Chapter Seventeen
© William F. Halloran, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0196.06
Life: 1898
Early in 1898, Sharp suffered a “severe nervous collapse” which caused “an acute depression and restlessness that necessitated a continual change of environment.” Elizabeth attributed it to the strain of maintaining a double identity:
The production of the Fiona Macleod work was accomplished at a heavy cost to the author as that side of his nature deepened and became dominant. The strain upon his energies was excessive: not only from the necessity of giving expression to the two sides of his nature; but because his desire that, while under the cloak of secrecy F. M. should develop and grow, the reputation of William Sharp should at the same time be maintained. Moreover, each of the two natures had its own needs and desires, interests, and friends. The needs of each were not always harmonious one with the other, but created a complex condition that led to a severe nervous collapse (Memoir, p. 292).
As he moved from place to place on the south coast of England — Bournemouth, Brighton, and St. Margaret’s Bay near Dover — he “was much alone, except for the occasional visit of an intimate friend.” The sea, and solitude “proved his best allies.” Elizabeth and Edith Rinder, the “intimate friend,” were co-operating to provide whatever companionship and affection was needed. Elizabeth recognized the extent of Edith’s “intimacy” with her husband, but she expressed no concerns about their relationship here or elsewhere in the Memoir. She focused on her work in London as an art critic, and on supporting her husband’s physical and mental health.
In a letter describing his illness to Catherine Janvier, Sharp implied he was trying, aided by drugs, to communicate with spirits. He was “skirting the wood of shadows,” “filled with vague fears,” in “a duel with other forces than those of human wills.” Periodically he recovered his “psychic control over certain media,” but the control was only temporary, a few days or weeks, but in that time he was himself. He wished for her peace of heart and “no gloom, but light, energy, full life” and in her “whole being, the pulse of youth, the flame of green fire.” In the months ahead he returned often to the flame imagery, sometimes green and sometimes red, to signify the youthful vitality he felt slipping away.
Elizabeth thought her husband’s efforts to obtain rituals for Yeats’s Celtic Mystical Order undermined his health. She attributed his illness in December 1896 to both the “heavy dual work” and “experimentation with certain psychic phenomena […] efforts in which at times he and Mr. W. B. Yeats collaborated” (Memoir, p. 282). Though she did not mention those efforts as a cause of Sharp’s illness in early 1898, they must have worried her. Her reticence here and elsewhere in the Memoir may have been due to her desire to protect Yeats and other living participants. There was also the fact that Edith Rinder was Sharp’s confederate in the psychic experiments. She valued her friendship and wanted to protect her as well. Though Sharp and Yeats may have engaged in psychic experiments together earlier, their collaboration began in earnest in January 1897 when Sharp joined the search for rituals for the Celtic Mystical Order. Yeats convinced Sharp, referencing his own relationship with Maud Gonne, that visions came more easily when jointly evoked by a man and a woman who were in love. He urged Sharp to partner with Fiona in the project, whereupon Sharp convinced Edith Rinder to join him, and the experiments continued for several years.
Although Elizabeth attributed her husband’s movement from place to place along England’s southern coast to his poor health and mental instability, he was also trying to create conditions that induced dreams and visions he could share with Yeats. He had convinced Elizabeth he needed to be alone with Edith to summon the female persona that enabled him to write as Fiona. Following Yeats’s advice, he needed to be alone with Edith to evoke necessary dreams and visions. Whether or not Edith shared his faith in the supernatural, her participation in the spiritualist activities reflected her love for Sharp and her desire that he remain healthy and productive. In this regard, it is interesting to note that a diary, now in the British Library, which Elizabeth kept for some years after her husband died in 1905, records in considerable detail her contacts through a medium with the spirit of her dead husband. Such spiritualist sessions were in vogue, and Edith must have had at least an open mind about Sharp’s communications with spirits.
In mid-February, he wrote a letter to his wife from the St. Margaret’s Bay Hotel shortly after arriving there from Dover. He expressed the sense of peace and happiness that came to him that afternoon after leaving the station, walking through the village, and finding himself “alone, alone ‘in the open.’” It was not “merely healing to me but an imperative necessity of my life.” He was weary of “the endless recurrence of the ordinary in the lives of most people.” To his own “wild heart […] life must come otherwise or not at all.” He wished he was “a youth once more” so he could “lie down at night smelling the earth and rise at dawn, smelling the new air out of the East, and know enough of men and cities to avoid both, and to consider little any gods ancient or modern, knowing well that there is only ‘The Red God’ to think of, he who lives and laughs in the red blood.” He described the tension between the need to produce articles and reviews that generated income and his desire to live freely in nature, “a wild instinct to go to my own.” In a letter about this time to “a friend,” who may well have been Edith Rinder, he was even more specific about his desire to shed his human qualities and become a creature of nature:
I wish I could live all my hours out of doors: I envy no one in the world so much as the red deer, the eagle, the sea-mew. I am sure no kings have so royal a life as the plovers and curlews have. All these have freedom, rejoice continually on the wind’s wing, exalt alike in sun and shade: to them day is day, and night is night, and there is nothing else (Memoir, p. 298).
Elizabeth said the February letter to her provides “an insight into the primitive elemental soul that so often swayed him and his work.” Taken together, the two letters — that to Elizabeth and that to a friend — express an intense desire to escape the bonds of rational life, to live an “elemental life” in the natural world, to recover the freedom he experienced as a youth when he joined the band of gypsies.
Before leaving St. Margaret’s Bay, he explained his illness to Murray Gilchrist and said his two weeks there had been restorative:
I know you will have been sorry to hear that I have been ill — and had to leave work, and home. The immediate cause was a severe and sudden attack of influenza which went to membranes of the head and brain, and all but resulted in brain fever. This evil was averted — but it and the possible collapse of your friend Will were at one time, and for some days, an imminent probability. I have now been a fortnight in this quiet sea-haven and am practically myself again.
At the letter’s close, he added: “I have suffered much, but am now again fronting life gravely and with laughing eyes.” After returning to London, he wrote to Stedman on March 1. He had been seriously ill, had just returned from two-months convalescence, and was well again partly due to what he called “alleviations” or “to be more exact, it should be in the singular! You can guess the name, & perhaps remember something of a rare beauty, of life-lifting eyes.” He must have shown Stedman a photograph of Edith Rinder during his trip to New York in November 1896. Later in the letter he was more specific about his illness and Edith’s role in his recovery:
Although I have had so bad a time with a dangerous collapse (culminating in severe meningitis) I am now feeling better than I have done for at least two years past — and am quite determined not only to work hard but to get as much of the sunshine & joy & romance and dear delight of life as may be! And what’s more, I’ve had it! And what’s more, I have laid in a treasure of it quite recently! And what’s more — by my Queen’s full consent and approval — I’ve been a very bad boy with a very dear & delightful “friend,” now alas returned to her home in Brussels — & generally I’ve been “spoilt” & made much of, & have enjoyed it, and am thinking of reforming 20 years hence, but meanwhile cling to my Sunshine Creed — to live sunnily, to think blithely, to act on the square even in my “sinning,” & to try to give sunshine to others. After all, it’s not such a bad creed — indeed, it’s a very good one, and it has my dear poet E. C. S. as Prophet!
In the Memoir, Elizabeth said she welcomed Edith’s cooperation in the efforts to maintain her husband’s health, but this paragraph is perhaps the only instance of Sharp’s stating explicitly that Elizabeth (his Queen) consented in and approved of his relationship with Edith. It also suggests Edith may have been living temporarily in Brussels to learn more about the Belgian writers whose stories she had translated and published in The Massacre of the Innocents.
Toward the end of the letter, in a burst of enthusiasm reflecting his restored health and enhanced devotion to the creed of which Stedman was the prophet, Sharp revealed his plan to meet Edith again in France in mid-April:
If all goes well, you can think of me (and my friend) in a lovely green retreat, on the Marne, near Paris, during the last fortnight of April. If you were there too I would drink to you in white wine, and she would give you a kiss — which, with the glory in her beautiful eyes, would make you “wild with the waste of all unnumbered Springs”. You will be with us in Spirit, dear poet of youth & romance — and I will kiss her for you, & likewise drink the sweet wine of France!!
Following this passage several lines are blacked out and are not decipherable. They precede the following lines which are also crossed through but can be read: “… hope, and I trust that her sunny smile and youthful heart often rejoice you. You will be a dear youth till the end, E. C. S., — & may the Gods reward you!” Apparently, Stedman’s life was also enriched by a beautiful young woman as he tried to live the creed of which he was the prophet. Sharp concluded by saying his letter had better be entrusted to “the oblivious flame.” Stedman did not so entrust it, but he, or someone else, expunged the name of the young woman who brought joy to his life.
In his St. Margaret’s Bay letter to Gilchrist, Sharp said that Fiona, “before she got ill,” had nearly finished a group of stories that might appear in the spring under the title There is But One Love, a volume Elizabeth identified as Fiona’s The Dominion of Dreams, which was not published until the spring of 1899. Four of those stories were published in 1898: “Children of the Dark Star” (The Dome, May); “Enya of the Dark Eyes” (Literature, September); “The Wells of Peace” (Good Words, September); and “The White Heron” (Harper’s, December). Two more that did not make their way into The Dominion of Dreams appeared in periodicals in 1898: “The Four Winds of Desire” (Good Words, 245) and “The Wayfarer” (Cosmopolis, June). Despite his illnesses during the first several months of 1898, Sharp produced by mid-year a considerable volume of writing.
Yet another spiritualist entered Sharp’s life in late March when he wrote the first of several Fiona letters to Dr. John A. Goodchild, whom he met through their mutual friend Grant Allen. As Fiona, he thanked Goodchild for a copy of a book of his poems and for a proof copy of his Light of the West, which would be published in April by Allen’s nephew, Grant Richards. Goodchild was a highly regarded medical doctor who cared for his British patients both in England and in Italy where many spent the darker months. He was also a serious student of the early civilizations of Ireland, England, and Scotland and had a special affection for the Celts and the early converts to Christianity. More significantly, he was a spiritualist to whom important messages were delivered during sleep and reveries. He had bought from a tailor in Italy a beautiful glass bowl he thought might be the Holy Grail, the cup Jesus used at the last super. After keeping it on display in his library for several years, a master spirit directed him to bury it in a stream near Glastonbury in the West of England, the reputed domain of King Arthur and his grail-seeking knights. The purpose of the burial is not clear, but it had some interesting results. Given Sharp’s involvement with Yeats’s Celtic Mystical Order, it is not surprising that he was drawn to Goodchild who, in turn, was drawn to the Celtic stories of Fiona Macleod.
Since Elizabeth included in the Memoir (pp. 294–96) part of a letter her husband wrote to her dated March 29, he must have been away again. Many have wondered why Elizabeth was so accepting of her husband’s relationship with Edith Rinder. Her inclusion of this letter in the Memoir addresses that concern as it is a carefully crafted argument not for free love, but for loving more than one person at a time. Elizabeth introduced the letter by saying it expressed views she and her husband held in common, and that echoes Sharp’s opening assertion:
Yes, in essentials, we are all at one. We have both learned and unlearned so much, and we have come to see that we are wrought mysteriously by forces beyond ourselves, but in so seeing we know that there is a great and deep love that conquers even disillusion and disappointment.
