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WILLIAM SHARP

(FIONA MACLEOD)

A MEMOIR

COMPILED BY HIS WIFE

ELIZABETH A. SHARP

NEW YORK

DUFFIELD & COMPANY

1910

Copyright, 1910, by
DUFFIELD & COMPANY

THE TROW PRESS · NEW YORK

WILLIAM SHARP

A MEMOIR

PREFACE

When the secret of the identity of Fiona Macleod—so loyally guarded by a number of friends for twelve years—was finally made known, much speculation arose as to the nature of the dual element that had found expression in the collective work of William Sharp. Many suggestions, wide of the mark, were advanced; among others, that the writer had assumed the pseudonym as a joke, and having assumed it found himself constrained to continue its use. A few of the critics understood. Prof. Patrick Geddes realised that the discussion was productive of further misunderstanding, and wrote to me: “Should you not explain that F. M. was not simply W. S., but that W. S. in his deepest moods became F. M., a sort of dual personality in short, not a mere nom-de-guerre?” It was not expedient for me at that moment to do so. I preferred to wait till I could prepare as adequate an explanation as possible. My chief aim, therefore, in writing about my husband and in giving a sketch of his life, has been to indicate, to the best of my ability, the growth and development in his work of the dual literary expression of himself.

The most carefully compiled record of a life can be but partially true, since much of necessity must be left unsaid. A biographer, moreover, can delineate another human being only to the extent of his understanding of that fellow being. In so far as he lacks, not only knowledge of facts, but also the illumination of intuition and sympathy, to that extent will he fail to present a finished study of his subject. And because no one can wholly know another: because one of necessity interprets another through the colour of his or her mind, I am very conscious of my own limitations in this respect. As, however, I have known William Sharp for more consecutive years than any other of his intimate friends, I perhaps am able therefore to offer the fullest survey of the unfolding of his life; though I realise that others may have known him better than I on some sides of his nature: in particular as he impressed those who had not discovered, or were not in sympathy with, the “F. M.” phase in him.

The life of William Sharp divides itself naturally into two halves: the first ends with the publication by W. S. of Vistas, and the second begins with Pharais, the first book signed Fiona Macleod. It has been my endeavour to tell his story by means of letters and diaries; of letters written by him, and of others written to him, concerning his work and interests. To quote his own words: “A group of intimate letters, written with no foreseen or suspected secondary intention, will probably give us more insight into the inner nature of a man than any number of hypothetical pros and cons on the part of a biographer, or than reams of autobiography.... I know Keats for instance far better through his letters than by even the ablest and most intimate memoirs that have been written of him: the real man is revealed in them and is brought near to us till we seem to hear his voice and clasp his hand.”

The diaries are fragmentary. They were usually begun at each New Year, but were speedily discontinued; or noted down intermittently, during a sojourn abroad, as a record of work. He was a good correspondent, both as W. S. and F. M. I have thus tried to make the book as autobiographic as possible, by means of these letters and diaries, and I have added only what has seemed to me necessary to make the narrative sequent. Unfortunately, letters have not been available from several valuable sources; and I regret the absence of any written by him to Walter Pater, George Meredith, Theodore Watts-Dunton, Arthur Symons, and to one or two of his most intimate friends.

I take this opportunity of expressing to many friends on both sides of the Atlantic my appreciation of their courtesy in placing letters at my disposal; also for permission accorded to me by Mr. Robert Ross for the use of letters from Oscar Wilde, and by Mr. Charles Baxter, for letters from Robert Louis Stevenson. Through the kindness of Mrs. Sturgis I have included among the illustrations a portrait of her father George Meredith (dated 1898). I am indebted to Miss Pater for the photograph of her brother Walter Pater; and to Mr. W. M. Rossetti for that of his brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Of the four portraits of William Sharp, herein reproduced, the earliest was taken about the time of the publication of his first volume of poems. The pastel by the Norwegian painter, Charles Ross, was executed in Rome in 1891, two years before Pharais was written; and the etching by our friend, Mr. William Strang A.R.A., who has kindly sanctioned my use of it, dates to 1896, in which year were published The Washer of the Ford, Green Fire, and From the Hills of Dream. The final portrait of my husband was taken in Sicily in 1903 by the Hon. Alexander Nelson Hood (Duke of Bronte), who also has permitted me to reproduce his photograph of Il Castello di Maniace, Bronte—on the inland shoulder of Etna—close to which, on a sloping hillside, in the little woodland burial ground, and within sound of rushing waters, stands the Iona cross erected to the memory of William Sharp and “Fiona Macleod.”

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PART I

WILLIAM SHARP

“Praised be the fathomless universe,
For life and joy ... and for love, sweet love.”

W. Whitman.

“But one to whom life appeals by myriad avenues, all alluring and full of wonder and mystery, cannot always abide where the heart most longs to be. It is well to remember that there are Shadowy Waters, even in the cities, and that the Fount of Youth is discoverable in the dreariest towns as well as in Hy Brasil: a truth apt to be forgotten by those of us who dwell with ever-wondering delight in that land of lost romance which had its own day, as this epoch of a still stranger, if less obvious, romance has its passing hour.”

F. M.

CHAPTER I

CHILDHOOD

“Childhood, when the child is as a flower of wilding growth, and when it is at one with nature, fellow with the winds and birds.”

