WILLIAM SHARP (FIONA MACLEOD) A MEMOIR COMPILED BY HIS WIFE ELIZABETH A. SHARP by ELIZABETH A. SHARP (best ebook reader ubuntu txt) š
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what mere words are to others. I think this is partly why I like you
better in your prose, though now and then a bit of verse comes well,
rising up out of the prose, in your simplest prose the most, the myths
stand out clearly, as something objective, as something well born and
independent. In your more elaborate prose they seem subjective, an inner
way of looking at things assumed by a single mind. They have little
independent life and seem unique; your words bind them to you. If Balzac
had written with a very personal, very highly coloured style, he would
have always drowned his inventions with himself. You seem to feel this,
for when you use elaborate words you invent with less conviction, with
less precision, with less delicacy than when you forget everything but
the myth. I will take as example, a prose tale.
That beautiful story in which the child finds the Twelve Apostles eating
porridge in a cottage, is quite perfect in all the first part, for
then you think of nothing but the myth, but it seems to me to fade to
nothing in the latter part. For in the latter part the words rise up
between you and the myth. You yourself begin to speak and we forget the
apostles, and the child and the plate and the porridge. Or rather the
more mortal part of you begins to speak, the mere person, not the god.
You, as I think, should seek the delights of style in utter simplicity,
in a self-effacing rhythm and language; in an expression that is like a
tumbler of water rather than like a cup of wine. I think that the power
of your work in the future will depend on your choosing this destiny.
Certainly I am looking forward to āThe Laughter of the Queen.ā I thought
your last prose, that pilgrimage of the soul and mind and body to the
Hills of Dream promised this simple style. It had it indeed more than
anything you have done.
To some extent I have an advantage over you in having a very fierce
nation to write for. I have to make everything very hard and clear, as
it were. It is like riding a wild horse. If oneās hands fumble or oneās
knees loosen one is thrown. You have in the proper sense far more
imagination than I have and that makes your work correspondingly more
difficult. It is fairly easy for me, who do so much of my work by the
critical, rather than the imaginative faculty, to be precise and simple,
but it is hard for you in whose mind images form themselves without
ceasing and are gone as quickly perhaps.
But I am sure that I am right. When you speak with the obviously
personal voice in your verse, or in your essays you are not that Fiona
who has invented a new thing, a new literary method. You are that Fiona
when the great myths speak through you....
Yours,
B. YEATS.
I like your verses on Murias and like them the better perhaps because
of the curious coincidence that I did in summer verses about lovers
wandering āin long forgotten Murias.ā
* * * * *
During the spring William Sharp had prepared a volume of selections
from the poems of Swinburne, with an Introduction by himself, for
publication in the Tauchnitz Collection of British Authors. Mr.
Swinburne consented that the selection should be made in accordance
with the critical taste of the Editor, with which however he was not in
complete agreement. He expressed his views in a letter dated from The
Pines, Putney Hill:
Oct. 6th.
DEAR MR. SHARP,
Many thanks for the early copy you have had the kindness to send on to
I am pleased to find the Nympholept in a leading place, as I thinkit one of the best and most representative things I ever did. I should
have preferred on all accounts that In the Bay had filled the place you
have allotted to Ave atque Vale, a poem to which you are altogether too
kind, in my opinion, as others have been before you. I never had really
much in common with Baudelaire thoā I retain all my early admiration
for his genius at its best. I wish there were fewer of such very
juvenile crudities as you have selected from my first volume of poems:
it is trying to find such boyish attempts as The Sundew, Aholibah,
Madonna Mia, etc., offered as examples of the work of a man who has
written so many volumes since in which there is nothing that is not at
least better and riper than they. I wish too that Mater Triumphalis had
not been separated from its fellow poemāa much fitter piece of work to
stand by itself. On the other hand, I am very cordially obliged to you
for giving the detached extract from Anactoria. I should greatly have
preferred that extracts only should have been given from Atalanta in
Calydon, which sorely needs compression in the earlier parts. Erectheus,
which would have taken up so much less space, would also, I venture to
think, have been a better and a fairer example of the authorās work. Mr.
Watts Duntonās objections to the book is the omission of Super Flumina
Babylonis. I too am much surprised to find it excluded from a selection
which includes so much that might well be sparedānay, would be better
away. I would like to have seen one of what I call my topographical
poems in full. The tiny scrap from Loch Torridon was hardly worth giving
by itself. I do not understand what you find obscure or melancholy in
The Garden of Cymodoce. It was written simply to express my constant
delight in the recollection of Sark. I hope you will not think anything
in this note captious or ungracious. Candour always seems to be the best
expression possible of gratitude or goodwill.
Ever sincerely yours,
SWINBURNE.
In December of 1901 F. M. wrote, ostensibly from Argyll, to Dr.
Goodchild: āI had hoped by this time to have had some definite
knowledge of what I am to do, where to go this winter. But
circumstances keep me here.... Our friend, too (meaning himself as W.
S.), is kept to England by the illness of others. My plans though
turning upon different issues are to a great extent dependent, later,
on his....
I have much to do, and still more to think of, and it may be bring to
life through the mysterious resurrection of the imagination.
