had, of course, much to see, and it was a delight to

me to be his cicerone. It was, moreover, a much wished-for opportunity

to introduce him to my special friends, while my mother made him known

to whosoever she thought would be influential in helping her nephew to

find some suitable post or occupation.

I had three friends in particular I wanted him to know; two were then

in London; but the third, John Elder, was in New Zealand, and did not

return till the following year. His sister, however, Miss Adelaide

Elder, was in town. She and my sister had been my confidants during

the preceding two years in the matter of our engagement, and I was

naturally most wishful that she and my cousin should meet. We had

known each other from childhood—our parents were old friends—and we

had read and studied together, often in a quiet part of Kensington

Gardens reading Tennyson, Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Fichte, etc. The

other friend was Miss Alison—afterward Mrs. Mona Caird—the novelist

and essay writer. We three were friends with many tastes and interests

in common, not the least being all questions relating to women. To my

great satisfaction out of the meeting with my cousin there grew deeply

attached friendships that lasted throughout his life.

In spite of all our efforts no work was found for the wanderer; he

spent the remainder of the year in Scotland and devoted his time to

writing. I have about two letters written to me about that time. In

one, dated August 21st from Braemar, he says:

“I feel another self within me now more than ever; it is as if I were

possessed by a spirit who must speak out.... I am in no hurry to

rush into print; I do not wish to write publicly until I can do so

properly. It would be a great mistake to embody my message in such a

poem as ‘Uplands,’ although a fifty times better poem than that is.

People won’t be preached to. Truth can be inculcated far better by

inference, by suggestion.... I am glad to see by your note you are in

good spirits. I also now look on things in a different light; but,

unfortunately, Lill, we poor mortals are more apt to be swayed by moods

than by circumstances, and look on things through the mist of these

moods.”

In the other letter he wrote:

“I am too worried about various things to settle to any kind of

literary work in the meantime. The weather has been wretchedly wet, and

the cold is intense. I do trust I shall get away from Scotland before

the winter sets in, as I am much less able to stand it than I thought I

was. Even with the strong air up here I can’t walk any distance without

being much the worse for it.”

One cause of the “worry” was a candid letter of criticism he had

received from Robert Buchanan, whose _The Book of Orm_ had been one of

his great favourites among books of modern verse. Its fine mysticism

appealed to him, and to the author he sent a number of his poems, and

asked for a criticism and hoping for a favourable one. But, alas,

when it came it was uncompromisingly the reverse; and the older poet

strongly advised the young aspirant not to dream of literature as a

career. Many years ago, he explained, when he was struggling in London

he tried in vain to get certain employment of the kind, but he had

never succeeded and had had “to buffet the sharp sea of journalism.”

It was a great blow. It produced a deep and prolonged depression, and

it required all my powers of persuasion and reiterated belief in his

possibilities to enable him to pull himself together and try again.

His hope was unfulfilled and he remained in Scotland throughout the

winter, at Moffat, where his mother had taken a house. Despite the cold

and the delay, he enjoyed the long rambles over the snow-clad hills and

in the fir woods; and wrote a number of poems afterward published in

_The Human Inheritance_; and so vivid were certain effects of sunglow

in the winter woods, that he described them in one of his last writings

included in _Where the Forest Murmurs_.

But for the most part his mood was one of depression; under it he wrote

the following sonnet:

THE GATE OF DEATH

  I wonder if the soul upon that day

    When Death’s gate opens to it, will with gaze

    Rapt and bewilder’d tremble at the rays

  Of God’s great glory—or if wild dismay

  Will stun it with blank horror, while away

    It watches the unguided world blaze

    With speed relentless down the flowing ways

  That end in nothing; while far off a gray

  Wan shadow trembles ere it fades for aye?

    Or if, half blinded still with death’s amaze,

  Dimly and faintly it will somewhat see,

    Some Shadow become substance and unroll

  Until there looms one vast Humanity,

    One awful, mighty, and resistless Whole?

In the late Spring of 1878 William Sharp settled in London. An opening

had been found for him in the City of Melbourne Bank by Mr. Alexander

Elder, the father of our friends, just in time to prevent him from

carrying out his decision to go as a volunteer in the Turkish army

during its conflict with Russia.

