WILLIAM SHARP

(FIONA MACLEOD)

A MEMOIR

COMPILED BY HIS WIFE

ELIZABETH A. SHARP

NEW YORK

DUFFIELD & COMPANY

1910

[iii]

Copyright, 1910, by DUFFIELD & COMPANY

THE TROW PRESS · NEW YORK

[iv]

WILLIAM SHARP

A MEMOIR

[v]

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[vi] 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[vii] 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[viii].”

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

[xi] [1]

PART I

WILLIAM SHARP

[2]

“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.

[3]

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[4] 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[5] 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.[6] 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[7] 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[8] 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[9] 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.