Having assured Elizabeth of his continuing love for her, he portrays his love for Edith as a powerful force impossible to control:
Not all the wishing, not all the dreaming, not all the will and hope and prayer we summon can alter that within us which is stronger than ourselves. This is a hard lesson to learn for all of us, and most for a woman. We are brought up within such an atmosphere of conventional untruth to life that most people never even perceive the hopeless futility in the arbitrary ideals which are imposed upon us — and the result for the deeper natures, endless tragic miscarriage of love, peace, and hope. But, fortunately, those of us who to our own suffering do see only too clearly, can still strike out a nobler ideal — one that does not shrink from the deepest responsibilities and yet can so widen and deepen the heart and spirit with love that what else would be irremediable pain can be transmuted into hope, into peace, and even into joy.
For those of us who recognize that loving more than one person can “widen and deepen the heart and spirit,” he asserted, what otherwise would cause deep pain can become a source of hope, peace, and even joy.
It strains credulity to believe Sharp’s relationship with Edith Rinder brought “hope, peace, and even joy” to Elizabeth, but her inclusion of the letter is a clear sign she shared its basic opinions. For most people, Sharp wrote, “the supreme disintegrate” of happiness is
the Tyranny of Love — the love which is forever demanding as its due that which is wholly independent of bonds, which is as the wind which bloweth where it listeth or where it is impelled, by the Spirit. […] That ought not be — but it must be as long as young men and women are fed mentally and spiritually upon the foolish and cowardly lies of a false and corrupt conventionalism.
Mona Caird, Elizabeth’s best friend and Edith’s cousin by marriage, was arguing forcefully in widely read periodicals and in novels against the conventional constraints of marriage. Elizabeth asserted several times in the Memoir that she and her husband shared her views. Mona’s main goal was to free women from the legal and conventional constraints of marriage and recognize them as equal partners. Sharp, however, in this letter goes much further to argue that both men and women ought to be freed from the convention that marriage required them to love and have intimate relations with only their marital partner.
An admission in the last two paragraphs of the letter casts an important light on the psychological make-up of William Sharp. “False and corrupt conventionalism,” he wrote, subjects “many fine natures, men and women,” to “lifelong suffering.” Some never learn their unhappiness is the result of impossible ideals, while others “learn first strength to endure the transmutations and then power to weld these to far nobler and finer uses and ends.” Both suffer, and Sharp places himself among the second class of sufferers. Everyone, he says, tends to nurse grief. “The brooding spirit craves for the sunlight, but it will not leave the shadows. Often, Sorrow is our best ally.” Sharp’s frequent bouts of depression which he described to his intimate friends, principally to Murray Gilchrist, were rooted in the impossible ideals installed in his youth.
I dreamed that a beautiful spirit was standing beside me. He said, “My Brother, I have come to give you the supreme gift that will heal you and save you.” I answered eagerly: “Give it me — what is it?” And the fair radiant spirit smiled with beautiful solemn eyes and blew a breath into the tangled garden of my heart — and when I looked there, I saw the tall white Flower of Sorrow growing in the Sunlight.
Whether or not such a dream occurred, Sharp’s rendition of it reveals a great deal. When he was twenty-one, his father, with whom he had a strained relationship, died. From that point onward, he had an overpowering need for intimate relationships with both men and women to whom he revealed his deepest thoughts and feelings. Elizabeth and Edith fulfilled his need for a female confessor, and a succession of men — Hall Caine, J. Stanley Little, R. Murray Gilchrist, and starting in 1900 Alexander Nelson Hood, the Duke of Bronte — fulfilled his need for a male confessor, a brother who would blow a breath into the tangled garden of his heart, that would allow his sorrow to grow into a beautiful white flower in the bright sunlight. Among his surviving letters, those to Murray Gilchrist express that need most vividly. There is no evidence that any of these relationships — with women or with men — involved sexual intimacy just as there is no evidence they did not. But there is abundant evidence that these individuals and others fulfilled a deep psychological need that reasserted itself throughout his troubled life.
Sharp’s trip to France was delayed. On April 22, he told Gilchrist he was leaving for Paris “next Friday,” April 29. The main purpose of the trip to Paris was to introduce Fiona Macleod to Yeats and Maud Gonne, and to Macgregor Mathers and his wife Moina who were helping him with the Celtic Mystical Order. The six would engage in psychic experiments, and Yeats would discuss with Fiona the plays he wanted her to write for the Celtic Theatre he was creating in Dublin. Sharp left for Paris on April 29, but he made it only as far as Dover where he again checked into the St. Margaret’s Bay Hotel. He wrote to Yeats the next day: “A sudden and serious collapse in health will prevent Miss M. from coming to Paris” and will “probably end in her having to go to some remote Baths for 2 months.” He added, “As for myself, partly for this and partly because being myself (as you will understand) seriously indisposed in the same way, I am unable to go to Paris either.” This sentence indicates that Sharp had told Yeats confidentially that Fiona was a woman who had emerged in his body. When she was sick, he was sick. She generated the Fiona writings, and Sharp was the vehicle for bringing them to the world. However improbable that construction may be, Yeats at the time accepted it, along with Sharp’s claim that there was a real woman who facilitated the emergence of Fiona. She was the woman Sharp loved and the woman who was working with him psychically on the Celtic Mystical Order. Since neither Maud Gonne nor the Mathers knew the truth, the woman he was taking to Paris would have to pretend to be Fiona.
Sharp thought he could take Edith to Paris, where they would engage briefly with Yeats and company, and then go to “the lovely green retreat on the Marne, near Paris,” he had described to Stedman on March first. If Edith knew Sharp expected her to play the role of Fiona in Paris as she had done for an hour or two with George Meredith the previous June, she would have been at least apprehensive. Though sympathetic to the Celtic Revival, she was neither a Scot nor immersed in the myths and legends of the Hebrides. She must have considered the Paris plan as one of Sharp’s romantic fantasies that would evaporate as so many did. When she realized he was about to implement the plan, she put her foot down and refused to go to Paris. Her refusal presented a problem for Sharp who seems to have been blissfully unaware of the inherent difficulties. Having refused to go to Paris as Fiona, Edith worried about leaving Sharp alone and either accompanied him to St. Margaret’s Bay or joined him there, where ensuing events bordered on the fantastic.
Yeats described the planned visit in a letter to Lady Gregory on April 25:
I have been here in Paris for a couple of days. […] I am buried in Celtic mythology and shall be for a couple of weeks or so. Miss Gonne has been ill with bronchitis. […] She comes here to-morrow to see visions. Fiona Macleod (this is private as she is curiously secret about her movements) talks of coming here too, so we will have a great Celtic gathering (Collected Letters II, pp. 214–15).
In a postscript, he told Lady Gregory he was staying with Macgregor Mathers, who was “a Celtic enthusiast who spends most of his day in highland costume to the wonder of the neighbors.” When he learned Sharp and Fiona were not be coming to Paris, Yeats sent Sharp a letter on May 3, in which he asked about Sharp’s family tartan and wanted to know what sort of person Fiona Macleod’s father was, what he looked like, and what his tartan was (Collected Letters II, pp. 219–20). He then asked Sharp if he had been “conscious of being in any unusual state on either May 1 or May 2.” He would explain later why he was asking these questions. For now, he could only say he has “had an astral experience of the most intense kind” and that Sharp’s “answers are necessary before certain things, which I was asked to do can be done.” With his letter to Sharp, Yeats enclosed a sealed letter to Fiona which clarified the matter. On the night of May 2, he was “suddenly visited by the intellectual body of someone who was passing through an intense emotional crisis.” He was “inclined to believe” the visitor was Fiona, and he needed to know if she, “either last night [May 2] or Sunday night [May 1] (the intellectual body sometimes appears a little after the emotional crisis that causes its appearance)” passed through “some state of tragic feeling?” Since Yeats knew Sharp was producing the Fiona writings, the enclosed letter must have been intended either for that separate person within the body of Sharp or for the woman who inspired the Fiona writings and was helping Sharp obtain rituals for his Order.
Yeats told Fiona he needed to know if she passed through some state of tragic feeling because someone “asked last night” for his help and the help of the “far more powerful occultist,” with whom he was working. Though not named in the letter, the more powerful occultist was probably Maud Gonne, and the person who asked for help was probably Macgregor Mathers. A professional Scott, Mathers wore a Macgregor tartan in Paris where, with help from his wife Moina, he was trying to set up a Paris branch of the Order of the Golden Dawn. He must have had some doubts about the Sharp/Fiona duo. Their tartans, if they had them, would prove they were legitimate Scotts. In a postscript to the Fiona letter, Yeats said he had hoped to see her in Paris and informed her that “the opening ceremonial of the Celtic mysteries, of which he [Sharp] will have told you, is now ready to be considered.”
Sharp’s response to Yeats’s letter posted two days later (Thursday, May 5) is a remarkable and amusing reflection of the predicament in which he found himself. No, he had not experienced anything but “a singular depression, and a curious sense of unreality for a time” on Sunday, but on Monday, May 2, he “suffered in a way I can’t explain, owing to what seemed to me an unaccountable preoccupation of Miss M.” That is vague enough. Ignoring Yeats’s tartan questions, Sharp described Fiona’s father as a “tall, fine looking man,” and then, surprisingly, “Fiona sees at times a startling likeness between me & her father, though I am taller & bigger & fairer than he was.” Among the similarities between them, he continued, was their first name: William. One need not look far for the origin of that detail; Edith Rinder’s father was William Wingate (1828–1884) of Ludford, Leicestershire.
In a hurried postscript, Sharp informed Yeats that Fiona had awakened and read his letter to her. In response, she said she had experienced a series of emotions like those of Sharp. She told Sharp to tell Yeats she was “going through an intense emotional crisis.” There was one “poignant period” on the Sunday night, she said but a far more poignant period on Monday:
But of this, being private, I cannot speak further. I was, on both occasions (though differently & for different reasons) undergoing tragic feeling. I am at present at a perilous physical & spiritual crisis. I can say no more. The one who shares my life & self is here. It is as crucial for him. I will talk over your letter to us — for to us it is, though you send it to me.
Sharp then added a question from Fiona: “Are you sure it was not Will whom you felt or saw?” He wondered why Yeats was asking about Fiona’s father rather than his father. He was unaware of Mather’s role in the matter. It was Mathers who had some suspicions about Fiona and wanted to know more about her Macleod ancestry. Sharp saw no need to shift the spotlight by introducing another male into the picture, and he certainly didn’t want to be drawn into speculations about Fiona’s ancestry.