What long months of preparation have to go to any writing that contains
life within it.āEven the slightest, the most significant, as it
seems! We, all of us who live this dual life of the imagination and
the spirit, do indeed mysteriously conceive, and fare thereafter in
weariness and heaviness and long travail, only for one small uncertain
birth. It is the common law of the spiritāas the obverse is the common
law of womanhood.ā
* * * * *
And again:
āLife becomes more and more strange, complex, interwrought, and
_intentional_. But it is _the end_ that mattersānot individuals.ā
Owing to my Motherās serious illness I could not leave England early in
November, as we had intended. London was impossible for my husband for
he, too, was ill. At first he went to Hastings, whence he wrote to Mrs.
Philpotāauthor of _The Sacred Tree_:
HASTINGS,
Dec. 20, 1901.
MY DEAR FRIEND,
You would have enjoyed ābeing meā yesterday. I had a most delightful
day at Rye with Henry James who now lives there for many months in
the year. I went over early, lunched, and then we went all over that
wonderfully picturesque old Cinque Port. A lovely walk in a frost-bound
still country, and then back by the sombre old Land Gate, over the
misty marshes down below, and the flame red Cypres Tower against a plum
coloured sunset, to Henry Jamesā quaint and picturesque old house to
tea. It was in every way a memorable and delightful day, and not least
the great pleasure of intercourse with that vivid brilliant and alive
mind. He is as of course, _you_ realise, an artist to the finger tips.
_Et ils sont rares ces diables dāesprit._ I wish it were spring! I long
to hear the missel thrush in the blossoming pear tree: and the tingling
of the sap, and the laughter in the blood. I suppose we are all, all of
us ever dreaming of resurrections....
The English climate proved equally impossible, so W. S. went to
Bordighera to be near Dr. Goodchild. But he was too restless to remain
long anywhere, and moved on to Rome and finally to Sicily. He wrote to
Mr. Rhys after the New Year from Il Castello di Maniace:
MY DEAR ERNEST,
As I think I wrote to you, I fell ill with a form of fever,āand had a
brief if severe recurrence of it at Rome: and so was glad some time ago
to get on to my beloved āGreekā Taormina, where I rapidly āconvalesced.ā
A few days ago I came on here, to the wilds inlands of the Sicilian
Highlands, to spend a month with my dear friend here, in this wonderful
old āCastle-Fortress-Monastery-Mansionāthe Castelā Maniace itself being
over 2,000 feet in the highlands beyond Etna, and Maletto, the nearest
station about 3,000.
How you and Grace would rejoice in this region. Within a dayās easy
ride is Enna, sacred to Demeter, and about a mile or so from Castelā
Maniace, in a wild desolate region of a lava wilderness, is the lonely
heron-haunted moorland-lake wherein tradition has it Persephone
disappeared....
S.
I joined him early in February at Maniace and we remained with Mr.
Hood for a month of sunshine and flowers. Among other guests came
Miss Maud Valerie White. She was wishful that the pleasant days spent
there together should be commemorated, and proposed that W. S. should
write a short poem, that she would set to Sicilian airs, and that the
song should be dedicated to our host. To that end Mr. Hood summoned
to the Castello one of the peasant bagpipe players, who one evening
walked round and round the hall, playing the airs that are played
each Christmas by the pipers before the shrines to the Madonna in
the various churches. The result of that evening was a song, āBuonā
Riposo,ā written by William Sharp, set to music by Miss Valerie White,
and published by Messrs. Chappell.
BUON RIPOSO
When, like a sleeping child
Or a bird in the nest,
The day is gathered
To the earthās breast ...
Hush!... ātis the dream-wind
Breathing peace,
Breathing rest
Out of the gardens of Sleep in the West.
O come to me ... wandering
Wind of the West!
Gray Doves of slumber
Come hither to nest....
Ah, sweet now the fragrance
Below the dim trees
Of the White Rose of Rest
That blooms in the gardens of Sleep in the West.
On leaving Maniace W. S. wrote to Dr. Goodchild:
Friday, 7th March, 1902.
To-morrow we leave here for Taormina.... And, not without many regrets,
I am glad to leaveāas, in turn, I shall be glad (thoā for other
reasons) when the time comes to leave Taormina. My wife says I am never
satisfied, and that Paradise itself would be intolerable for me if I
could not get out of it when I wanted. And there is some truth in what
she says, though it is a partial truth, only. I think external change as
essential to some natures as passivity is to others: but this may simply
mean that the inward life in one person may best be hypnotised by āa
still image,ā that of another may best be hypnotised by a wavering image
or series of wavering images. It is not change of scene one needs so
much as change in these wavering images. For myself, I should, now, in
many ways be content to spend the most of my life in some quiet place in
the country, with a garden, a line of poplars and tall elms, and a great
sweep of sky....
Your friend affectionately,
WILLIAM SHARP.
To Mrs. Philpot.
TAORMINA,
April 3, 1902.
DEAR FRIEND,
... It would take pages to describe all the flowers and other near and
far objects which delight one continually. Persephone has scattered
every treasure in this her birth-island. From my room here in the
Castello-a-Mareāthis long terraced hotel is built on the extreme edge
of a precipitous height outside the Messina Gate of TaorminaāI look
down first on a maze of vividly green almond trees sloping swiftly
down to the deep blue sea, and over them the snowy vastness of Etna,
phantom-white against the intense blue, with its hitherside 11,000 feet
of gulfs of violet morning shadow. About midway this is broken to the
right first by some ancient cactus-covered fragments of antiquity at
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