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

(i. e. Fionnaghal—of which it is the diminutive:

 as Maggie, Nellie, or Dair are diminutives of Margaret, Helen, or

 Alasdair).

 

 I hope to have the great pleasure of seeing Mrs. Allen and yourself when

 (as is probable) I come south in the late autumn or sometime in November.

 

  Sincerely and gratefully yours,

  FIONA MACLEOD.

 

 

ANDREWS, 1894.

 

  DEAR MR. GRANT ALLEN,

 

 How generous you are! If it were not for fear of what you say about my

 Gaelic phrases I should quote one to the effect that the wild bees that

 make the beautiful thoughts in your brain also leave their honey on your

 lips.

 

 Your _Westminster_ review has given me keen pleasure—and for everything

 in it, and for all the kind interest behind it, I thank you cordially.

 

 What you say about the survival of folklore as a living heritage is

 absolutely true—_how_ true perhaps few know, except those who have lived

 among the Gaels, of their blood, and speaking the ancient language. The

 Celtic paganism lies profound and potent still beneath the fugitive

 drift of Christianity and Civilisation, as the deep sea beneath the

 coming and going of the tides. No one can understand the islander and

 remote Alban Gael who ignores or is oblivious of the potent pagan and

 indeed elementally barbaric forces behind all exterior appearances.

 (This will be more clearly shown in my next published book, a vol. of

 ten Celtic tales and episodes—with, I suppose, a more wide and varied

 outlook on life, tho’ narrow at that!—than either of its predecessors.)

 But excuse this rambling. Your review is all the more welcome to me

 as it comes to me during a visit to friends at St. Andrews, and to

 me, alas, the East Coast of Scotland is as foreign and remote in all

 respects as though it were Jutland or Finland....

 

 Again with thanks, dear Mr. Allen,

 

  Most sincerely yours,

  FIONA MACLEOD.

 

S. In his letter Mr. Sharp says (writing to me in his delightful

 shaky Gaelic) that ‘both Grant and Nellie Allen are _clach-chreadhain_.’

 It took me some time to understand the compliment. _Clach-chreadh_ means

 ‘stone of clay’—i. e. _a Brick_!

 

 

That Mr. Grant Allen was half persuaded as to the identity of the

author is shown in the following invitation:

 

 

  THE CROFT, HINDHEAD,

  July 12, 1894.

 

  MY DEAR SHARP,

 

 Kindly excuse foolscap, I am out of note-paper, and on this remote

 hilltop can’t easily get any. As for the type-writing, I am reduced

 to that altogether, through writer’s cramp, which makes my right hand

 useless even for this machine, which I am compelled to work with my left

 hand only.—As to _Pharais_, I will confess I read it with some doubt as

 to whether it was not your own production; and after I had written my

 letter to Miss Macleod, I took it to my wife and said, “Now, if this

 is William Sharp, what a laugh and a crow he will have over me!” Le

 Gallienne, who is stopping with us, was sure it was yours; but on second

 thoughts, I felt certain, in spite of great likeness of style, there was

 a feminine touch in it, and sent on my letter. All the same, however, I

 was not quite satisfied you were not taking us in, especially as your

 book with Blanche Willis Howard had shown one how womanly a tone you

 could adopt when it suited you; and I shan’t feel absolutely at rest on

 the subject till I have seen the “beautiful lassie” in person. If she

 turns out to be W. S. in disguise, I shall owe you a bad one for it;

 for I felt my letter had just that nameless tinge of emotion one uses

 towards a woman, and a beginner, but which would be sadly out of place

 with an old hand like yourself, who has already won his spurs in the

 field of letters.

 

 We shall be glad to make your cousin’s acquaintance (supposing her

 to exist) in October. It will afford us the opportunity we have long

 desired of asking you and Mrs. Sharp to come and see us in our moorland

 cottage, all up among the heather. Indeed, we have had it in our minds

 all summer to invite you—you are of those whom one would wish to know

 more intimately. I have long felt that the Children of To-morrow ought

 to segregate somehow from the children of to-day, and live more in a

 world of their own society.

 

 With united kindest regards, and solemn threats of vengeance if you are

 still perpetrating an elaborate hoax against me,

 

  I am ever

  Yours very sincerely,

  GRANT ALLEN.

 

Unfortunately, there was an imperative reason for bringing our

residence at Rudgwick to a close. The damp, autumnal days in the little

cottage on its clay soil, and the fatigue of constantly going up and

down to town in order to do the work of the Art critic for the _Glasgow

Herald_—which I for some time had undertaken—proved too severe a strain

on me, and I found that in the winter months I could not remain at

Phenice Croft without being seriously ill. So with great reluctance we

decided to give it up at midsummer. I was anxious that we should seek

for another cottage, on a main line of railway, and on sandy soil; but

my husband feared to make another experiment and preferred that we

should make our headquarters in London once again, and that he should

go into the country whenever the mood necessitated. But his regret

was deep. Phenice Croft had seen the birth of Fiona Macleod; he had

lived there with an intensity of inner life beyond anything he had

ever experienced. He knew that life in town would create difficulties

for him, yet it seemed the wisest compromise to make. Our difficulty

of choice was mainly one of ways and means; a considerable part of

the ordinary work was in my hands, and I found it difficult to do it

satisfactorily away from London. He expressed his regret in a letter to

Mr. Murray Gilchrist:

 

 

  PHENICE CROFT,

  27th March, 1894.

 

  MY DEAR GILCHRIST,

 

 You would have heard from me before this—but I have been too unwell.