In a second postscript, Sharp added for Yeats’s benefit a more immediate and serious element of stress:
Hurriedly adding this at the PO to say that my friend’s neuralgia was too severe to talk any more. The subject too was exciting her. She will show me your letter when I get back. Note this time today. About 3 p.m. today Thursday she went through (& I too) a wave of intense tragic emotion — and last night, between 10 and 12 or later, we nearly lost each other in a very strange way. Something I did by the will was too potent, & for a time severed some unconscious links (we were apart at the time: I thought she was sleeping) — & we both suffered in consequence. But I think the extreme crisis of tragic psychic emotion is over.
Most of this frenetic activity was invented for the consumption of Yeats in order to sustain his belief in Sharp’s psychic abilities, but it also reflects the pattern of emotions Sharp and Edith were experiencing as they attempted to establish contact with spirits in another realm. It is always difficult to distinguish between what Sharp was fabricating in a calibrated effort to mislead people, and what arose from genuine experiences. Although the mix differed from time to time, it was always a combination of the two. That said, the letter exemplifies the mental instability that resulted from having joined Yeats’s spiritualist quest.
Yeats’s response on May 7 was even stranger than Sharp’s May 5 letter (Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, II, pp. 222–23). He described in detail the dreams and visions he and the Mathers were having about Sharp/Fiona. The letter illustrates the depth of Yeats’s interest in and psychic involvement with his mysteries and with Sharp. Fiona’s father had appeared in a Macleod tartan to Mathers in a dream on Sunday. On Monday, Yeats said, he “fell into a strange kind of shivering & convulsive trembling” whereupon he felt the astral presence of first Fiona and then Sharp. Moina Mathers then saw a face which she drew, and it seemed to Yeats to be the face of William Sharp’s daemon which George Russell (AE) had seen in the spring of 1897. Next, Moina saw someone who must have been Fiona and then a man with a tartan who, Yeats wrote, “was probably the astral of some dead person.” After all these sightings, Yeats, Moina, and Macgregor retired “into a room used for magical purposes” and there made themselves “magical principals rather than persons.” Fiona appeared, Yeats continued, and told them “certain things about her spiritual & mental state & asked for Occult help, of which I prefer to talk rather than to write.” Fiona, he affirmed, “is suffering physically,” as Sharp had just told him, “but the cause of this suffering is not physical & can be remedied.” It would be best if Sharp and Fiona “could come to Paris for a couple days on (say) Monday [May 9].” Otherwise, Yeats might see Sharp in London at the end of the next week.
Yeats was left shaken for a time by this very intense experience. He had spoken in a dream to Sharp’s daemon during the past night. If Sharp can come to Paris, his friends in “the order of the Rosy Cross,” really the Order of the Golden Dawn, and specifically the Mathers, will give any help they can. These friends “have a boundless admiration for the books of Fiona Macleod.” As if all this was not enough to set Sharp’s teeth on edge and feed his manic fantasies, Yeats added a postscript, which reads as follows:
I think you should do no magical work with Miss Macleod until we meet. I mean that you should not attempt to use the will magically. The danger of doing so just now is considerable. You are both the channels of very powerful beings & some mistake has been made. I tried to send a magical message, as I have said, last night. It was something which you were to say to Miss Macleod. I can but remember that it was a message of peace. I did not try to appear or make you aware of my presence. I was in a dream for a […] time too, far off from my surroundings, & believe that our daemons met in someplace of which my bodily self has no memory & that the message which I spoke with my bodily lips was carried thither.
Yeats was an active member of the London chapter of the Order of the Golden Dawn where his motto was Daemon est Deus. His encounter with Sharp’s daemon was rooted in the secret rituals of the order, and Sharp, as a less active member of the London chapter, knew something of its rituals.
Many years later, Yeats wrote of the St. Margaret’s Bay exchange of letters:
I was fool enough to write to Sharp and [received] an unbelievable letter from a seaside hotel about the beautiful Fiona and himself. He had been very ill, terrible mental suffering and suddenly my soul had come to heal him, and he had found Fiona to tell her he was healed — I think that I had come as a great white bird. I learnt, however, from Mrs. Sharp years afterward that at the time he was certainly alone but mad. He had gone away to struggle on with madness (W. B. Yeats, Memoirs, transcribed and edited by Denis Donoghue (London: Macmillan, 1972), p. 105).
In response to Yeats’s May 7 letter, Sharp may have written another to Yeats that contained the “great white bird.” If he was referring to Sharp’s May 5 letter, his recollection was inaccurate. Not only is there no bird, but the assertion — attributed correctly or falsely to E. A. S — that Sharp was surely alone and struggling with madness was wrong. Since the descriptions of Fiona’s actions were, I believe, beyond even Sharp’s ability to create out of thin air, Edith must have been with him in St. Margaret’s Bay. Moreover, many of the letters he wrote to others during the two weeks were perfectly sane and rational. He was experiencing depression, a condition worsened by the psychic experiments, but he was not insane. The description in his May letter to Yeats of his depression and “tragic emotion” and Fiona’s “perilous physical & spiritual crisis” had some basis in fact, but the letter’s main purpose was to sustain Yeats’s confidence in his psychic abilities.
Yeats’s three May letters from Paris — one to Fiona and two to Sharp — also exhibit his genuine attraction to the idea of Fiona in 1898 and the closeness of his relationship with Sharp. They were joined in a secret project known to only a few of Yeats’s close friends. His later disparaging remarks arose, in part I believe, from his effort to obscure the extent of his own psychic activities in the 1890s. Sharp was trying his best to follow Yeats’s directions and contribute to his project. In the first draft of his “Autobiography,” Yeats wrote of Sharp,
I feel I never properly used or valued this man, through whom the fluidic world seemed to flow, disturbing all; I allowed the sense of comedy, taken by contagion from others, to hide from me my own knowledge. To look at his big body, his high colour, his handsome head with the great crop of bristly hair, no one could have divined the ceaseless presence of that fluidic life (Memoirs, pp. 128–29).
On the other hand, we recall Yeats’s remark many years later that Sharp “never told one anything that was true” (Autobiographies). Taken together, the two comments show Yeats continued for years the effort to unravel the mysteries and grasp the truth about Sharp/Fiona. His failure reflects the complexity of Sharp’s personality and exemplifies the difficulty his friends faced understanding him while he lived, and everyone has faced since he died.
The astonishing letters Sharp wrote to Yeats from St Margaret’s Bay contrast starkly with the perfectly sane business letters he wrote to his publisher Grant Richards, to his friend John Macleay, and to Fiona’s suitor Benjamin Burgess Moore. It is no wonder Sharp’s state of mind was fragile, that he was often depressed and on the edge of mental collapse. His life was defined by dichotomies and contradictions — all of his own making — as he tried to comply with Yeats’s spiritualist expectations, write poems and stories as though by two different writers, get them published to produce income, and deal with the tensions that inevitably arose from his love for two remarkable women, both of whom loved him and worried about his mental and physical health. Yeats’s warning that Sharp not engage with Miss Macleod in any “magical work’ until they could meet freed Edith to leave St. Margaret’s Bay after a week, so I believe, and provided Sharp some respite for serious writing during his second week at the St. Margaret’s Bay Hotel.
After returning to London on May 13, Sharp described his condition to Gilchrist: “After months of sickness, at one time at the gates of death, I am whirled back from the Iron Gates and am in the maelstrom again — fighting with mind and soul and body for that inevitable losing game which we call victory.” After mentioning what he was writing as Fiona and as himself, he asked Gilchrist to write to him soon, “by return best of all. You can help me — as I, I hope, can help you.” Despite his return with renewed health to the “maelstrom,” his condition remained fragile, since he needed Gilchrist’s help, if only through a letter. “It is only the fullest and richest lives,” he wrote, “that know what the heart of loneliness is.” He placed Gilchrist and himself among those who live full and rich lives. Sharing confidences about their deepest feelings and desires would, he thought, alleviate their loneliness. He concluded by calling Gilchrist his “comrade” and assuring him he had his love. More openly here, but throughout his correspondence with Gilchrist, there is the suggestion that Sharp had shared with Gilchrist, whose desires were directed entirely toward men and who lived with a male lover, his need for an intimate relationship with another man and the duality of his sexual orientation.
After his return from St. Margaret’s Bay, Sharp stayed in London only long enough to celebrate Elizabeth’s birthday on May 17, before leaving again on May 18 for what she called “a delightful little wander in Holland” with Thomas Janvier, “a jovial, breezy companion.” She hoped a walking trip with a sane friend would be restorative, and it had that effect for a time. On May 20, Sharp wrote to Elizabeth from the south Zuyder Zee about the “marvellous sky effects” and the island of Marken where “the women are grotesque, the men grotesquer, and the children grotesquest” and where the babies are “gorgeous-garbed, blue-eyed, yellow haired, imperturbable.” They alone, Sharp wrote, were worth coming to see.
Only a few Sharp/Macleod letters survive from the summer of 1898, and surprisingly few from the last half of the year. Elizabeth glossed over this seven-month period by commenting only that her husband had to sustain the reputation of William Sharp despite his need to write as Fiona Macleod.
There was a great difference in the method of production of the two kinds of work. The F. M. writing was the result of an inner impulsion, he wrote because he had to give expression to himself whether the impulse grew out of pain or out of pleasure. But W. S., divorced as much as could be from his twin self, wrote not because he cared to, because the necessities of life demanded it (Memoir, p. 301).
In this context, Elizabeth referred to two William Sharp novels: Wives in Exile, A Comedy in Romance which he wrote in 1895 for the Stone and Kimble firm in Chicago; and Silence Farm, the novel he was writing in 1898.
When Grant Richards started his publishing firm in 1897, Sharp moved in on the ground floor. He convinced Richards to publish a British edition of Wives in Exile, which, Stone and Kimball having dissolved, was published by Lamson, Wolffe and Co. in Boston in 1897. He made some revisions in the spring of 1898, and the book appeared in the summer. It is a light romance in which the men go off sailing, leaving their wives behind to make do. He also started a new novel, Silence Farm, which Richards would publish in 1899. According to Elizabeth, he felt he had to publish works by William Sharp and “show some result of the seclusion he was known to seek for purposes of work” in order support the fictional existence of Fiona. In writing Silence Farm, “a tragic tale of the Lowlands, founded on a true incident,” Sharp
never forgot that the book should not have obvious kinship to the work of F. M., that he should keep a considerable amount of himself in check. For there was a midway method, that was a blending of the two, a swaying from the one to the other, which he desired to avoid, since he knew that many of the critics were on the watch. Therefore, he strained the realistic treatment beyond what he otherwise would have done. […] Nevertheless, that book was the one he liked best of all the W. S. efforts, and he considered that it contained some of his most satisfactory work (Memoir, p. 301).
Despite his fondness for Silence Farm, neither it nor Wives in Exile were successful. Elizabeth’s comments about the two writing methods and styles, and a third “midway method,” are interesting. Beginning in 1897, the Fiona writings begin moving away from the retelling of Celtic myths and stories about people of the Western Isles into mystical allegories and ruminations on the beauties of the natural world and the presence of spiritual forces within it. After the failure of Silence Farm to attract a sizable readership, Sharp turned increasingly to travel writing, art history and criticism for publications signed William Sharp. “Middle method” or not, the distinction between publications signed F. M. and those signed W. S. began to fade despite, Sharp’s continuing efforts to sustain it.