W. S.

“That man is fortunate who has half his desires gratified, who lives to see half his desires accomplished,” says Schopenhauer, and taking the axiom to be true I am not going back on it, for certainly more than half of the desires of my boyhood and youth have been fulfilled. I come of a West of Scotland stock which—perhaps in part because of its Scandinavian admixture—has always had in it ‘the wandering blood’: and from my early days, when at the mature age of three I escaped one night from the nursery and was found in the garden at midnight, a huddled little white heap at the foot of a great poplar that was at once my ceaseless delight and wonder and a fascination that was almost terror, a desire of roaming possessed me.”

That William Sharp should be one of the fortunates who, toward the end of life, could say he had fulfilled more than half of his early desires, was due mainly to a ceaseless curiosity and love of adventure, to a happy fearlessness of disposition that prompted him when starting on any quest to seize the propitious moment, and if necessary to burn his boats behind him. He believed himself to have been born under a lucky star. Notwithstanding the great hardships and difficulties that sometimes barred his way, his vivid imagination, aided by a strong will and untiring perseverance, opened to him many doors of the wonderland of life that lured him in his dreams. The adventurous and the romantic were to him as beacons; and though their lights were at times overshadowed by the tragedy of human life, his natural buoyancy of disposition, his power of whole-hearted enjoyment in things large and small, his ready intuitive sympathy, preserved in him a spirit of fine optimism to the end.

The conditions of his early boyhood were favourable to the development of his natural inclination.

He was born on the 12th of September, 1855, at 4 Garthland Place, Paisley, on a day when the bells were ringing for the fall of Sebastopol. He was the eldest of a family of three sons and five daughters. His father, David Galbreath Sharp, a partner in an old-established mercantile house, was the youngest son of William Sharp, whose family originally came from near Dunblane. His mother was a Miss Katherine Brooks, the eldest daughter of William Brooks, Swedish Vice-Consul at Glasgow, and of Swedish descent, whose wife was a Miss Agnes Henderson, related to the Stewarts of Shambellie and the Murrays of Philiphaugh.

Mr. David Sharp was a genial, observant man, humourous, and a finished mimic. Though much of his life was of necessity spent in a city, he had a keen love of the country, and especially of the West Highlands. Every summer he took a house for three or four months on the shores of the Clyde, or on one of the beautiful sea lochs, or on the island of Arran, now so exploited, but then relatively secluded. Very early he initiated his son in the arts of swimming, rowing, and line fishing; sailed with him along the beautiful shores of the Western Highlands and the Inner Hebrides.

Mrs. David Sharp had been brought up by her father to read seriously, and to take an interest in his favourite study of Geology. It was she who watched over her son’s work at college, and made facilities for him to follow his special pursuits at home. But the boy was never urged to distinguish himself at college. He was considered too delicate to be subjected to severe mental pressure; and he met with no encouragement from either parent in his wish to throw himself into the study of science or literature as a profession, for such a course seemed to them to offer no prospects for his future. It was from Mrs. Sharp that her son inherited his Scandinavian physique and high colouring; for in appearance he resembled his fair-complexioned, tall maternal grandfather. The blend of nationalities in him, slight though the Swedish strain was, produced a double strain. He was, in the words of a friend, a Viking in build, a Scandinavian in cast of mind, a Celt in heart and spirit.

As a little child he was very delicate.

The long months each year by mountain and sea, and the devotion of his Highland nurse Barbara, and his delight in open-air life, were the most potent factors in the inward growth of his mind and spirit. From his earliest days he was a passionate lover of nature, a tireless observer of her moods and changes, for he had always felt himself to be “at one with nature, fellow with the winds and birds.” And Barbara, the Highland woman, it was she who told him stories of Faerie, crooned to him old Gaelic songs, and made his childish mind familiar with the heroes of the old Celtic Sagas, with the daring exploits of the Viking rovers and Highland chieftains. It was she who sowed the seeds in his mind of much that he afterward retold under the pseudonym of Fiona Macleod.

There are two stories of his childhood I have heard him tell, which seem to me to show that from earliest years the distinctive characteristics of his markedly dual nature existed and swayed him. From babyhood his mind had been filled with stories of old heroic times, and in his play he delighted in being the adventurous warrior or marauding Viking. In the gray, inclement days of winter when he was shut up in his nursery away from the green life in the garden and the busy wee birds in the trees, he was thrown on the resources of his imagination to fill the long hours. One snowy day, when he was five years old, and he was tired of playing with his baby sisters, who could not sufficiently rise to the occasion and play the distressed damsels to his deeds of knightly chivalry, he determined to sally forth in search of adventure. He buckled his sword above his kilt—it was afternoon and the light was waning—stole downstairs and out of the house, hatless, with flying curls, and marched down the street to lay siege to the nearest castle. A short distance away stood the house of a friend of his father, and upon that the besieger turned his attack. It loomed in his mind as the castle of his desire. He strode resolutely up to the door, with great difficulty, on tiptoe, reached the handle of the bell, pulled a long peal, and then demanded of the maid that she and all within should surrender to him and deliver up the keys of the castle. The maid fell in with his humour, was properly frightened, and begged to be allowed to summon her mistress, who at once promised submission, led the victor into her room, and by a blazing fire gave him the keys in the form of much coveted sweets, held him in her lap till in the warmth he fell asleep, rolled him up in a blanket, and carried him home.

