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

where

 it listeth or where it is impelled, by the Spirit. We are taught such

 hopeless lies. And so men and women start life with ideals which seem

 fair, but are radically consumptive: ideals that are not only bound to

 perish, but that could not survive. The man of fifty who could be the

 same as he was at twenty is simply a man whose mental and spiritual

 life stopped short while he was yet a youth. The woman of forty who

 could have the same outlook on life as the girl of 19 or 20 would

 never have been other than one ignominiously deceived or hopelessly

 self-sophisticated. This ought not to be—but it must be as long as young

 men and women are fed mentally and spiritually upon the foolish and

 cowardly lies of a false and corrupt conventionalism.

 

 No wonder that so many fine natures, men and women, are wrought to

 lifelong suffering. They are started with impossible ideals: and while

 some can never learn that their unhappiness is the result, not of the

 falling short of others, but of the falsity of those ideals which they

 had so cherished—and while others learn first strength to endure the

 transmutations and then power to weld these to far nobler and finer uses

 and ends—for both there is suffering. Yet, even of that we make too

 much. We have all a tendency to nurse grief. The brooding spirit craves

 for the sunlight, but it will not leave the shadows. Often, _Sorrow_ is

 our best ally.

 

 The other night, tired, I fell asleep on my sofa. I dreamed that a

 beautiful spirit was standing beside me. He said: “My Brother, I have

 come to give you the supreme gift that will heal you and save you.” I

 answered eagerly: “Give it me—what is it?” And the fair radiant spirit

 smiled with beautiful solemn eyes, and blew a breath into the tangled

 garden of my heart—and when I looked there I saw the tall white Flower

 of Sorrow growing in the Sunlight.”

 

(To E. A. S.)

 

 

MARGARET’S BAY,

  May, 1898.

 

 I have had a very happy and peaceful afternoon. The isolation, with sun

 and wind, were together like soft cream upon my nerves: and I suppose

 that within twenty minutes after I left the station I was not only

 serenely at peace with the world in general, but had not a perturbing

 thought. To be alone, alone ‘in the open’ above all, is not merely

 healing to me but an imperative necessity of my life—and the chief

 counter agent to the sap that almost every person exercises on me,

 unless obviated by frequent and radical interruption.

 

 By the time I had passed through the village I was already ‘remote’

 in dreams and thoughts and poignant outer enjoyment of the lovely

 actualities of sun and wind and the green life: and when I came to

 my favourite coign where, sheltered from the bite of the wind, I

 could overlook the sea (a mass of lovely, radiant, amethyst-shadowed,

 foam-swept water), I lay down for two restful happy hours _in which not

 once a thought of London or of any one in it, or of any one living_,

 came to me. This power of living absolutely in the moment is worth not

 only a crown and all that a crown could give, but is the secret of

 youth, the secret of life.

 

 O how weary I am of the endless recurrence of the ordinary in the lives

 of most people—the beloved routine, the cherished monotonies, the

 treasured certainties. I grudge them to none: they seem incidental to

 the common weal: indeed they seem even made for happiness. But I know

 one wild heart at least to whom life must come otherwise, or not at all.

 

 Today I took a little green leaf o’ thorn. I looked at the sun through

 it, and a dazzle came into my brain—and I wished, ah I wished I were a

 youth once more, and was ‘sun-brother’ and ‘star-brother’ again—to lie

 down at night, smelling the earth, and rise at dawn, smelling the new

 air out of the East, and know enough of men and cities to avoid both,

 and to consider little any gods ancient or modern, knowing well that

 there is only ‘The Red God’ to think of, he who lives and laughs in the

 red blood....

 

 There is a fever of the ‘green life’ in my veins—below all the ordinary

 littlenesses of conventional life and all the common place of exterior:

 a fever that makes me ill at ease with people, even those I care for,

 that fills me with a weariness beyond words and a nostalgia for sweet

 impossible things.

 

 This can be met in several ways—chiefly and best by the practical yoking

 of the imagination to the active mind—in a word, to work. If I can do

 this, well and good, either by forced absorption in contrary work (e.

Cæsar of France), or by letting that go for the time and let the

 more creative instinct have free play: or by some radical change of

 environment: or again by some irresponsible and incalculable variation

 of work and brief day-absences.

 

 At the moment, I am like a man of the hills held in fee: I am willing

 to keep my bond, to earn my wage, to hold to the foreseen: and yet any

 moment a kestrel may fly overhead, mocking me with a rock-echo, where

 only sun and wind and bracken live—or an eddy of wind may have the sough

 of a pine in it—and then, in a flash—there’s my swift brain-dazzle in

 answer, and all the rapid falling away of these stupid half-realities,

 and only a wild instinct to go to my own....

 

It was in this mood that he wrote to a friend:

 

 ... but then, life is just like that. It is glad only ‘in the open,’

 and beautiful only because of its dreams. I wish I could live all my

 hours out of doors: I envy no one in the world so much as the red deer,

 the eagle, the sea-mew. I am sure no kings have so royal a life as the

 plovers and curlews have. All these have freedom, rejoice continually on

 the wind’s wing, exalt alike in sun and shade: to them day is day, and

 night is night, and there is nothing else.

 

His sense of recovery was greatly heightened by a delightful little

wander in Holland in May, with Mr. Thomas A. Janvier, a jovial, breezy

companion. Of all he saw the chief fascination proved to be Eiland

Marken, as he wrote to me:

 

 We are now in the south Zuyder Zee, with marvellous sky effects, and low

 lines of land in the distance. Looking back at Eiland Marken one sees

 six clusters of houses, at wide intervals, dropped casually into the sea.