In June 1898, however, the origin of the “two writing methods” and the relationship between them, were on Sharp’s mind. On June 28, Fiona Macleod responded to a Yeats letter which has not yet surfaced. In that letter, Yeats praised two Fiona stories and asked for a further explanation of the relationships between the man the world knew as William Sharp, the real woman who inspired Sharp to write as F. M., and the female personality within Sharp responsible for the Fiona writings. It is not surprising that Yeats, who at this time accepted the possibility of more than one person inhabiting a single body, remained curious about Sharp/Fiona. In Fiona’s response, Sharp invoked the metaphor of a torch, a match, and a flame to explain his relationship with Edith Rinder and her role in the creative process. Portions of the letter have been crossed out or erased, but it is possible to read some lines through the markings and infer some of the erased words. In a postscript that is not decipherable, he asked Yeats to destroy the letter, and when he had not received word that Yeats had done so, Sharp wrote again as Fiona on July 6 to tell Yeats he was anxious about the letter. In a July 4 letter to Sharp, Yeats said he had heard from Fiona and “done as she wished about the letter” (Collected Letters II, p. 250). Fortunately, he had not done as she wished, and the letter survives.
The relevant section reads as follows:
I have been told that long ago one of the subtlest and strangest minds of his time — a man of Celtic ancestry on one side and of Norse on the other — was so profoundly influenced by the kindred nature and spirit of a woman whom he loved, a Celt of the Celts, that, having in a sense accidentally discovered the mystery of absolute mental and spiritual union of two impassioned and kindred natures the flame of [?vision] that had been his in a far back day was in him, so that besides a strange and far [?reaching] ancestral memory, he remembered anew and acutely every last clue and significance of his boyhood and early life, spent mostly among the shepherds and fishers of the Hebrides and Gaelic Highlands. His was the genius, the ancestral memory, the creative power — she was the flame — she, too, being also a visionary, and with unusual and all but lost old wisdom of the Gael. Without her, he would have been lost to the Beauty which was his impassioned quest: with her, as a flame to his slumbering flame, he became what he was. The outer life of each was singular, beyond that of any man or woman I have heard of: how much stranger that of their spiritual union. A profound and resolute silence lay upon the man, save when he knew the flame of the woman “through whom he saw Beauty,” and his soul quickened. She gave him all she could, and without her he could not be what he was, and he needed her vision to help his own, and her dream, and her thought, and her life, till hers and his ceased to be hers and his and merged into one, and became …… a spirit of shaping power born of them both.
Although he cast the vignette in the ancient past, he was talking about himself (half Celt and half Norse) and describing how his relationship with Edith Rinder enabled him to write as Fiona Macleod. She was the match that brought flame to the otherwise dark and silent torch. They became one in the resultant fire, which was the fire of passion, the fire of creativity. The torch (Sharp) was the vehicle that carried that fire while the match survived within the fire and sustained it. This metaphor of creativity came to dominate Sharp’s imagination. After describing it, Fiona asked Yeats: “How does that strike you as a subject for a tale, a book? It would be a strange one. Does it seem to you impossible? It does not seem so to me.” Indeed, it did not, for Sharp as Fiona incorporated the match, the torch, and the flame into “The Distant Country,” a story he began writing in the summer of 1898 and included in Fiona’s The Dominion of Dreams which Archibald Constable and Co. published in May 1899. The story will be discussed in some detail in the next chapter.
Sharp was in London for most of July writing and dealing with the publication details of Wives in Exile. In mid-July, he received a letter from Yeats addressed to Fiona informing him that a certain legal obstacle to the establishment of a Celtic Theater in Dublin had been resolved, and asking which plays Fiona would have for production by the fall. In her reply, Fiona said that three plays (“Fand and Cuchulain,” “The King of Ys,” and “Dahut the Red’) would be ready for consideration. And there might be a fourth, “The Hour of Beauty.” The first three were never finished, but “The Hour of Beauty,” having become “The Immortal Hour,” was published in The Fortnightly Review in 1900. The play was not performed in Dublin, but it became the libretto for Rutland Boughton’s opera, which was an enormous success on the London stage in the 1920s and is still performed. Though Sharp was working on plays during the summer of 1898, he managed to complete only two (“The Immortal Hour” and “The House of Usna”). His plan to write a series of short dramas under the general title The Theatre of the Soul came to naught, but “The House of Usna” was also published in The Fortnightly Review in 1900 and, on April 29 that year, it was performed at the Globe Theatre in London under the auspices of the Stage Society of which William Sharp was President. Only a few of those who joined Sharp in the audience knew he was the author of the play.
On the July 19, 1898, William and Elizabeth went to Holmesfield in Derbyshire to visit Murray Gilchrist at Cartledge Hall, where he lived with his mother, his two sisters, and his companion George Garfitt. They returned to London on July 26, and Sharp left for the West of Scotland on July 31. A letter carrying that date from Fiona to Benjamin Burgess Moore, the American fan she had enlisted in approaching publishers, informed him that “it is not quite true that Mr. Yeats and I are collaborating on a drama: but we are each writing a drama, which we hope to see brought out in the new Celtic Theatre in Dublin next year.” She concluded by telling him that as soon as she finished her new book (The Dominion of Dreams) she would “get on with two short plays, ‘The Hour of Beauty’ and ‘The King of Ys and Dahut the Red.’” Yeats’s efforts to encourage Sharp/Fiona to write plays for his projected theatre in Dublin soon came to an abrupt end when he was forced, under the pressure of Irish Nationalists, to change its name to the “Irish Theatre,” and to exclude all but Irish authors.
In a July 4 letter from Coole Park, Yeats told Sharp that Edward Martyn was too upset by his mother’s death (on May 12) to invite anyone to Tillyra Castle, his home in County Galway where Sharp was a guest the previous October. If he changed his mind, Yeats would speak to him about inviting Sharp. Apparently, Martyn did invite Sharp, but the formality of Sharp’s early August letter to Martyn suggests the invitation was less cordial and welcoming than that of the previous year which led to Sharp’s spending nearly three weeks at Tillyra, proving an embarrassment to Martyn and some of his friends. Sharp stayed in and around Kilcreggan in Scotland, near where Edith Rinder was vacationing, until August 24, when he returned to London and went on to Holland to gather material for an article on Rembrandt which Cosmopolis had commissioned and which appeared in its November issue. He was back in London by September 17, the date of a Fiona Macleod letter to Benjamin Moore which mentioned “prolonged absence” as reason for his delay in writing. Sharp’s annual birthday letter to E. C. Stedman on September 28 mentioned “illness — followed by heavy work & latterly a big exigent writing commission in Holland for Cosmopolis” (the Rembrandt article) as excuses for the relative brevity of the letter. Still, he managed to inform Stedman that he “had a very wonderful & happy time this summer with the dear friend of whom you know, & whose writings you admire so much — & I look to another week at least about mid-October.” The dear friend was Edith Rinder, who Stedman thought was Fiona Macleod, and who was with Sharp often during the three weeks he spent in the West of Scotland. He concluded the Stedman letter by highlighting his recent successes: “In another letter I must tell you of my many literary doings — more ambitious now. (In a magazine way, see Fortnightly for August, etc. etc. Also Cosmopolis in Nov. — am now writing for all the big mags here and U.S.A.).” The Fortnightly printed his tribute to Edward Burne Jones, the Pre-Raphaelite painter who had recently died.
It is difficult to chronicle Sharp’s activities in the fall of 1898 because very few letters survive from those months. He may have had another holiday with Edith Rinder in October, as he told Stedman he was planning, and he was continuing the mystical efforts to obtain talismans and rituals for Yeats. In that connection, it is interesting to note that Sharp proposed Grant Richards ask Edith Rinder to translate Jules Bossière’s Fumeurs d’Opium, a collection of stories first published in 1896 examining the effects of opium on mind and body.
Near the end of December, just before Christmas, he was at the Pettycur Inn across the Forth from Edinburgh. From there he wrote to Catherine Ann Janvier with enthusiasm and optimism. His time there had been “memorable,’” and he had written three stories for The Dominion of Dreams that he thought some of his best work.
What a glorious day it has been. The most beautiful I have ever seen at Pettycur I think. Cloudless blue sky, clear exquisite air tho’ cold, with a marvellous golden light in the afternoon. Arthur’s Seat, the Crags, and the Castle and the 14 ranges of the Pentlands all clear-cut as steel, and the city itself visible in fluent golden light.
Then, as 1898 came to a close, he was moved to reflect on what he had accomplished and to welcome “a new birth,” without specifying whether it would occur in this world or the next:
And now I listen to the gathering of the tidal waters under the stars. There is an infinite solemnity — a hush, something sacred and wonderful. A benediction lies upon the world. Far off I hear the roaming wind. Thoughts and memories crowd in on me. Here I have lived and suffered — here I have touched the heights — here I have done my best. And now, here, I am going through a new birth. “Sic itur ad astral!” [Thus onward to the stars]
It is fitting that the first and last surviving letters of 1898 were addressed to Catherine Ann Janvier, an American artist and writer who was fourteen years older than Sharp, and with whom he shared his deepest thoughts and dreams.
Letters: 1898
To Catherine Ann Janvier, [January/February, 1898]
… I am skirting the wood of shadows. I am filled with vague fears — and yet a clear triumphant laughter goes through it, whether of life or death no one knows. I am also in a duel with other forces than those of human wills — and I need all my courage and strength. At the moment I have recovered my physic control over certain media. It cannot last more than a few days at most a few weeks at a time: but in that time I am myself…
Let there be peace in your heart: peace and hope transmuted into joy: in your mind, the dusking of no shadow, the menace of no gloom, but light, energy, full life: and to you in your whole being, the pulse of youth, the flame of green fire… .
To Elizabeth A. Sharp, [mid-February, 1898]1
St. Margaret’s Bay
I have had a very happy and peaceful afternoon. The isolation, with sun and wind, were together like soft cream upon my nerves: and I suppose that within twenty minutes after I left the station I was not only serenely at peace with the world in general, but had not a perturbing thought. To be alone, alone “in the open” above all, is not merely healing to me but an imperative necessity of my life — and the chief counter agent to the sap that almost every person exercises on me, unless obviated by frequent and radical interruption.
By the time I had passed through the village I was already “remote” in dreams and thoughts and poignant outer enjoyment of the lovely actualities of sun and wind and the green life: and when I came to my favourite coign where, sheltered from the bite of the wind, I could overlook the sea (a mass of lovely, radiant, amethyst-shadowed, foam-swept water), I lay down for two restful happy hours in which not once a thought of London or of any one in it, or of any one living, came to me. This power of living absolutely in the moment is worth not only a crown and all that a crown could give, but is the secret of youth, the secret of life.