The other story is indicative not of the restless adventure-loving side of him, but of the poet dreamer.

During the child’s sixth year his father had taken a house for the summer months on the shores of Loch Long; the great heather-clad hills, peak behind peak, the deep waters of the winding loch, were a ceaseless delight to the boy. But above all else there lay an undefined attraction in a little wood, a little pine belt nestling on the hillside above the house. It was an enchanted land to him, away from the everyday world, where human beings never came, but where he met his invisible playmates, visible to him. “I went there very often,” he wrote later. “I thought that belt of firs had a personality as individual as that of any human being, a sanctity not to be disturbed by sport or play.” It was a holy place to him. The sense of the Infinite touched him there. He had heard of God in the church, and as described from the pulpit that Being was to him remote and forbidding. But here he seemed conscious of a Presence that was benign, beautiful. He felt there was some great power (he could not define the feeling to himself) behind the beauty he saw; behind the wind he did not see, but heard; behind the wonder of the sunshine and sunset and in the silences he loved, that awoke in him a desire to belong to it. And so, moved to express his desire in some way, he built a little altar of stones, rough stones, put together under a swaying pine, and on it he laid white flowers in offering.

The three influences that taught him most in childhood were the wind, the woods, and the sea. Water throughout his life had an irresistible charm for him—the sea, the mountain-loch, or the rushing headlong waters of the hill-burns. To watch the play of moving waters was an absorbing fascination, and he has told me how one bright night he had crept on to a ledge of wet rocks behind a hill water-fall and had lain there so that he might watch the play of moonlight through the shimmering veil of waters.

“When I was a child,” he wrote later, “I used to throw offerings—small coins, flowers, shells, even a newly caught trout, once a treasured flint arrow-head—into the sea-loch by which we lived. My Hebridean nurse had often told me of Shony, a mysterious sea-god, and I know I spent much time in wasted adoration: a fearful worship, not unmixed with disappointment and some anger. Not once did I see him. I was frightened time after time, but the sudden cry of a heron, or the snort of a pollack chasing the mackerel, or the abrupt uplifting of a seal’s head became over-familiar, and I desired terror, and could not find it by the shore. Inland, after dusk, there was always the mysterious multitude of shadow. There, too, I could hear the wind leaping and growling. But by the shore I never knew any dread, even in the darkest night. The sound and company of the sea washed away all fears.”

But the child was not a dreamer only. He was a high-spirited little chap, who loved swimming and fishing and climbing; and learned at an early age to handle the oar and the tiller, and to understand the ways and moods of a sailing boat; afraid of nothing and ready for any adventure that offered.

My first recollections of him go back to my childhood. We were cousins; my father was his father’s older brother. My mother was the daughter of Robert Farquharson, of Breda and Allargue. In 1863 my Uncle David had a house at Blairmore on the Gare-loch for the summer, and my mother took her children to the neighbouring village of Strone, so that the cousins might become acquainted. My impression of “Willie” is vivid: a merry, mischievous little boy in his eighth year, with bright-brown curly hair, blue-gray eyes, and a laughing face, and dressed in a tweed kilt; eager, active in his endless invention of games and occupations, and a veritable despot over his sisters in their play. He interested his London cousins in showing them how to find crabs and spouting fish, birds’ nests, and brambles; terrified them with tales of snakes in the grass on the hills, and of the ghostly things that flitted about the woods at night. But his chief delight was his punt. A great part of the day he spent on and in the water, shouting with delight as he tossed on the waves in the wake of a steamer, and he occasionally startled us by being apparently capsized into the water, disappearing from sight, and then clambering into the punt dripping and happy. But I remember that with all his love of fun and teasing, he seemed to feel himself different from the other children of his age, and would fly off alone to the hillside or to the woods to his many friends among the birds and the squirrels and the rabbits, with whose ways and habitations he seemed so familiar.

About the dream and vision side of his life he learned early to be silent. He soon realised that his playmates understood nothing of the confused memories of previous lives that haunted him, and from which he drew materials to weave into stories for his school-fellows in the dormitory at nights. To his surprise he found they saw none of the denizens of the other worlds—tree spirits and nature spirits, great and small—so familiar to him, and who he imagined must be as obvious to others as to himself. He could say about them as Lafcadio Hearn said about ghosts and goblins, that he believed in them for the best of possible reasons, because he saw them day and night.

He found, as have other imaginative psychic children, that he had an inner life, a curious power of vision unshared by any one about him; so that what he related was usually discredited. But the psychic side of his nature was too intimately a part of himself to be killed by misunderstanding. He learned early to shut it away—keep it as a thing apart—a mystery of his own, a mystery to himself. This secrecy had two direct results: he needed from time to time to get away alone, from other people, so as again and again to get into touch with “the Green Life,” as he called it, for spiritual refreshment; and it developed in him a love not only of mystery for its own sake, but of mystification also that became a marked characteristic, and eventually was one of the factors which in his literary work led to the adoption of the pseudonym.

