WILLIAM SHARP (FIONA MACLEOD) A MEMOIR COMPILED BY HIS WIFE ELIZABETH A. SHARP - ELIZABETH A. SHARP (phonics reader TXT) 📗
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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 themore 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 aconstant 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.
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