O how weary I am of the endless recurrence of the ordinary in the lives of most people — the beloved routine, the cherished monotonies, the treasured certainties. I grudge them to none: They seem incidental to the common weal: indeed they seem even made for happiness. But I know one wild heart at least to whom life must come otherwise, or not at all.
Today I took a little green leaf o’ thorn. I looked at the sun through it, and a dazzle came into my brain — and I wished, ah I wished I were a youth once more, and was “sun-brother” and “star-brother” again — to lie down at night, smelling the earth, and rise at dawn, smelling the new air out of the East, and know enough of men and cities to avoid both, and to consider little any gods ancient or modern, knowing well that there is only “The Red God” to think of, he who lives and laughs in the red blood… .
There is a fever of the “green life” in my veins — below all the ordinary littleness of conventional life and all the common place of exterior: a fever that makes me ill at ease with people, even those I care for, that fills me with a weariness beyond words and a nostalgia for sweet impossible things.
This can be met in several ways — chiefly and best by the practical yoking of the imagination to the active mind — in a word, to work. If I can do this, well and good, either by forced absorption in contrary work (e.g. Caesar of France),2 or by letting that go for the time and let the more creative instinct have free play: or by some radical change of environment: or again by some irresponsible and incalculable variation of work and brief day-absences.
At the moment, I am like a man of the hills held in fee: I am willing to keep my bond, to earn my wage, to hold to the foreseen: and yet any moment a kestrel may fly overhead, mocking me with a rock-echo, where only sun and wind and bracken live — or an eddy of wind may have the sough of a pine in it — and then, in a flash — there’s my swift brain-dazzle in answer, and all the rapid falling away of these stupid half-realities, and only a wild instinct to go to my own.
Memoir, pp. 296–98
To a friend, [mid-February, 1898]3
… but then, life is just like that. It is glad only “in the open” and beautiful only because of its dreams. I wish I could live all my hours out of doors: I envy no one in the world so much as the red deer, the eagle, the sea-mew. I am sure no kings have so royal a life as the plovers and curlews have. All these have freedom, rejoice continually on the wind’s wing, exalt alike in sun and shade: to them day is day, and night is night, and there is nothing else… .
Memoir, p. 298
To Robert M. Gilchrist, [mid-February, 1898]4
My Dear Friend:
I know you will have been sorry to hear that I have been ill — and had to leave work, and home. The immediate cause was a severe and sudden attack of influenza which went to membranes of the head and brain, and all but resulted in brain fever. This evil was averted — but it and the possible collapse of your friend Will were at one time, and or some days, an imminent probability. I have now been a fortnight in this quiet sea-haven, and am practically myself again. Part of my work is now too hopelessly in arrears ever to catch up. Fortunately, our friend Miss F. M. practically finished her book just before she got ill too — and there is a likelihood that There is But One Love5 will come out this Spring. A few days will decide… .
Your friend and Sunlover, (in the deep sense you know I mean — for I have suffered much but am now again fronting life gravely and with laughing eyes),
Will
Memoir, p. 293
To Benjamin Burgess Moore, February 25, 1898
c/o Miss Rea. | The Columbia City Agency | 9. Mill Street. | Conduit Street. | London. | 25:2:98 Dear Mr. Moore
I was very pleased to get your letter, which ill health prevented my answering before this; and to learn that you like “The Laughter of Peterkin” so well. Its reception altogether has been a pleasant surprise to me — for though but a volume of old tales of beauty re-seen and re-told across an individual temperament, it has had many long articles and important reviews as well as the ordinary run of notices. In America, however, I understand there was little or no demand for it — partly due to the fact that the book was not published there.
My English publishers did what they could — but the invariable reply was “there is no market here for such books.”
I am sorry.
I had intended to publish this Spring a volume of tales — but on account of an important historical romance on hand have postponed publication of the vol. in question indefinitely — certainly for a year hence at least. Till the publication of this historical romance (sometime in 1899) I intend to issue no volume, with the possible exception of a volume of poems and short old-world dramas, but even that not till next Spring, or, at earliest, the late Autumn of this year. On the other hand stories etc. by myself are to appear in serial magazines, British and American, throughout this year. In particular, I would care for you to look at (when they do appear) “The Wayfarer” in Cosmopolis6 and “The Wells of Peace” in Good Words.7 I have no other personal news to give you save that some of my tales are being translated into French.
Hoping that the exigent life oversea leaves you time sometimes to stroll quietly off through the Gates of Dream —
With kind regards, | Yours very truly, | Fiona Macleod
ALS Huntington Library
To Mary Stuart, March 1, 1898
30 Greencroft Gardens | South Hampstead, London | 1st March/98
My dear Miss Stuart,
It was a great pleasure to me on returning to London today (after a two months absence, recruiting from serious illness) to find that the American mail just in had brought me a letter from you. I said to myself “what a dear she is” — and envied Mr. Mielatz,8 for I can only hug you in imagination and with the Atlantic between us!
I thank you very much for your kind letter. But I am indeed distressed to hear how ill E. C. S. has been and I fear still is, tho’ I hope now along the upgrade. I am thankful you have returned to his aid — and glad that you are working with him in the Amer. Anthology.9 If I can possibly manage it I’ll send him a cheery letter by this mail. I am certain he needs to take very great care of himself — and above all to be on guard against nervous weariness. His real illness, alas, is a nostalgia for impossible things. We all (soon or late) suffer from it in some degree. I do not know any friend who can do more for him than you can — and again I say I am thankful you are with him. He is so naturally sweet and sunny, but his nervous life is forever on the rack — much of it unavoidably alas, but some of it amenable by sympathy, loving camaraderie, and alert cooperation.
I am interested in what you say about Mr. Mielatz’s recent work. Well (except for E. C. S.) I hope you will get married soon — & have a happy time, as you deserve — and that you will both come over to London, for Mr. Mielatz not only to win wider repute & ampler cash but also to be introduced to one of the staunchest of your admirers and your sincere friend
William Sharp
My other news in my note to E. C. S.
ALS Columbia University Library
To Edmund Clarence Stedman, March 1, 1898
30 Greencroft Gardens | South Hampstead | London NW | 1st March/98
Dear & well-loved Poet & Friend,
Today is the first day of Spring — and what better could I do than send a line to a friend whom I love right well, and who happens also to be a poet of Springtide and of romance and love & youth?
But first, Edmund of the Gypsy Eyes, bear in mind that you are just to read, & have a handshake across the Atlantic, & then not to dream of answering. Half the pleasure of hearing from a friend is gone — for one so wrought as yourself by many things, & so waylaid by Protean circumstance — if a letter has the ill-manners to kick at the conscience while smiling in the eyes! So know that I am simply writing you a brief greeting out of loving camaraderie. You have many friends over here, & doubtless some whose friendship you value more than mine — but there is none more loyal to you, in every way, and none who loves you more truly.
I know you will be sorry to hear that I have been seriously ill, & am just back from 2 months convalescence — but, then, I am better now, & so there is no more to be said about it. Then, too, latterly I had …… alleviations. To be more exact, it shd be in the singular! You can guess the name, & perhaps remember something of a rare beauty, of life-lifting eyes.10 Anyway, I am well again: & youth, romance, beauty, the passion of keen life, hope, eager outlook, eager work, are all realities once again.
My latest news of you was that you were very “fagged” — nervously overwrought. I do hope you are now more rested, and better able to get to your work — I mean the work for which God & nature meant you. Your book of poetry — for it is not “a book of verse” — has made a very distinct impression here.11 I have not seen many notices, but what I saw were respectful & appreciative — & from individuals & from letters I hear of nothing but high praise.
Did Miss F. M. ever write to you? I know she intended to — & indeed I remember seeing the first page or two of a letter (for she wrote when we were together somewhere) — for she very sincerely admired your poems and was touched and gratified by your sending her a copy. A photograph of your handsome “phiz” ornaments said copy of the Poems — not given, I must add, but forcibly & insistently stolen from me!
Although I have had so bad a time with a dangerous collapse (culminating in severe meningitis) I am now feeling better than I have done for at least two years past — and am quite determined not only to work hard but to get as much of the sunshine & joy & romance and dear delight of life as may be! And what’s more, I’ve had it! And what’s more, I have laid in a treasure of it quite recently! And what’s more — by my Queen’s full consent and approval — I’ve been a very bad boy with a very dear & delightful “friend”, now alas returned to her home in Brussels — & generally I’ve been “spoilt” & made much of, & have enjoyed it, and am thinking of reforming 20 years hence, but meanwhile cling to my Sunshine Creed — to live sunnily, to think blithely, to act on the square even in my “sinning”, & to try to give sunshine to others.12 After all, it’s not such a bad creed — indeed, it’s a very good one, and it has my dear poet E. C. S. as Prophet!
As for work — a great change has taken place in me. Hence forth you will see work at once more controlled, more thorough, stronger, and with more of controlled imagination, of more scrupulous art — & this both in prose & verse, tho’ indeed of the latter I am writing little. My immediate long undertakings (& I have also many important magazine commissions to fulfill) are “a romance of the destinies of France,” and an ambitious play.
For ten years, too, I have been slowly preparing for a big series depictive of Contemporary Life — and the first (to be called either Camaraderie or The Hunters of Wisdom, may be out in book form next Spring).13
If all goes well, you can think of me (and my friend) in a lovely green retreat, on the Marne, near Paris, during the last fortnight of April. If you were there too I would drink to you in white wine, and she would give you a kiss — which, with the glory in her beautiful eyes, would make you “wild with the waste of all unnumbered Springs”. You will be with us in Spirit, dear poet of youth & romance — and I will kiss her for you, & likewise drink the sweet wine of France!!
… hope, and I trust that her sunny smile and youthful heart often rejoice you. You will be a dear youth till the end, E. C. S., — & may the Gods reward you!14
If you, or Miss Mary Stuart (God bless her!) will (not write, but) send me a P/C to say that this has safely reached you — and it had better be entrusted to what old Sir T. Browne calls “the oblivious flame” — I will be glad.15
My dear wife sends you cordial greeting — & and tells me to say to you that she insists on your keeping well & young till she comes out to Bronxville to see for herself! Possibly she may take a run over sea next Spring! So she says, & I believe intends. (I hope she’ll find the funds!)
My love to dear Mrs. Stedman — & if Miss Mary Stuart will accept it, it is hers too. As for you, dear friend, you know you have it.
Ever loyally & lovingly yours, | William Sharp
ALS Columbia University Library
To John Macleay, [mid-March?, 1898]
Greencroft Gardens/So. Hampstead
My dear Mr. Macleay
I congratulate you on your appointment — and trust it may be a stepping stone to good fortune.16 I am sorry, otherwise, that you are leaving the Highland — & that the H/News loses one of its best contributors. There is sore need of more men like yourself, in the newspaper offices of the north. But probably you will continue to write occasionally for the H/N — and give a good but difficult, tho’ I hope in the end triumphant cause, what lift you can.
If ever I can be of any help to you, let me know: & if I can I will.
You go to a good paper — & Liverpool is one of the lucky schools of journalism.
May you reach your heart’s desire!