Once only, as far as I know, in the short psychic tale called “The Four Winds of the Spirit,” did he, in his writings, make any reference to his invisible playmates. I have often heard him speak of a beautiful, gentle white Lady of the Woods, about whom he once wrote in a letter: “For I, too, have my dream, my memory of one whom as a child I called Star-Eyes, and whom later I called ‘Baumorair-na-mara,’ the Lady of the Sea, and whom at least I knew to be no other than the woman who is in the heart of women. I was not more than seven when one day, by a well, near a sea-loch in Argyll, just as I was stooping to drink, my glancing eyes lit on a tall woman standing among a mist of wild hyacinths under three great sycamores. I stood, looking, as a fawn looks, wide-eyed, unafraid. She did not speak, but she smiled, and because of the love and beauty in her eyes I ran to her. She stooped and lifted blueness out of the flowers, as one might lift foam out of a pool, and I thought she threw it over me. When I was found lying among the hyacinths dazed, and, as was thought, ill, I asked eagerly after the lady in white, and with hair all shiny-gold like buttercups, but when I found I was laughed at, or at last, when I passionately persisted, was told I was sun-dazed and had been dreaming, I said no more—but I did not forget.”

This boy dreamer began his education at home under a governess, and of those early days I know little except that he was tractable, easily taught, and sunny-natured.

He has given an account of his first experiences at school in a paper, “In the Days of my Youth,” which he was asked to contribute to M. A. P.

“The first tragedy in my life was when I was captured for the sacrifice of school. At least to me it seemed no less than a somewhat brutal and certainly tyrannical capture, and my heart sank when, at the age of eight (I did not know how fortunate I was to have escaped the needless bondage of early schooling till I was eight years old), I was dispatched to what was then one of the chief boarding-schools in Scotland, Blair Lodge, in Polmont Woods, between Falkirk and Linlithgow. It was beautifully situated, and though I then thought the woods were forests and the Forth and Clyde canal a mighty stream, I was glad some years ago, on revisiting the spot, to find that my boyish memories were by no means so exaggerated as I feared. I am afraid I was much more of a credit to my shepherd and fisher and gipsy friends than to my parents or schoolmasters.

“On the very day of my arrival a rebellion had broken out, and by natural instinct I was, like the Irishman the moment he arrived in America, ‘agin the Government.’ I remember the rapture with which I evaded a master’s pursuing grip, and was hauled in at a window by exultant rebels. In that temporary haven the same afternoon I insulted a big boy, whose peculiar physiognomy had amazed me to delighted but impolite laughter, and forthwith experienced my first school thrashing. Later in the day I had the satisfaction of coming out victor in an equal combat with the heir of an Indian big-wig, whom, with too ready familiarity, I had addressed as ‘Curry.’ As I was a rather delicate and sensitive child, this was not a bad beginning, and I recollect my exhilaration (despite aching bones and smarting spots) in the thought that ‘school’ promised to be a more lively experience than I had anticipated.

“I ran away three times, and I doubt if I learned more indoors than I did on these occasions and in my many allowed and stolen outings. The first flight for freedom was an ignominious failure. The second occasion two of us were Screaming Eagle and Sitting Bull, and we had a smothered fire o’ nights and ample provender (legally and illegally procured), and we might have become habitual woodlanders had I not ventured to a village and rolled downhill before me a large circular cheese, for which, alas! I now blush to say, I forgot to pay or even to leave my name and address. That cheese was our undoing. The third time was nearly successful, and but for a gale my life, in all probability, would have had an altogether different colour and accent. We reached the port of Grangemouth, and were successful in our plot to hide ourselves as stowaways. We slept that night amid smells, rats, cockroaches, and a mysterious congregation of ballast and cargo, hoping to wake to the sound of waves. Alas! a storm swept the Forth from west to the east. The gale lasted close on three days. On the morning of the third, three pale and wretched starvelings were ignominiously packed back to Blair Lodge, where the admiration of comrades did not make up for punishment fare and a liberal flogging.

“A fourth attempt, however, proved successful, though differently for each of us. One of the three, a rotund, squirrel-eyed boy, named Robinson, was shipped off as an apprentice in an Indiaman. A few years later he went to his dreamed-of South Seas, was killed in a squabble with hostile islanders, and, as was afterward discovered, afforded a feast (I am sure a succulent one) to his captors. The second of the three is now a dean in the Anglican Church. I have never met him, but once at a big gathering I saw the would-be pirate in clerical garb, with a protuberant front, and bald. I think Robinson had the better luck. As for the third of the three, he has certainly had his fill of wandering, if he has never encountered cannibals and if he is neither a dean nor bald.”