Neither the work nor the prospects offered were inviting, but he was

thankful to have a chance of trying his fortunes in London. He bound

himself as clerk in the Bank for three years, on a salary of £80, £90,

and £100. As owing to the long idleness he had unavoidable debts to

pay off, he determined to try what he could do with his pen to add

to the slender income. He took a room in 19 Albert Street, Regent’s

Park, whence he could walk to the Bank, yet sleep not far away from

birds and trees; and he had the good fortune to fall in with a kindly,

competent landlady. Now began a long, arduous struggle for the means of

livelihood, for health, for a place among the literary writers of his

day—a “schooling in the pains and impecuniosities of life” from which

he learned so much. He had no influence to help him; and no friends

other than those he had met at my mother’s house. Each week-end he came

to 72 Inverness Terrace and stayed with us from Saturday till Monday. A

serious difficulty now presented itself, one which threatened us both

with temporary disaster. As long as my betrothed was in Scotland it was

quite possible to preserve the secret of our engagement. Now that he

was in London and a constant visitor at our house it was not so simple

a matter. Moreover, to me it did not seem honourable toward my mother,

and I wished her to know. He, however, was not of my opinion; not only

would he lose much—we both believed we could not win my mother to our

way of thinking—if he were forbidden to come to the house, but he also

delighted in the very fact of the secrecy, of the mystery, and, indeed,

mystification, which I did not then realise was a marked characteristic

of his nature. For me such secrecy had no charm, but was fraught with

difficulties and inconveniences. Many were our discussions, and at last

he yielded an unwilling consent.

One Sunday afternoon in the late summer a dejected couple wandered

about in Kensington Gardens, under the old trees, trying to forecast

what seemed a mournful future. However, our fears were groundless. My

mother, though she felt it her duty to point out to us the hopelessness

and foolishness of the engagement from a worldly point of view, her

strong objection to it on the score of our cousinship, his delicacy and

lack of prospects, nevertheless realised the uselessness of opposing

her daughter’s decision, accepted the inevitable, and from that moment

treated her nephew as her son.

Two months later he wrote to me:

  26: 8: 78.

... Thanks for your welcome note which I received a little ago. I, too,

like you, was sitting at my open window last night (or rather this

morning) with the stars for my companions: and I, too, took comfort

from them and felt the peace hidden in their silent depths. I know

of nothing that soothes the spirit more than looking on those awful

skies at midnight. Some of our aspirations seem to have burnt into life

there, and, tangled in some glory of starlight, to shine down upon

us with beckoning hands.... I have told you before how that music, a

beautiful line of poetry, and other cherished things of art so often

bring you into close communion with myself. But there is one thing that

does it infallibly and more than anything else: trees on a horizon,

whether plain or upland, standing against a cloudless blue sky—more

especially when there is a soft blue haze dimly palpitating between.

Strange, is it not? I only half indefinitely myself know the cause

of it. _One_ cause certainly is the sense of music there is in that

aspect—possibly also the fairness of an association so sympathetic with

some gracious memory of the past.

number of _Good Words_?

This poem was of special interest to me because it had been written

while I had played to him on the piano one evening. It was in the

summer of 1878 also that he just met Mr. John Elder, whom I had known

from childhood. John was a graduate of Cambridge, a thinker and man of

fine tastes, and his new friend found a great stimulus in the keen mind

of the older man. Owing to delicacy he could be but little in England,

and till his death in 1883 the two men corresponded regularly with one

another. From the letters of the younger man I have selected one or two

to illustrate the trend of his mind at that date:

  19 ALBERT ST., REGENT’S PARK,

  Oct., 1879.

  MY DEAR JOHN,

Thanks for your welcome letter of 18th August. My purpose, in my

letter of May 7th, if I recollect rightly, was to urge that Reason is

sometimes transcended by Emotion—sufficiently often, that is to say,

to prevent philosophers from deriding the idea that a truth may be

reached emotionally now and again, quicker than by the light of Reason.

God may be beyond the veil of mortal life, but I cannot see that he

has given us any definite revelation beyond what pure Deism teaches,

viz., that there is a Power—certainly beneficent, most probably

eternal, possibly (in effect, if not in detail) omnipotent—who, letting

the breath of His being blow through all created things, evolves the

Ascidian into man, and man into higher manifestations than are possible

on earth, and whose message and revelation to man is shown forth in the

myriad-paged volume of nature, and the inherent yearning in every human

soul for something out of itself and yet of it. Of such belief, I may

say that I am.

But my mind is like a troubled sea, whereon the winds of doubt blow

continually, with waves of dead hopes and religious beliefs washing far

away behind, and nothing before but the weary seeming of phantasmal

shores. At times this faith that I cherish comes down upon me like

the hushful fall of snow-flakes, calming and soothing all into peace;

and again, it may be, it appears as a dark thunder-cloud, full of

secret lightnings and portentous mutterings. And, too, sometimes I

seem to waken into thought with a start, and to behold nothing but

the blind tyranny of pure materialism, and the unutterable sorrow and

hopelessness of life, and the bitter blackness of the end, which is

annihilation. But such phases are generally transient, and, like a

drowning man buffeting the overwhelming waves, I can often rise above

them and behold the vastness and the Glory of the Light of Other Life.

And this brings me to a question which is at present troubling many

others besides myself. I mean the question of the immortality of the

individual. I do not know how you regard it yourself, but you must be

aware that the drift