Yrs very sincerely/William Sharp
ALS National Library of Scotland
To Elizabeth A. Sharp, March 29, 189817
… Yes, in essentials, we are all at one. We have both learned and unlearned so much, and we have come to see that we are wrought mysteriously by forces beyond ourselves, but in so seeing we know that there is a great and deep love that conquers even disillusion and disappointment… .
Not all the wishing, not all the dreaming, not all the will and hope and prayer we summon can alter that within us which is stronger than ourselves. This is a hard lesson to learn for all of us, and most for a woman. We are brought up within such an atmosphere of conventional untruth to life that most people never even perceive the hopeless futility in the arbitrary ideals which are imposed upon us — and the result for the deeper natures, endless tragic miscarriage of love, peace, and hope. But, fortunately, those of us who to our own suffering do see only too clearly, can still strike out a nobler ideal — one that does not shrink from the deepest responsibilities and yet can so widen and deepen heart and spirit with love that what else would be irremediable pain can be transmuted into hope, into peace, and even into joy.
People talk much of this and that frailty or this or that circumstance as being among the commonest disintegrants of happiness. But far more fatal for many of us is that supreme disintegrant, the Tyranny of Love — the love which is forever demanding as its due that which is wholly independent of bonds, which is as the wind which bloweth where it listeth or where it is impelled, by the Spirit. We are taught such hopeless lies. And so men and women start life with ideals which seem fair, but are radically consumptive: ideals that are not only bound to perish, but that could not survive. The man of fifty who could be the same as he was at twenty is simply a man whose mental and spiritual life stopped short while he was yet a youth. The woman of forty who could have the same outlook on life as the girl of 19 or 20 would never have been other than one ignominiously deceived or hopelessly self-sophisticated. This ought not to be — but it must be as long as young men and women are fed mentally and spiritually upon the foolish and cowardly lies of a false and corrupt conventionalism.
No wonder that so many fine natures, men and women, are wrought to lifelong suffering. They are started with impossible ideals: and while some can never learn that their unhappiness is the result, not of the falling short of others, but of the falsity of those ideals which they had so cherished — and while others learn first strength to endure the transmutations and then power to weld these to far nobler and finer uses and ends — for both there is suffering. Yet, even of that we make too much. We have all a tendency to nurse grief. The brooding spirit craves for the sunlight, but it will not leave the shadows. Often, Sorrow is our best ally.
The other night, tired, I fell asleep on my sofa. I dreamed that a beautiful spirit was standing beside me. He said: “My Brother, I have come to give you the supreme gift that will heal you and save you.” I answered eagerly: “Give it me — what is it?” And the fair radiant spirit smiled with beautiful solemn eyes, and blew a breath into the tangled garden of my heart — and when I looked there I saw the tall white Flower of Sorrow growing in the Sunlight.
Memoir, pp. 294–96
To Robert Murray Gilchrist, [April 22, 1898]
I forgot to answer your question: Forgive me. E’s birthday is the 17 of May — & she will be at home.
I am hard pressed with work just now, as this is my busiest time. Next Friday18 I go to Paris for a week or 10 days.
I hope all goes well with you and yours.
W. S.
ACS Sheffield City Archives
To Grant Richards, April 26, 1898
30 Greencroft Gardens | South Hampstead | 26/Apr/98
My dear Richards,
Thanks for your note. Glad you like the exiled ladies so well.19 I daresay I might improve the opening a bit. I can see about this.
My terms, as I stated, are £25 (not £20) down on day of publication on a/c of a 15% royalty: & to this I agree. (It is the miscarriage I explained to you that induces me to mention so modest a sum — but that is absolutely my minimum.)
When will you begin printing? I should strongly advise publication before the end of May if possible — so as to catch that large public which begins to move off towards mid-June — a public interested in such a yachting romance as this.
The copy I sent you was an unrevised one. I have a partially revised one somewhere — & this I could take with me to Paris & send to you for printing from, with revisions, & perhaps some improvement in first chap. Please let me have the other some time.
It is fairly possible I may be able to snatch a half hour tomorrow (Press day Royal Academy) & look in on you abt this & these d–d “Love Letters”20 but I can’t tell yet.
Excuse a scribbled line in extreme haste, with a telegram from one big daily & a printer’s devil from Literature both “pawing the air” for me.
Yours sincerely | William Sharp
ALS Stanford University
To William Butler Yeats, April 30, 189821
St. Margaret’s Bay Hotel | Dover
My dear Yeats
I was just about to write to you when your note came, to tell you that a sudden & serious collapse in health not only will prevent Miss M. from coming to Paris, but will probably end in her having to go to some remote Baths for 2 months for special treatment. This may prove unnecessary: I trust so. Meanwhile it has materially affected immediate plans. As for myself, partly for this and partly because of being myself (as you will understand) seriously indisposed in the same way, I am unable to go to Paris either, & have had to cancel my art-work etc.22 I shall now be at above address for a week or more to come.
No I do not recall the new Revue Celtique address — but think it is in the Rue Bonaparte. Parts cannot be had separately — as it is by yearly subsc. Your easiest plan wd. be to borrow the Moytura23 part either from Jubainville24 or from Douglas Hyde25 who, I know, takes the R.C. or you could easily copy what you want at the Bibliotheque Nationale. Send me a p/c to say you have recd this.
ACS Yale, printed in Letters to Yeats, I, pp. 35-36
To Grant Richards, May 2, 1898
St. Margaret’s Bay Hotel | Lanzardle | near Dover | 2/May/98
My dear Richards
Herewith the contracts. I return mine to be initialled or cross-signed by you opposite Clause I.
(1) |
As I explained to you at the time I called on you about Wives in Exile, the American sale covers the U.S.A. and Canada, and the condition on which publication is now feasible in this country is that of non-interference with the Transatlantic sale. |
|
(2) |
I make it an invariable rule (a wise condition voluntarily adopted also with all their books, by John Lane and at least 3 other Publishers) to sign away no copyright for more than seven years. It goes without saying that self-interest as well as courtesy & square dealing make this stipulation a merely precautionary one. |
In this instance I need make no objection to Clause 7 — as the printing will be from revised printed pages, and so there will naturally be very few Author’s corrections: but as a rule I refuse to sign any such stipulation, unless indeed in some special instance where expense would run high.
Again, in Clause XI, I prefer the more expeditious & more business-like procedure of Constable & Co., Lane, etc. who remit within a calendar month after June 30th & Dec. 31.
Love Letters26
I regret that continuous pressure of work since I came here has prevented my reading through the long installment of these letters. From the hurried glimpse I have been able to take of them, I feel as I already told you that the vocative-beginnings should be omitted, or used very rarely, as they are monotonous and (except doubtless to the two concerned!) ultimately wearisome. My own (perhaps far too swiftly and inadequately gained) impression is, that the man is sexually distraught and that the woman is neither his holy saint nor even a virgo intacta! However, I send on the signed copy for you to judge: it is quite possible that there might be a big sale for a book of this kind. Pour moi, le dis que le propre titre, c’est “Le monde ou l’on s’ennuie”.
Tomorrow I hope to be able to go through Wives in Exile. So I can see my way to improving the opening by making clearer the point to which you allude I will do so. In any case I will revise for press as soon as I can — for certainly I think it important that this book should come out as early as practicable.
In haste | Yours sincerely | William Sharp
ALS State University of New York at Buffalo
To John Macleay, [May 3?, 1898]
Lanzardle | near Dover
Dear Mr. Macleay,
Your note has reached me at a little seaside place near Dover where I came a few days ago after a specially hard spell of literary and art-journalistic work: tho,’ now, I may leave tomorrow.27
I am glad to hear from you, and that things go fairly well with you: and glad also that you are finding leisure for that literary pen-work for which you care so much and in which you have shown so much genuine promise. It is of the very greatest advantage that Liverpool suits you, and that you have so fortunate a domestic environment. You ought now to set yourself (always keeping a scrupulous hold over your nervous health) to write imaginatively, that is to re-create observation and impression and give forth in a new because individual way. I shall look for any Highland work from your pen with genuine interest. Almost certainly, I should fancy, you will do better away from Inverness than in it — I mean about Inverness & Highland life.
I have never seen The Highland News since you left, so don’t know if you are still (as I hope) contributing to it. I believe Miss Macleod had a long letter in it, in response to a request from the Editor, but I have not seen it.
She is in better health now, you will be interested to hear: but I’m not sure what she is doing just now — probably working slowly at her historical Jacobite romance. There is a long short-story of hers in the just pubd. new number of that marvelous shillings worth, the little quarterly The Dome: and, I hear, one of the Summer issues of Cosmopolis is to have one of her most ambitious short stories. As to Mrs. Wingate Rinder’s new Breton translation — yes, it has been well received already, tho’ just published, The Scotsman of May 2nd which I have just found here, on file, has a very good notice. I have read the book with much interest, though I do not hold the high opinion of Le Goffic that many French critics have.28 I think Mrs. W. R.’s translation excellent as a translation, and wonderfully literal while deft and idiomatic — but I wd. far rather see her translating and better still paraphrasing the Breton legendary tales of which she gave so fine an installment in “The Shadow of Arvor.” However, when last I heard from her, she alluded to her intention to do another such volume — & would have the advice & help of the great Breton Specialist, Anatole Le Braz.
As for myself I have been very busy, but largely with writing for the weeklies, and upon a new book, and upon as yet unpublished magazine articles. At the end of this month, or beginning of June, Grant Richards will publish a story, a “Comedy in Romance” of mine, entitled Wives in Exile.
I’ll postpone Neil Munro’s story till it appears in book-form. It seems to me very good indeed, but its Gaelicism to be far too self-conscious and in any case overdone. Another Glasgow man (Benjamin Swift) has, in my judgment, produced a very disappointing book in The Tormentor, tho’ I had hoped big things from him. He may do well yet. The book, all the same, is very clever, very able. Spanish John I liked, and was the more interested in as I know the author, a Scoto-Canadian who lives in Montreal. But he does not know the real Gaelic nature, I fancy. I have read nothing so imaginatively good for a long time as F. Mathews The Spanish Wine. That is romance.
With cordial regards and good wishes, / Yours sincerely / William Sharp
ALS National Library of Scotland
To Benjamin Burgess Moore, May 3, 1898
Letter-address | c/o Miss Rea | The Columbia City Agency | 9 Mill Street | Conduit St. |
London | 3rd May 98
Dear Mr. Moore
Very many thanks for your friendly letter and its accompanying most sympathetic and appreciative review of “Peterkin”.
I wish there could be an American edition of that book, for I find now I have a greater number of readers than I knew. If chance should take you to Boston I wish you would ask Mr. Lamson (Lamson, Wolffe & Co.) or Copeland & Day or Houghton Mifflin & Co. if they would care to issue an American edition of it29 — either as it stands or without the Peterkin prologue and interludes — and in the latter case (which for some reasons I should prefer) under the title “The Three Sorrows of Old”, or “Heroic Tales of the Celt”, or “The Story of Deirdre the Beautiful”. In the circumstances I should expect no payment beyond a 15% royalty, and say 25 copies free. Would it be possible for you to see to this for me? You could add that the Spectator,30 Literature, and indeed all the important English literary papers have spoken most highly of the book, — and perhaps you could emphasise this point by sending your own admirable “Yale Review” notice.