When their son was twelve years old, William’s parents left Paisley and took a house in Glasgow (India Street), and he was sent as a day scholar to the Glasgow Academy. In his sixteenth year he was laid low with a severe attack of typhoid fever. It was to that summer during the long months of convalescence in the West that many of his memories of Seumas Macleod belong. Of this old fisherman he wrote: “When I was sixteen I was on a remote island where he lived, and on the morrow of my visit I came at sunrise upon the old man standing looking seaward with his bonnet removed from his long white locks; and upon my speaking to Seumas (when I saw he was not ‘at his prayers’) was answered, in Gaelic of course, ‘Every morning like this I take my hat off to the beauty of the world.’ Although I was sent to the Academy at Glasgow, and afterward to the University, I spent much of each year in boating, sailing, hill-climbing, wandering, owing to the unusual freedom allowed to me during our summer residence in the country and during the other vacations. From fifteen to eighteen I sailed up every loch, fjord, and inlet in the Western Highlands and islands, from Arran and Colonsay to Skye and the Northern Hebrides, from the Rhinns of Galloway to the Ord of Sutherland. Wherever I went I eagerly associated myself with fishermen, sailors, shepherds, gamekeepers, poachers, gipsies, wandering pipers, and other musicians.” In this way he made many friends, especially among the fishermen and shepherds, stayed with them in their houses, and, ‘having the Gaelic,’ talked with them, gained their confidence, and listened to tales told by old men, and old mothers by the fireside during the long twilight evenings, or in the herring-boats at night.

“At eighteen I ‘took to the heather,’ as we say in the north, for a prolonged period....” Up the Gare-loch, close to Ardentinny, there was a point of waste land running into the water, frequently used as camping ground by roving tinkers and gipsies. Many a time he sailed there in his little boat to get in touch with these wandering folk. One summer he found there an encampment of true gipsies, who had come over from mid-Europe, a fine, swarthy, picturesque race. The appeal was irresistible, strengthened by the attraction of a beautiful gipsy girl. He made friends with the tribe, and persuaded the ‘king’ to let him join them; and so he became ‘star-brother’ and ‘sun-brother’ to them, and wandered with them over many hills and straths of the West Highlands. To him, who at all times hated the restrictions and limitations of conventional life, to whom romance was a necessity, this free life ‘on the heather’ was the realisation of many dreams. In those few months he learned diverse things; much wood-lore, bird-lore, how to know the ways of the wind, and to use the stars as compass. I do not know exactly how long he was with the camp; two months, perhaps, or three. For to him they were so full of wonder, so vivid, that in later life, when he spoke of them, he lost all count of time, and on looking back to those days, packed with new and keen experiences so wholly in keeping with his temperament, weeks seemed as months, and he ceased to realise that the experience was compressed into one short summer. He never wove these memories into a sequent romance, though in later time he thought of so doing. For one thing, the present was the absorbing actuality to him, and the future a dream to realise; whether in life or in work the past was past, and he preferred to project himself toward the future and what it might have in store for him. But traces of the influence of those gipsy days are to be seen in Children of To-morrow, in the character of Annaik in Green Fire, and in the greater part of the story of “The Gipsy Christ,” published later in the collection of short stories entitled Madge o’ the Pool. He also had projected a romance to be called The Gipsy Trail, but it was never even begun.

One thing, however, I know for certain, that the truant’s parents were greatly concerned over his disappearance. After considerable trouble the fugitive was recaptured. Not long after he was put into a lawyer’s office, ostensibly to teach him business habits, but also the better to chain him to work, to the accepted conventions of life, and to remove him out of the way of dangerous temptations offered by the freer College life with its long vacations.

“Not long after my return to civilisation, at my parent’s urgent request, I not only resumed my classes at the University, but entered a lawyer’s office in Glasgow (on very easy conditions, hardly suitable for a professional career), so as to learn something of the law. I learned much more, in a less agreeable fashion, when I spent my first years in London and understood the pains and penalties of impecuniosity! The only outside influence which had strongly perturbed my boyhood was the outbreak of the Franco-German War, and I recall the eager excitement with which I followed the daily news, my exultation when the French were defeated, my delight when the Prussians won a great victory. A few years later I would have ‘sided’ differently, but boys naturally regarded the French as hereditary foes.”

In the autumn of 1871 he had been enrolled as student at the Glasgow University, and he attended the sessions of 1871-72 and 1872-73 during the Lord Rectorship of The Right Honourable B. Disraeli. He did not remain long enough at the university to take his degree. Yet he worked well, and was an attentive scholar. Naturally, English Literature was the subject that attracted him specially; in that class he was under Prof. John Nichol, whose valued friendship he retained for many years. At the end of his second session he was one of three students who were found ‘worthy of special commendation.’ The chief benefit to him of his undergraduate days was the access it gave him to the University Library. There new worlds of fascinating study were opened to him; not only the literature and philosophy of other European countries, but also the wonderful literatures and religions of the East. He read omnivorously; night after night he read far into the morning hours literature, philosophy, poetry, mysticism, occultism, magic, mythology, folk-lore. While on the one hand the immediate result was to turn him from the form of Presbyterian faith in which he had been brought up, to put him in conflict with all orthodox religious teachings, it strengthened the natural tendency of his mind toward a belief in the unity of the great truths underlying all religions; and, to his deep satisfaction, gave him a sense of brotherhood with the acknowledged psychics and seers of other lands and other days. At last he found a sympathetic correspondence with his thoughts and experiences, and a clew to their possible meaning and value.

In 1874, with a view to finding out in what direction his son’s capabilities lay, Mr. David Sharp put him into the office of Messrs. Maclure and Hanney, lawyers, in Glasgow, where he remained till his health broke down and he was sent to Australia. It was soon evident that he would never be a shining light in the legal profession: his chief interest still lay in his private studies and his earliest efforts in literature. In order to find time for all he wished to do, which included a keen interest in the theatre and opera whenever the chance offered, he allowed himself during these two years four hours only out of the twenty-four for sleep; a procedure which did not tend to strengthen his already delicate health. At no time in his life did he weigh or consider what amount of physical strength he had at his disposal. His will was strong, his desires were definite; he expected his strength to be adequate to his requirements, and assumed it was so, until, from time to time, a serious breakdown proved to him how seriously he had overdrawn on his reserve.