 Besides, I have had extreme pressure of matters requiring every possible

 moment I could give. My wife’s health, too, has long been troubling me:

 and we have just decided that (greatly to my disappointment) we must

 return to Hampstead to live. Personally, I regret the return to town

 (or half town) more than I can say: but the matter is one of paramount

 importance, so there is nothing else to be done. We leave at midsummer.

 As for me, one of my wander-fits has come upon me: the Spring-madness

 has got into the blood: the sight of green hedgerows and budding leaves

 and the blue smoke rising here and there in the woodlands has wrought

 some chemic _furor_ in my brain. Before the week is out I hope to be

 in Normandy—and after a day or two by the sea at Dieppe, and then at

 beautiful and romantic Rouen, to get to the green lanes and open places,

 and tramp ‘towards the sun.’ I’ll send you a line from somewhere, if you

 care to hear.

 

 And now, enough about myself. I have often meant to write to you in

 detail about your _Stone-Dragon_....

 

 I believe in you, camerado mio, but you must take a firm grip of the

 reins; in a word, be the driver, not the driven. I think you ought to

 be able to write a really romantic romance. I hope _The Labyrinth_ may

 be this book: if not, then it will pave the way. But I think you should

 see more of actual life: and not dwell so continually in an atmosphere

 charged with your own imaginings—the glamour through which you see life

 in the main at present.

 

 Probably you are wise to spend the greater part of each year as you

 do: but part of the year should be spent otherwise—say in a town like

 London, or Paris, or in tramping through alien lands, France or Belgium,

 Scandinavia, or Germany, or Italy, or Spain: if not, in Scotland, or

 Ireland, or upon our Isles, or remote counties.

 

 It is because I believe in you that I urge you to beware of your own

 conventions. Take your pen and paper, a satchel, and go forth with a

 light heart. The gods will guide _you_ to strange things, and strange

 things to you. You ought to _see_ more, to _feel_ more, to _know_ more,

 at first hand. Be not afraid of excess. “The road of excess leads to

 the palace of wisdom,” says Blake, and truly.... Meanwhile let me send

 you a word of sunshine. To be alive and young and in health, is a boon

 so inestimable that you ought to fall on your knees among your moorland

 heather and thank the gods. Dejection is a demon to be ruled. We cannot

 always resist his tyranny, but we can always refuse to become bondagers

 to his usurpation. Look upon him as an Afreet to be exorcised with a

 cross of red-hot iron. He is a coward weakling, after all: take him by

 the tail and swing him across the moor or down the valley. Swing up into

 your best.

 

 Be brave, strong, self-reliant. Then you live.

 

  Your friend

  WILLIAM SHARP.

 

We took a small flat in South Hampstead (Rutland House, Greencroft

Gardens) that stood high enough for us to see, on clear days, the line

of the Surrey hills from the windows, and to give us a fine stretch of

sky above the chimney pots.

 

The night before leaving Phenice Croft, a lovely still evening, he

wrote the little poem,

 

 

THE WHITE PEACE

 

  It lies not on the sunlit hill

    Nor in the sunlit gleam

  Nor ever in any falling wave

    Nor ever in running stream—

 

  But sometimes in the soul of man

    Slow moving through his pain

  The moonlight of a perfect peace

    Floods heart and brain.

 

and sent it to me in a letter (for I had gone to town in advance of

him), and told me:

 

 “Before I left I took up a handful of grassy turf, and kissed it three

 times, and then threw it to the four quarters—so that the Beauty of the

 Earth might be seen by me wherever I went and that no beauty I had seen

 or known there should be forgotten. Then I kissed the chestnut tree on

 the side lawn where I have seen and heard so much: from the springing of

 the dream flowers, to the surge of the sea in _Pharais_.”

 

 

Thence he went to Scotland and wrote to me from Kilcreggan, where he

was staying with his mother and sisters till I could join him:

 

 “I told you about Whistlefield? how it, and all the moorland parts about

 here just now, is simply a boggy sop, to say nothing of the railway

 works. I hope we’ll have fine weather in Iona: it will be lovely there

 if we go....

 

 (By the way Mr. Traill had a gratifying notice of _Pharais_ in the

 _Graphic_ a week or two ago.)

 

 I have made friends here with a Celtic Islesman from Iona who is settled

 here: and have learned some more legends and customs etc. from him—also

 got a copy of an ancient MS. map of Iona with all its fields, divisions,

 bays, capes, isles, etc. He says my pronunciation of Gaelic is not only

 surprisingly good, but is distinctively that of the Isles.

 

 I have learned the rune also of the reading of the spirit. The

 ‘influence’ itself seems to me purely hypnotic. I was out with this man

 McC—— on Saty. night last in a gale, in a small two-sailed wherry. We

 flew before the squalls like a wild horse, and it was glorious with the

 shriek of the wind, the heave and plunge of the boat, and the washing

 of the water over the gunwales. Twice ‘the black wind’ came down upon

 us out of the hills, and we were nearly driven under water. He kept

 chanting and calling a wild sea-rune, about a water-demon of the isles,

 till I thought I saw it leaping from wave to wave after us. Strangely,

 he is a different man the moment others are present. He won’t speak a

 word of Gaelic, nor be ‘Celtic’ in any way, nor even give the word as

 to what will be doing in the isles at this time or any other. This,

 however, I have noticed often: and all I have ever learned has been in

 intimacy and privily and more or less casually. On Sunday and Monday he

 avoided me, and would scarce speak: having given himself away and shown

 his Celtic side—a thing now more than ever foreign to the Celtic nature,

 which has become passionately reticent. But a few words in Gaelic, and

 a private talk, put all right again. Last night I got