WILLIAM SHARP (FIONA MACLEOD) A MEMOIR COMPILED BY HIS WIFE ELIZABETH A. SHARP - ELIZABETH A. SHARP (phonics reader TXT) 📗
- Author: ELIZABETH A. SHARP
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because I have known a mystery, and am to-day as a child before it,
and can neither reveal nor interpret it.” For that mystery concerns
the evolution of a human soul; and the part of it for which ‘the man’
is consciously and personally responsible, is the method he used, the
fiction he created and deliberately fostered,—rightly or wrongly—for
the protection of his inner, compelling self.
This deliberate ‘blind’—which according to some critics “is William
Sharp’s most notable achievement in fiction rather than the creation of
any of ‘her’ works”—is largely the cause of the sense of confusion that
exists in the minds of certain of his friends, to whom he told the half
but not the whole of the facts. He purposely did not dispel the idea
of a collaborator, an idea which grew out of the half veiled allusions
he had made concerning the friend of whom I have written, whose vivid
personality appealed so potently to a phase of his complex nature, and
stirred his imagination as no one else had done.
In a letter to Mr. W. B. Yeats signed “Fiona Macleod,” and written in
1899, about herself and her friend (namely himself) William tried “as
far as is practicable in a strange and complex manner to be explicit.”
‘She’ stated that, “all the formative and expressional as well as
nearly all the visionary power is my friends. In a sense only his
is the passive part, but it is the allegory of the match, the wind,
and the torch. Everything is in the torch in readiness, and as you
know, there is nothing in the match itself. But there is a mysterious
latency of fire between them ... the little touch of silent igneous
potency at the end of the match—and in what these symbolise, one adds
spiritual affinity as a factor—and all at once the flame is born. The
torch says all is due to the match. The match knows the flame is not
hers. But beyond both is the wind, the spiritual air. Out of the unseen
world it fans the flame. In that mysterious air both the match and the
flame hear strange voices. The air that came at the union of both is
sometimes Art, sometimes Genius, sometimes Imagination, sometimes Life,
sometimes the Spirit. It is all.
“But before that flame people wonder and admire. Most wonder only at
the torch. A few look for the match beyond the torch, and finding her
are apt to attribute to her that which is not hers, save as a spiritual
dynamic agent. Now and then the match may have _in petto_ the qualities
of the torch—particularly memory and vision: and so can stimulate and
amplify the imaginative life of the torch. But the torch is at once
the passive, the formative, the mnemonic, and the artistically and
imaginatively creative force. He knows that in one sense he would be
flameless or at least without that ideal blend of the white and the
red—without the match: and he knows that the flame is the offspring
of both, that the wind has many airs in it, and that one of the most
potent is that which blows from the life and mind and soul of ‘the
match’—but in his heart he knows that, to all others, he and he
alone is the flame, his alone both the visionary, the formative, the
expressional.”
At the last, realising with deep regret that one or two of the friends
he cared greatly for would probably feel hurt when they should know
of the deception, he left the following note to be sent to each
immediately on the disclosure of the secret:
“This will reach you after my death. You will think I have wholly
deceived you about Fiona Macleod. But, in an intimate sense this is
not so: though (and inevitably) in certain details I have misled you.
Only, it is a mystery. I cannot explain. Perhaps you will intuitively
understand or may come to understand. “The rest is silence.” Farewell.
WILLIAM SHARP.
It is only right, however, to add that I, and I only, was the author—in
the literal and literary sense—of all written under the name of “Fiona
Macleod.”
In watching the development of the “Fiona Macleod” phase of expression
it has seemed to me that the writer, in that work, lived a new
sequent life, and passed through its successive phases of growth and
development independently of the tenor of his ordinary life as “W.
S.” He passed from the youth in _Pharais_ and _The Mountain Lovers_,
through the mature manhood of _The Barbaric Tales and Tragic Romances_
to the greater serenity of later contemplative life in _The Divine
Adventure_, _The Winged Destiny_ and _Where the Forest Murmurs_.
In surveying the dual life as a whole I have seen how, from the early
partially realised twin-ship, “W. S.” was the first to go adventuring
and find himself, while his twin, “F. M.,” remained passive, or a
separate self. When “she” awoke to active consciousness “she” became
the deeper, the more impelling, the more essential factor. By reason
of this severance, and of the acute conflict that at times resulted
therefrom, the flaming of the dual life became so fierce that
“Wilfion”—as I named the inner and third Self that lay behind that dual
expression—realised the imperativeness of gaining control over his
two separated selves and of bringing them into some kind of conscious
harmony. This was what he meant when he wrote to Mrs. Janvier in 1899,
“I am going through a new birth.”
For, though the difference between the two literary expressions was so
marked, there was, nevertheless, a special characteristic of “Wilfion”
that linked the dual nature together—the psychic quality of seership if
I may so call it. Not only did he, as F. M. “dream dreams” and “get in
touch with the ancient memory of the race” as some of ‘her’ critics
have said; but as W. S. he also saw visions by means of that seership
with which he had been dowered from childhood. And though, latterly,
he gave expression to it only under shelter of the Fiona Macleod
writings—as for instance in _The Divine Adventure_, because he was as
sensitive about it as he was to the subtler, more imaginative side of
his dual self—a few of his friends knew William Sharp as psychic and
mystic, who knew nothing of him as Fiona Macleod.