CHAPTER II

AUSTRALIA

My second meeting with my cousin was in August of 1875, when he spent a week with us at a cottage my mother had taken at Dunoon, then one of the most charming villages on the Clyde.

I remember vividly the impression he made on me when I saw the tall, thin figure pass through our garden gateway at sunset—he had come down by the evening steamer from Glasgow—and stride swiftly up the path. He was six feet one inch in height, very thin, with slightly sloping shoulders. He was good-looking, with a fair complexion and high colouring; gray-blue eyes, brown hair closely cut, a sensitive mouth, and winning smile. He looked delicate, but full of vitality. He spoke very rapidly, and when excited his words seemed to tumble one over the other, so that it was not always easy to understand him.

In September my sister and I visited our Uncle and Aunt at 16 Rosslyn Terrace, Glasgow, and before the close of that month their son and I were secretly plighted to one another. Then began a friendship that lasted unbrokenly for thirty years.

It was then he confided to me that his true ambition lay not in being a scientific man, as it was supposed, but a poet: that his desire was to write about Mother Nature and her inner mysteries, but that as yet he had not sufficient mastery of his art to be able to put his message into adequate form. After much persuasion he read to me several of his early attempts, and promised to send me a copy of whatever he should write.

We were very anxious to meet again before I returned to London, as we should of necessity be separated till the following autumn. A few days later in Edinburgh came the desired opportunity. But how and where to meet? No one must know, lest our secret should be discovered—for we well knew all our relations would be unanimous in disapproval.

Instead of going to the Lawyer’s office one morning my cousin took an early train into Edinburgh—and I left my sister to make the necessary excuses for my absence at luncheon. But where to meet? We knew we should run the risk of encountering relations and acquaintances in the obvious places that suggested themselves. At last a brilliant idea came to my betrothed, and we spent several hours in—the secluded Dean Cemetery, and were not found out! We talked and talked—about his ambitions, his beliefs and visions, our hopeless prospects, the coming lonely months, my studies—and parted in deep dejection.

The immediate outcome of the day was a long poem of no less than fifty-seven verses addressed to me: “In Dean Cemetery”—a pantheistic dream, as its author described it; and in a note to one of the verses he wrote: “I hold to the rest of the poem, for there are spirits everywhere. We are never alone, though we are rarely conscious of other presences.”

The poem is too long and too immature to quote from. It was one of a series, never of course published, that he wrote about this time; all very serious, for his mind was absorbed in psychic and metaphysical speculation.

And the reason why he chose such serious types of poems to dedicate to the girl to whom he was engaged was that she was the first friend he had found who to some extent understood him, understood the inner hidden side of his nature, sympathised with and believed in his visions, dreams, and aims.

Immediately on my return to London he sent me three long poems written in 1873 under the influence of Shelley—then to him the poet of poets. Very faulty in their handling, they are to me significant, inasmuch as they strike the keynote of all his subsequent intimate writings. “To the Pine Belt” begins with these lines:

To-day amid the pines I went
In a wonderment,
For the ceaseless song
Of lichened branches long
In measures free
Said to me
Strange things of another life
Than woodland strife.

In The Blue Peaks he sings of the Quest of the beckoning dim blue hills, of which he wrote again many years later in The Divine Adventure. And the third, “The River το καλυγ,” is an ecstatic chant to Beauty:

O Spirit fair
Who dwelleth where
The heart of Beauty is enshrined.

Wherewith he invokes “Nature, or Beauty, or God” to help him to realise the poignant dream of beauty, which haunted him in diverse ways throughout his life. When he sent them to me he realised how youthful and faulty was the presentment, and he wrote: “If I had not promised to send these poems I should certainly not do so now. They are very poor every way, and the only interest they may have for you is to show you the former current of my thoughts—I did indeed put Beauty in the place of God, and Nature in that of his Laws. Now that I see more clearly (and that is not saying much), these appear trash. Still there is some good here and there. I am glad I have written them, for they helped me to arrive at clearer convictions. The verse and rhythm are purposely uneven and irregular—it admitted of easier composition to write so.” While at the University he had made an eager study of comparative religions, their ethics and metaphysics, being then in active revolt against the religious teachings in which he had been brought up. This mental conflict, this weighing of metaphysical problems, found expression in the first Book of a projected Epic on Man, to be called Upland, Woodland, Cloudland. “Amid the Uplands” only was finished, and consists of two thousand lines in blank verse; the leading idea is fairly suggested in these lines from the Proem:

“And I have written in the love of God
And in a sense of man’s proud destiny.

And I have striven to point out harmony,
An inner harmony in all things fair,
Flow’rs, tree, and cloudlet, wind, and ocean wave,
Wold, hill, and forest, with the heart of man,
And with the firmament and universe,
And thence with God. All things are part of Him.”