On the other hand do not hesitate to let me know if this is inconvenient for you. (If it had not been for the failure of Stone & Kimball of New York, who published my two previous books “The Sin Eater” and “The Washer of the Ford,” Peterkin would probably have been out in U .S. A. before this.)
I have directed the publisher to send you a copy of that delightful quarterly magazine, The Dome,31 which is published today I believe. It contains a story of mine which you may care for (Good Words for April had a brief episodic narrative, “The Four Winds of Desire”.32 One of the Summer issues of Cosmopolis will contain “The Wayfarer”33 of which I wrote to you, and Good Words “The Wells of Peace”.)34
I am writing this to send it with other notes to be posted in Edinburgh, (as am postless here in a remote little haven by the sea.)35 What peace and wonder and mystery lie in the ceaseless noise of a lonely sea. I send you a sea-breath of this old-world you love so well.
Sincerely Yours, | Fiona Macleod
ALS Huntington Library
To William Butler Yeats, May 5, 1998
St. Margaret’s Bay Hotel | Nr. Dover | 5th May 1898
My dear Yeats
In strict privacy, my friend Miss Macleod is here just now. She was on her way to Paris, but as I told you she was suddenly taken too unwell. She was sleeping when your letter came, but I left the enclosure for her at her bedside — & if she wakes before the post goes she will doubtless give you a message through me, unless she feels up to writing herself. If well enough, she leaves here on Saturday morning — but to go north again.36
You ask me if I were in any unusual state on either May 1st or 2nd. I do not remember anything on Sunday 1st beyond a singular depression, and a curious sense of unreality for a time, as though I were really elsewhere. But on Monday 2nd, late, I suffered in a way I can’t explain, owing to what seemed to me an unaccountable preoccupation of Miss M.
All this is very private — but I trust you.
Her father was tall, fine-looking, with a rather singular concentrated expression. The Macleod tartan is dark (dark green & dark blue almost black). I don’t quite understand why you ask. I forgot to add that F. M. herself at times sees a startling likeness between me & her father, though I am taller & bigger & fairer than he was. There are, however, many similarities in nature, etc., and also in the accident of baptismal name.
In case you do not get it, I ordered to be sent to you in Paris (at her & my simultaneous suggestion) a copy of The Dome.37 Perhaps you will care for the story there. Your own poems there are very lovely.
I am afraid I must now go and post this: but
P.S. Have just time to say that Miss M has awaked, & is feeling much better. She cannot write at the moment however — but asks me to say that she has read your letter. In reply, she asks me to write as follows: –
“I have been going though an intense emotional crisis. One less poignant period was on the evening or night of the 1st, but far more so, & more poignantly on the 2nd. But of this, being private, I cannot speak further. I was, on both occasions (though differently & for different reasons) undergoing tragic feeling. I am at present at a perilous physical & spiritual crisis. I can say no more. The one who shares my life & self is here. It is as crucial for him. I will talk over your letter to us — for to us it is, though you send it to me. Are you sure it was not Will whom you felt or saw? If I, then I must only38
P.S. Hurriedly adding this at the PO to say that my friend’s neuralgia was too severe to talk any more. The subject too was exciting her. She will show me your letter when I get back.
Note this time today. About 3 p.m. today Thursday she went through (& I too) a wave of intense tragic emotion — and last night, between 10 and 12 or later, we nearly lost each other in a very strange way. Something I did by the will was too potent, & for a time severed some unconscious links (we were apart at the time: I thought she was sleeping) — & we both suffered in consequence. But I think the extreme crisis of tragic psychic emotion is over.39
God grant it
ACS Yale, printed in Letters to Yeats, I, pp. 36-37
To Grant Richards, May 9, 1898
St Margaret’s Bay Hotel | near Dover | Monday 9th May: 98
My dear Richards,
My delay in sending you the first pages of Wives in Exile for press has been mainly due to my consideration of the point you addressed. After some hesitation I wrote a supplementary chapter — Then I read the book right through critically, and today reread the opening and this new chapter. The result is that I have destroyed this interpolated new chapter, and am convinced that my own shaping instinct was in the main right. I may add that no single review in America indicated any hesitancy as to the point you alluded to, nor any one over there who wrote to me about the book. My own strong feeling is that I could not now touch the book, by interpolation, except to spoil it. It must stand as it is, in this respect. In a story of this kind, so much depends on spontaneity and rapid continuity: I can do nothing to it, I realise, that would not militate against these qualities. From the first, I may add, my instinct was dead against your suggestion — but in courtesy, and also because I believe in the frequent value of outside suggestions, I was willing to put the matter to the test. I have done so. — And so, Finis.
I find, however, that I have forgotten to say I think I have very materially improved the opening of the book (& incidentally practically met your point abt making Harry Adoir & his true, merely incidental relationship, obvious at once) — by making it now begin with P16 and then heading on to present beginning, minus first sentence. (The story now starts, too, on absolutely the right “prognostic note.”)
Herewith I send you the opening forty six pp., revised and ready for press. (There are 329 pp. of text.) The remainder I shall send you with all possible expedition, for I am as anxious as you can be that there should now be no avoidable delay.
I trust you will not bring out the book in the same small size as the American edition. Here, I am convinced for my part, the public will not purchase small books. The book will have far more chances as an ordinary sized 6/ volume — & I would suggest that it might be printed page for page as here, but bigger type & wider spaced — so as still to be about 330 pp. in length.
I expect to be here till the week-end, but if I make an abrupt move shall let you know.
Yours sincerely, | William Sharp
ALS University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Library
To Dr. John Goodchild,40 [mid-May, 1898]
The Outlook Tower, | Edinburgh,
Dear Sir,
I have to thank you very cordially for your book and the long and interesting letter which accompanied it. It must be to you also that I am indebted for an unrevised proof-copy of The Light of the West.41
Everything connected with the study of the Celtic past has an especial and deep interest for me, and there are few if any periods more significant than that of the era of St. Columba. His personality has charmed me, in the old and right sense of the word “charm”: but I have come to it, or it to me, not through books (though of course largely through Adamnan) so much as through a knowledge gained partly by reading, partly by legendary lore and hearsay, and mainly by much brooding on these, and on every known saying and record of Colum, in Iona itself. When I wrote certain of my writings (e.g. “Muime Chriosd” and “The Three Marvels of Iona”) I felt, rightly or wrongly, as though I had in some measure become interpretative of the spirit of “Colum the White.”
Again, I have long had a conviction — partly an emotion of the imagination, and partly a belief insensibly deduced through a hundred avenues of knowledge and surmise — that out of Iona is again to come a Divine Word, that Iona, the little northern isle, will be as it were the tongue in the mouth of the South.
Believe me, sincerely yours, | Fiona Macleod.
Memoir, pp. 316–17
To Robert M. Gilchrist, [mid-May?, 1898]42
Rutland House
My Dear Robert,
… After months of sickness, at one time at the gates of death, I am whirled back from the Iron Gates and am in the maelstrom again — fighting with mind and soul and body for that inevitable losing game which we call victory. Well, the hour waits: and for good or ill I put forth that which is in me. The Utmost for the Highest. There is that motto for all faithful failures… .
I am busy of course. And so, too, our friend F. M. — with an elixir of too potent life. The flame is best: and the keener, the less obscured of smoke. So I believe: upon this I build. Cosmopolis will era long have “The Wayfarer” of hers — Good Words “The Wells of Peace” — Harper’s something43 — Literature a spiritual ballad44 — and so forth. But her life thought is in another and stranger thing than she has done yet.45 … Your friend W. S. is busy too, with new and deeper and stronger work. The fugitive powers impel. I look eagerly to new works of yours: above all to what you colour with yourself. I care little for anything that is not quick with that volatile part of one which is the effluence of the spirit within. Write to me soon: by return best of all. You can help me — as I, I hope, can help you.46
It is only the fullest and richest lives that know what the heart of loneliness is.
You are my comrade, and have my love, | Will
Memoir, pp. 293–94
To Robert Murray Gilchrist, May 17, 189847
Rutland House | May 17th ‘98
Dear Mr. Gilchrist
My birthday has been gladdened by your most friendly letter, and made fragrant by the beautiful flowers you sent me. As I write I am conscious of the sweet wild wood scent of the lilies-of-the-valley — my favourite flower. It is indeed good of you to remember me, and it is one of my urgent wishes that before long the opportunity may come for me to know you well, for already I count you among my valued friends. Your photograph stands near one of Will, who asks me to send you his love.
Your word of the moorlands made me long for uplands and wide spaces. There are only indications of spring here, and no real spring — a veil of smoke hangs between us and clear bright sunshine, and makes a sadness of what should be a glorious day. Your mother, Mrs. Murray Gilchrist very kindly has asked me to stay some day with her. We go North to Scotland about the latter end of July, and I think it would be so very nice if we might stay for a day or so with her on our way. This is of course only a suggestion, and wholly depends upon whether or not it would be convenient to Mrs. Gilchrist.
Will has not been very well; tomorrow he goes to Holland for four days. I hope the newness of the surroundings there will send him home well & ready for work.
Are you working I wonder? Are you gathering more of those vivid strong tales to put together in another book? I hope so very much.
With cordial thanks for your friendliness
Very sincerely yours | Elizabeth A. Sharp
ALS Sheffield City Archive
To Editors, Harper’s Magazine, May 19, 1898
C/o Miss Rea. | The Columbia Literary Agency | 9. Mill St. Conduit St. | London — W. | 19:May:1898
Dear Sirs,
Thanks for the Draft from Editor of Harper’s Magazine for £20. (Twenty Pounds) for the Serial rights of my story “The White Heron”:
Yours very truly | Fiona Macleod | 19/5/98
ACS University of Texas, Austin
To Elizabeth A. Sharp [late May, 1898]
… We are now in the south Zuyder Zee, with marvellous sky effects, and low lines of land in the distance. Looking back at Eiland Marken48 one sees six clusters of houses, at wide intervals, dropped casually into the sea.
We had a delightful time in that quaintest of old world places, where the women are grotesque, the men grotesquer, and the children grotesquest — as for the tubby, capped, gorgeous-garbed, blue-eyed, yellow haired, imperturbable babies, they alone are worth coming to see … .
Memoir, p. 298
To Grant Richards, [late May, 1898]
30 Greencroft Gardens | So. Hampstead
My dear Grant Richards
I meant to send you some notices of “Wives in Exile” — but I can’t “lay my memory to one o’them” as they say in Ireland.49 All be somewhere in a package. But by a chance I came across this in one of Lamson’s letters, & send it to you. It was quoted from, among others, a good deal in U.S.A.