I have said little concerning my husband as a psychic; a characteristic
that is amply witnessed to in his writings. From time to time he
interested himself in definite psychic experimentation, occasionally
in collaboration with Mr. W. B. Yeats; experimentation that sometimes
resulted in such serious physical disturbance that he desisted from it
in later years.
In a lecture given by Mr. Yeats to the Aberdeen Centre of the
Franco-Scottish Society in 1907 the Irish poet referred to his friend.
He considered that “Sharp had in many ways an extraordinarily primitive
mind. He was fond of speaking of himself as the representative of the
old bards,” and the Irish poet thought there was really something in
the claim. (In a letter Mr. Yeats had expressed his opinion that my
husband was imaginative in “the old and literal sense of image-making;
not like a man of this age at all.”) He continued that W. S. was the
most extraordinary psychic he had ever encountered. He really believed
that “Fiona Macleod was a secondary personality—as distinct a secondary
personality as those one reads about in books of psychical research.
At times he (W. S.) was really to all intents and purposes a different
being.” He would “come and sit down by my fireside and talk, and I
believe that when ‘Fiona Macleod’ left the house he would have no
recollection of what he had been saying to me.”
It is true, as I have said, that William Sharp seemed a different
person when the Fiona mood was on him; but that he had no recollection
of what he said in that mood was not the case. That he did not
understand it, is true. For that mood could not be commanded at will.
Different influences awakened it, and its duration depended largely on
environment. “W. S.” could set himself deliberately to work normally,
and was, so far, master of his mind. But for the expression of the “F.
M.” self he had to wait upon mood, or seek conditions to induce it.
But, as I have said, the psychic, visionary power belonged exclusively
to neither; it influenced both, and was dictated by laws he did not
fully understand. For instance, “Lilith,” “The Whisperer,” “Finis,” by
S. and “The Woman with the Net,” “The Last Supper,” “The Lynn ofDreams” by F. M., were equally the result of direct vision.
I remember from early days how he would speak of the momentary curious
“dazzle in the brain” which preceded the falling away of all material
things and preluded some inner vision of Great Beauty, or Great
Presences, or of some symbolic import—that would pass as rapidly as it
came. I have been beside him when he has been in trance and I have felt
the room throb with heightened vibration. I regret now that I never
wrote down such experiences at the time. They were not infrequent, and
formed a definite feature in our life. There are, however, two or three
dream-visions belonging to his last summer that I recollect. Two he had
noted down in brief sentences for future use. One was:
“The Lily of the World, and its dark concave, dark with excess of light
and the stars falling like slow rain.”
The other is headed “Elemental Symbolism,” “I saw Self, or Life,
symbolised all about me as a limitless, fathomless and lonely sea. I
took a handful and threw it into the grey silence of ocean air, and it
returned at once as a swift and potent flame, a red fire crested with
blown sunrise, rushing from between the lips of sky and sea to the
sound as of innumerable trumpets.”
One morning he told me that during sleep he had visited a city of
psychic mechanism. In a huge building he had seen this silent mechanism
at work; he had watched a force plunge into molten metal and produce
a shaped vessel therefrom. He could see nothing that indicated by what
power the machinery was driven. He asked his guide for explanation, and
he was led along passages to a small room with many apertures in the
walls, like speaking tubes. In the centre was a table, on a chair sat
a man with his arm on the table, his head in his hand. Pointing to him
the guide said “His thought is the motive force.”
In another dream he visited a land where there was no more war, where
all men and women were equal; where humans, birds and beasts were no
longer at enmity, or preyed on one another. And he was told that the
young men of the land had to serve two years as missionaries to those
who lived at the uttermost boundaries. “To what end?” he asked. “To
cast out fear, our last enemy.” The dream is too long to quote in its
entirety, for it spread over two nights, but one thing impressed him
greatly. In the house of his host he was struck by the beauty of a
framed painting that seemed to vibrate with rich colour. “Who painted
that?” he asked. “His host smiled, “We have long ceased to use brushes
and paints. That is a thought projected from the artist’s brain, and
its duration will be proportionate with its truth.”
Once again he saw in waking vision those Divine Forges he had sought
in childhood. On the verge of the Great Immensity that is beyond the
confines of space, he saw Great Spirits of Fire standing at flaming
anvils. And they lifted up the flames and moulded them on the anvils
into shapes and semblances of men, and the Great Spirits took these
flaming shapes and cast them forth into space, so that they should
become the souls of men.
He was, as Mrs. Mona Caird has truly said of him, “almost encumbered
by the infinity of his perceptions; by the thronging interests,
intuitions, glimpses of wonders, beauties and mysteries which made
life for him a pageant and a splendour such as is only disclosed to
the soul that has to bear the torment and the revelations of genius.
He had much to suffer, but in spite of that—perhaps partly because of
that—he was able to bring to all a great sense of sunshine and boyish
freshness, of joy in life and nature and art, and in the adventure
and romance of it all, for those who knew how to dare enough to go
to meet it with open hands. He gave ever the sense of new power, new
thresholds, new realms. His friendship was a spiritual possession.”
And
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