Scattered through the many pages of philosophic exhortation and speculation, of descriptions of nature, of psychical visions, are lines that are suggestive of later development, of later trend of thought, and from them the following are selected:

“There is in everything an undertone ...
Those clear in soul are also clear in sight,
And recognise in a white cascade’s flash,
The roar of mountain torrents, and the wail
Of multitudinous waves on barren sands,
The song of skylark at the flush of dawn,
A mayfield all ablaze with king-cups gold,
The clamour musical of culver wings
Beating the soft air of a dewy dusk,
The crescent moon far voyaging thro’ dark skies,
And Sirius throbbing in the distant south,
A something deeper than mere audible
And visible sensations; for they see
Not only pulsings of the Master’s breath,
The workings of inevitable Law,
But also the influences subordinate
And spirit actors in life’s unseen side.
One glint of nature may unlock a soul.”

“Our Evil is too finite to disturb
The infinite of good.”

“We all are wind-harps casemented on Earth,
And every breath of God that falls may fetch
Some dimmest echo of a faint refrain
From even the worst strung of all of us.”

“Oh, I have lain upon a river’s brink
And drank deep, deep of all the glory near,
Until my soul in unison did beat
With all things round me: I was at the root,
The common root of life from which all flow,
And when thus far could enter unto all;
I look’d upon a rose and seemed to grow
A bud into a bloom, I watched a tree
And was the life that quicken’d the green leaves,
I saw the waters swirling and became
The law of their wild course, and in the clouds
I felt my spirit wand’ring over heaven.
I did identify myself with aught
That rose before me, and communion held.

Death is not only change, or sleep; it is
God’s seal to sanctify the soul’s advance.”

In the beginning of 1875 he made various experiments in rhymed metre, all equally serious in subject and stiff in handling; but in the latter part of the year he wrote several little songs in a lighter vein and happier manner.

The following year brought a fresh change in his circumstances, and placed him face to face with the serious questions of practical means of living. His father had been in bad health for some months, and he himself developed disquieting symptoms of chest trouble. I had been in Italy during the three spring months, and was overjoyed on my return to hear that we and my uncle’s family were to spend August at Dunoon in neighbouring houses. On arriving there we found my uncle in an alarming condition and his son looking extremely delicate. Nevertheless there were many happy days spent there—and rambling over the hills, boating and sailing on the lochs, in talking over our very vague prospects, in reading and discussing his poems. Of these he had several more to show me, chief among them being an idyll “Beatrice,” dedicated to me, and a lyrical drama “Ariadne in Naxos” which excited in me the greatest admiration and pride. Toward the middle of the month my uncle’s condition grew hopeless, and on the 20th he died. His death was a great shock to his son, whose health gave way: consumption was feared (as it proved, causelessly) and in the autumn he was ordered a voyage to Australia.

In September I was taken by my mother to Aberdeenshire, and thus I had no opportunity of seeing William again, and the last thing I heard of him, when he had left Scotland in a sailing ship, was a gloomy prediction made by an old relative to my mother: “Ah, that poor nephew of yours, Willie Sharp, he’ll never live to reach Australia.”

To quote his own words:

“So to Australia I went by sailing ship, relinquishing my idea of becoming a formidable rival to Swinburne (whose Atalanta in Calydon had inspired me to a lyrical drama named Ariadne in Naxos), to Tennyson (whose example I had deigned to accept for an idyll called ‘Beatrice’), and to the author of Festus, whose example was responsible for a meditative epic named ‘Amid the Uplands.’ Alas! ‘subsequent events’ make it unlikely that these masterpieces will ever see the light.

“In Australia I had friends with whom I stayed, and from them I joined an eminent colonist whose tragic end cast a cloud over a notable career as an explorer. With him I saw much of the then wild country in Gippsland, beyond the Buffalo and Bogong Mountains, across the Murray River into the desert region of lower New South Wales.”

So to Australia he sailed, not only in search of health but to look about and see if he would care to settle there, supposing that he should find work that he could do, as it was now imperative he should provide for his future. In The Sport of Chance, and in an article “Through Bush and Fern,” he has given graphic descriptions of the memorable ride which afforded the newcomer a unique opportunity of seeing something of the interior of the colony; and from these the following selections are taken:

“It was the full tide of summer when my friend and I started one morning in continuance of our ride south through the ranges that rise and swell and slope away in mighty hollows, sweeping like immense green waves around the bases of those lofty Australian Alps, of which Mounts Hotham, Kosciusko, and Feathertop are the chief glories. Although early, the heat of the sun was already very powerful; but its effect was more bracing than enervating, owing to the clearness and dryness of the atmosphere.... Across the rugged mountains we rode, by difficult passes over desolate plains, along sweeping watercourses marked by the long funeral procession of lofty blue-gums, and mournful, stringy bark. Day by day we saw the sun rise above the hills. We slept, while our horses stood by panting with heat, under what shade we could get, and arose when the sky had lost its look of molten copper and had taken on once more its intense ultramarine. At night as we rode across the plains we heard the howling of the wild dogs as they scoured afar off, or sent flying in all directions startled kangaroos, which leaped across the moonlit wastes like ghosts of strange creatures in pre-Adamite times.... At last we had come to Albury to join a friend who promised us some swan shooting, and it thus came about that early one morning, about an hour before dawn, we found ourselves crouching under the shelter of some wattles growing close to the Murray lagoons. Not a sound was to be heard save the monotonous swish of the river as it swept slowly onward, except when at rare intervals some restless parrot or cockatoo made a transient disturbance somewhere in the forest. The stillness, the semi-darkness, the sound of the rushing water, our expectancy, all rendered the hour one of mingled solemnity and excited tension; and it was with difficulty that at least one of our small party repressed some sound when within a few feet a venomous-looking snake wriggled away with a faint hiss from a bunch of knotted grass.”