 

 We had a delightful time in that quaintest of old world places,

 where the women are grotesque, the men grotesquer, and the children

 grotesquest—as for the tubby, capped, gorgeous-garbed, blue-eyed,

 yellow-haired, imperturbable babies, they alone are worth coming to

 see....

 

The following is a letter from his other self:

 

 

  23d July, 1898.

 

  MY DEAR MR. RHYS,

 

 On my coming to Edinburgh for a few days I find the book you have so

 kindly sent to me. It is none the less welcome because it comes as no

 new acquaintance: for on its appearance a friend we have in common sent

 it to me. Alas, that copy lies among the sea-weed in a remote Highland

 loch; for the book, while still reading in part, slipped overboard the

 small yacht in which I was sailing, and with it the MS. of a short story

 of mine appropriately named “Beneath the Shadow of the Wave”! The two

 may have comforted each other in that solitude: or the tides may have

 carried them southward, and tossed them now to the Pembroke Stacks, now

 to the cliffs of Howth. Perhaps a Welsh crab may now be squeaking (they

 do say that crabs make a whistling squeak!) with a Gaelic accent, or the

 deep-sea congers be reciting Welsh ballads to the young-lady-eels of the

 Hebrides. Believe me, your book has given me singular pleasure. I find

 in it the indescribable: and to me that is one of the tests, perhaps

 the supreme test (for it involves so much) of imaginative literature.

 A nimble air of the hills is there; the rustle of remote woods; the

 morning cry, that is so ancient, and that still so thrills us.

 

 I most eagerly hope that you will recreate in beauty the all but lost

 beauty of the old Cymric singers. There is a true originality in this,

 as in anything else. The green leaf, the grey wave, the mountain

 wind—after all, are they not murmurous in the old Celtic poets, whether

 Alban or Irish or Welsh: and to translate, and recreate anew, from

 these, is but to bring back into the world again a lost wandering beauty

 of hill-wind or green leaf or grey wave. There is, I take it, no one

 living who could interpret Davyth ap Gwilym and other old Welsh singers

 as you could do. I long to have the Green Book of ‘the Poet of the

 Leaves’ in English verse, and in English verse such as that into which

 you could transform it....

 

M.

 

The Welsh poet replied:

 

 

  NEWCASTLE-ON-TYNE,

  27th Dec., 1898.

 

  DEAR “FIONA MACLEOD,”

 

 ‘I believe I never wrote to thank you for your story in the _Dome_,

 which I read eventually in an old Welsh tower. It was the right place

 to read such a fantasy of the dark and bright blindness of the Celt: and

 I found it, if not of your very best, yet full of imaginative stimulus.

 

 Not many weeks ago, in very different surroundings, Mr. Sharp read me

 a poem—two poems—of yours. So I feel that I have the sense, at least,

 of your continued journeys thro’ the divine and earthly regions of

 the Gael, and how life looks to you, and what colours it wears. What

 should we do were it not for that sense of the little group of simple

 and faithful souls, who love the clay of earth because heaven is wrapt

 in it, and stand by and support their lonely fellows in the struggle

 against the forces upon forces the world sends against them? I trust at

 some time it may be my great good fortune to see you and talk of these

 things, and hear more of your doings.

 

  ERNEST RHYS.

 

From the little rock-perched, sea-girt Pettycur Inn, my husband wrote

to Mrs. Janvier:

 

 

  THE HOUSE OF DREAMS,

  20th Dec., 1898.

 

 ... It has been a memorable time here. I have written some of my best

 work—including two or three of the new things for _The Dominion of

 Dreams_—viz. “The Rose of Flame,” “Honey of the Wild Bees,” and “The

 Secrets of the Night.”

 

 What a glorious day it has been. The most beautiful I have ever seen at

 Pettycur I think. Cloudless blue sky, clear exquisite air tho’ cold,

 with a marvellous golden light in the afternoon. Arthur’s Seat, the

 Crags and the Castle and the 14 ranges of the Pentlands all clear-cut

 as steel, and the city itself visible in fluent golden light. The whole

 coast-line purple blue, down to Berwick Law and the Bass Rock, and the

 Isle of May 16 miles out in the north sea.

 

 And now I listen to the gathering of the tidal waters under the

 stars. There is an infinite solemnity—a hush, something sacred and

 wonderful. A benediction lies upon the world. Far off I hear the roaming

 wind. Thoughts and memories crowd in on me. Here I have lived and

 suffered—here I have touched the heights—here I have done my best. And

 now, here, I am going through a new birth.

 

 ‘_Sic itur ad astral!_’

 

During the years that F. M. developed so rapidly her creator felt

the necessity pressing hard on him to sustain, as far as he could,

the reputation of W. S. He valued such reputation as he had and was

anxious not to let it die away; yet there was a great difference in

the method of production of the two kinds of work. The F. M. writing

was the result of an inner impulsion, he wrote because he had to give

expression to himself whether the impulse grew out of pain or out of

pleasure. But W. S., divorced as much as could be from his twin self,

wrote because he cared to, because the necessities of life demanded

He was always deeply interested in his critical work, for he was a

constant student of Literature in all its forms, and of the Literature

of different countries—in particular of France, America and Italy.

This form of study, this keen interest, was a necessity to W. S.; but

fiction was to him a matter of choice. He deliberately set himself to

write the two novels _Wives in Exile_ and _Silence Farm_, because he

felt W. S.