At this juncture, unfortunately the writer was carried away by his interest in snakes ... in rare water birds and “Murray-cod,” and quite forgot to finish his account of the swan shooting. It is obviously unnecessary to explain that shooting, as a sport, had no attraction for him; whereas observing birds and bats, fish, etc., was always a preoccupying interest.

“What a day of intense heat followed that morning! When at last we reached our previous night’s shelter, a shepherd station known as Bidgee Bend, we were nearly exhausted.

“While resting on a rough shake-down and lazily smoking, my eye happened to glance at my saddle, which was lying close at hand, and right in the midst thereof I saw a large scorpion with its tail raised in that way which is known to signify a vicious state of mind. Hearing my exclamation, the stockman looked round, and without a word reached for a long-lashed whip, and with a blow of the shaft put an end to the possibly dangerous intentions of our unwelcome visitor. Of an extremely laconic nature, our shepherd friend never uttered a word he felt to be unnecessary, and when, after having asked him if he saw scorpions frequently hereabouts, and received a monosyllabic reply in the affirmative, I added, ‘Any other kind of vermin?’ he muttered sleepily, with his pipe in his mouth, ‘Bull-dog ants, hairy spiders, centipedes, bugs.’”

On his return to Melbourne the traveller realised that there was no immediate prospect of finding work. He had made inquiries in every available direction, but he did not make any great effort. He realised that life in the New World, under such conditions as would be open to him, would be very distasteful; and greatly as he had enjoyed the few months’ sojourn in Australia, owing chiefly to Mr. Turner’s 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.

P. S.—By-the-bye, have you noticed that my “Nocturne” is in the July 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,

23d October, 1880.

Lo, in a dream, I saw a vast dim sea
Whose sad waves broke upon a barren shore;
The name of this wan sea was Nevermore,

The land The Past, the shore Futility:

Thereon I spied three mighty Shadows; three
Weary and desolate Shades, of whom each wore
A crown whereon was writ Despair. To me

One spoke, and said, “Lo, I am He
In whom the countless millions of the East

Live, move, and hope. And all is vanity!”—
And I knew Buddha. Then the next: “The least
Am I, but once God’s mightiest Prophet-Priest”—

So spake Mahomet. And then pitifully

The third Shade moaned, “I am of Galilee!”

I also enclose the record of a vision I had lately:

Lo, in that Shadowy place wherein is found
The fruitage of the spirit men call dreams,
I wander’d. Ever underneath pale gleams

Of misty moonlight quivering all around,
And ever by the banks of sedgy streams
Swishing thro’ fallen rushes with slow sound

A spirit walked beside me. From a mound,

Rustling from poplar-leaves from top to base,

Some bird I knew not shrilled a cry of dole,

So bitter, I cried out to God for grace.
Whereat he by me slackened from his pace,

Turning upon me in my cold amaze
And saying, “While the long years onward roll

Thou shalt be haunted by this hateful face—“
And looking up, I looked on my own soul!

Nov. 20, 1880.

If this note does not reach you by New Year’s Day it will soon after—so let me wish you most heartily and sincerely all good wishes for the coming year. May the White Wings of Happiness and Peace and Health brush from your path all evil things. There is something selfish in the latter wish, for I hope so much to see you before long again. Don’t despise me when I say that in some things I am more a woman than a man—and when my heart is touched strongly I lavish more love upon the one who does so than I have perhaps any right to expect returned; and then I have so few friends that when I do find one I am ever jealous of his or her absence.

P. S.—I wonder if this late Kentish violet will retain its delicious scent till it looks at you in New Zealand. It is probably the last of its race.

Feb., 1881.

I may say in reference to the Religion of Humanity that my sympathy with Comtism is only limited, and that though I think it is and will yet be an instrument of great good, I see nothing in it of essential savingness. It is even in some of its ceremonial and practical details a decided retrogression—at least so it seems to me—and though I do not believe in a revealed God, I think such a belief higher and more precious and morally as salutary as a belief in abstract Humanity. Concrete humanity appeals more to my sympathy when filled with the breath of “God” than in its relation to its abstract Self. When I write again I will endeavour to answer your question as to whether I believe in a God or not. My friend, we are all in the hollow of some mighty moulding Hand. Every fibre in my body quivers at times with absolute faith and belief, yet I do not say that I believe in “God” when asked such a question by those whom I am conscious misinterpret me. You have some lines of mine called “The Redeemer”; they will hint something to you of that belief which buoys my soul up in the ocean of love that surrounds it. It were well for the soul, if annihilation rounds off the circle of life, to sink to final forgetfulness in the sea of precious human love; but it is far better if the soul can be borne along that sea of wonder and glory to distant ever-expanding goals, transcending in love, glory, life all that human imagination ever conceived....

Farewell for the present, dear friend.

W.