Very glad of your good news.50 In a double sense you can now say the lovely Italian words of the Romagna folksong: — “O dolce primavera pien’ di olezzo e amor!”51
In haste | Sincerely Yours | William Sharp
ALS Stanford University
To Grant Richards [early June, 1898]
Dear Mr. Richards
In reply to your note, I send enclosed. I suppose it is the kind of thing you want.
Certainly the two U.S.A. quotations ought to prove stimulant both to the public and the critic — no small consideration.
Please let me know the date when it is intended to publish the book.52 There ought not to be a day’s unnecessary delay now — especially as the yachting season begins at once.
By the way, your traveler shd. try and make a special sale with it in Glasgow (Maclehose, Forester, Hadden, etc.,) and Edinburgh (Andrew Elliot, etc., etc.,) as a Yachting Romance of the Clyde.
In haste, | Yours sincerely, | William Sharp
ALS Pierpont Morgan Library
To William Butler Yeats, June 28, 1898
Temporary 9 Upper Coltbridge Terrace | Murrayfield. | Midlothian. | Scotland
My dear Mr. Yeats
I am very glad to get the letter duly forwarded to me, and to hear from you again. As you know, there is no living writer with whom I find myself so absolutely in rapport as with you. I am eagerly hoping for more beautiful work from you again in prose and verse, soon. How often I have meant to write to you about your lovely opening pages of “The Shadowy Waters”, which I do hope you will complete soon, and about the alas still unpublished lyrics “The Wind in the Reeds”.53 I was deeply interested in your Folklore articles — but it is new imaginative work that I most long to see.54 I dread for you a too great preoccupation in other interests — and the consequent inevitable dispersal of energy, and the insatiable avarice of the hours and days of our brief time. I was glad to hear that you liked “Children of the Dark Star” and “The Wayfarer”.55
I have been told that long ago one of the subtlest and strangest minds of his time — a man of Celtic ancestry on one side and of Norse on the other — was so profoundly influenced by the kindred nature and spirit of a woman whom he loved, a Celt of Celts, that, having in a sense accidentally discovered56 the mystery of absolute mental and spiritual union of two impassioned and kindred natures the flame of anguish that had been his in a far back day was in him, so that besides a strange and far reaching ancestral memory, he remembered anew and acutely every last clue and significance of his boyhood and early life, spent mostly among the shepherds and fishers of the Hebrides and Gaelic Highlands. His was the genius, the ancestral memory, the creative power — she was the flame — she, too, being also a visionary, and with unusual and all but lost old wisdom of the Gael. Without her, he would have been lost to the Beauty which was his impassioned quest: with her, as a flame to his slumbering flame, he became what he was. The outer life of each was singular, beyond that of any man or woman I have heard of: how much stranger that of their spiritual union. A profound and resolute silence lay upon the man, save when he knew the flame of the woman “through whom he saw Beauty,” and his soul quickened. She gave him57 all she could, and without her he could not be what he was, and he needed her vision to help his own, and her dream, and her thought, and her life, till hers and his ceased to be hers and his and merged into one, and became …… a spirit of shaping power born of them both.58
How does that strike you as a subject for a tale, a book? It would be a strange one. Does it seem to you impossible? It does not seem so to me.59
Your friend and comrade | Fiona Macleod60
ALS Yeats Papers, printed in Collected Letters to Letters to Yeats, I, pp. 38-39
To Richard Watson Gilder, July 5, 1898
30 Greencroft Gardens | South Hampstead | 5/July/98
My dear Mr. Gilder,
Herewith I send a couple of short poems: perhaps one or both may appeal to you.
Like our common friends (and near neighbours) the Janviers, I had hoped to see Mrs. Gilder and yourself in London this season: but perhaps next Spring may see you again in a town you both love well. The Janviers, too, are become Londoners!
Recently, Janvier accompanied me in a little trip through Holland, a country with which I am familiar but which was new to him. He enjoyed it greatly.
Later (I have another volume of short stories coming out first) I wish to publish a series of short stories with North-Holland scenery or old Dutch towns as background. Would it be any use my sending you one of these? I am now writing them. The first is already accepted: the others, available soon, are, (this will be the titular story), (2) “The Merchant of Dreams” (with Amsterdam as background) (3) “The Flower of Oblivion” (Flemish-Dutch, not “Hollandisch” proper, as it is an effort to convey the mysterious charm and fascination of Bruges.) (4) “The Ivory Sculptor” (Delft) (5) “The House in the Wood,” (North Holland) (6) “The Scarlet Peacock” (North Holland).61
What are you doing yourself just now, apart from your editorial work? 1 hope you are going to publish a volume of poetry soon. You may not have as many but you have as sincere admirers here as oversea. My cordial regards to Mrs. Gilder.
Yours sincerely, | William Sharp
Just finished today a difficult task — that of writing an article on Burne-Jones for two magazines for (I understand) the same month. But that for the “Atlantic” is personal, while that for the “Fortnightly” is critical, an appreciation.62
ALS Huntington Library
To William Butler Yeats, July 6, 1898
6th July/98
Dear Mr. Yeats
I hope you duly received the private letter I sent you on the 28th of June. I am a little anxious about it.63
Yours most sincerely | Fiona Macleod
ACS New York Public Library, Berg Collection
To Grant Richards, July 11, 1898
30 Greencroft Gardens | South Hampstead | 11 July/98
My dear Grant Richards
What day will you send out review copies of Wives in Exile? If you have copies in hand could you let me have two of mine by Friday, as wanted for birthdays!
I think it would be advisable if you would send (as review copies, though not to be so indicated: simply a slip with the author’s compliments) copies to
(1) |
H. D. Traill Esq | Editor Literature | Printing House Square | E.C. (this not to interfere with the copy to Literature itself, which Mr. T. will give out. If he has a copy himself he may be able to do something for it in two other quarters.) For same reason to W. L. Courtney Esq64 | C/o Messrs. Chapman & Hall |
|
(3) |
James Knowles Esq | Queen Anne’s Lodge | St. James Park | SW |
|
(4) |
Richard Whiteing Esq | 45 Mecklenburgh Square | W.C. |
|
(5) |
Charles Russell Esq | 12 Buckingham Terrace | Hillhead | Glasgow |
|
(6) |
The Rev. Donald Macleod D.D.65 | 1 Woodlands Terrace | Glasgow |
|
(7) |
Clement K. Shorter Esq66 | Sketch Office etc. |
Each of these, I have reason to know, will prove a “well-placed” copy — sent in this way. I would add Coulson Kernahan, but I think he said you had promised him a copy.
Please let me know if you are sending above as indicated.
I think I have already suggested your traveller making a special push of the book in Glasgow & Edinburgh — particularly where a Clyde yachting romance ought to “take”.
For my own use, in addition to the Six Authors Copies agreed upon (two by Friday if possible) — please send me (I presume at trade-price, as is usual?) six other copies.
And will you please oblige me by letting me have by this week-end the £25 advance, owing to an unexpected sudden emergency — a courtesy for which I will venture to thank you in advance. Will you & Mrs. Richards come & have tea with Mrs. Sharp & myself some afternoon either at her club or at mine?67 (From the 19th till 25th I expect to be with Murray Gilchrist, & then here for 2 or 3 days again)
Yours Sincerely | William Sharp
ALS New York University, Fales Library
To Grant Richards, [July 15, 1898]
Friday
My dear Richards
Thanks for the copies of our Exiled Dames to hand. The book is very well got up, & I am delighted with the cover, which is at once simple & charming, & the colour effective. I hope the combined efforts of author & publisher will allure the stray “4s/6 cash” from many pockets — notwithstanding a war-spent season and this being “sae waefu’ far on i’ the year”.68
Of course the book is heavily handicapped by coming so late in the season — but even now I hope the big booksellers out of town, at Brighton, Cromer etc. etc. may be able to catch some of the holiday public who might care for a book such as this.
If some good reviews appear (I expect “a mixed lot” as the auctioneers say!) the book may take a sudden life — & in any case will I hope have a fresh lease in the Autumn.
Thanks, too, for the cheque for advance £25.
Sorry we are not likely to meet this summer. We shall be away from the 19th till the 25th or 26th — & then back till the 31st, on which day we leave for Scotland.
I presume it is this Saty that you go to Cornwall. If not, could you both come here Monday? (Don’t bother to answer if it is this Saty you go.)69
Hoping you will have a happy second honeymoon —
Very sincerely yours, | William Sharp
ALS State University of New York at Buffalo
To Ernest Rhys, July 23, 1898
23rd July, 1898
My Dear Mr. Rhys,70
On my coming to Edinburgh for a few days I find the book you have so kindly sent to me.71 It is none the less welcome because it comes as no new acquaintance: for on its appearance a friend we have in common sent it to me. Alas, that copy lies among the sea-weed in a remote Highland loch; for the book, while still reading in part, slipped overboard the small yacht in which I was sailing, and with it the MS. of a short story of mine appropriately named “Beneath the Shadow of the Wave”! The two may have comforted each other in that solitude: or the tides may have carried them southward, and tossed them now to the Pembroke Stacks, now to the cliffs of Howth. Perhaps a Welsh crab may now be squeaking (they do say that crabs make a whistling squeak!) with a Gaelic accent or the deep-sea congers be reciting Welsh ballads to the young-lady-eels of The Hebrides. Believe me, your book has given me singular pleasure. I find in it the indescribable: and to me that is one of the tests, perhaps the supreme test (for it involves so much) of imaginative literature. A nimble air of the hills is there; the rustle of remote woods; the morning cry, that is so ancient, and that still so thrills us.
I most eagerly hope that you will recreate in beauty the all but lost beauty of the old Cymric singers. There is a true originality in this, as in anything else. The green leaf, the grey wave, the mountain wind — after all, are they not murmurus in the old Celtic poets, whether Alban or Irish or Welsh: and to translate, and recreate anew, from these, is but to bring back into the world again a lost wandering beauty of hill-wind or green leaf or grey wave. There is, I take it, no one living who could interpret Davyth ap Gwilym72 and other old Welsh singers as you could do. I long to have the Green Book of “the Poet of the Leaves” in English verse, and in English verse such as that into which you could transform it… .
F. M.
Memoir, pp. 298–99
To William Butler Yeats, [c. July 20, 1898]
[This letter, which is in private hands, responded to a letter from Yeats in which he reported that the legal difficulties encountered by the Celtic Theatre were settled and asked F. M. what plays she would have ready for the fall. In this reply, F. M. said she was “very glad indeed to hear about the Celtic Theatre and that she hoped to have “Fand and Cuchulain” finished this autumn and possibly the shorter “The Hour of Beauty.” She said she had also “virtually completed ‘The King of Ys’ and ‘Dahut the Red.’”]
To Benjamin Burgess Moore, July 31, 1898
Address during August | Seaview West | Kilcreggan, Dumbartonshire | Scotland | 31:July:98
Dear Mr. Moore
Many thanks for your letter, and all the trouble you have taken. It will be pleasant if Mr. Lamson would take “Peterkin”: I have not heard from him. If you are writing to him again you might add that I have a volume of short stories (from the Collective 3-Vol. Edn., and magazine sources) not published in America (Stone & Kimball published The Sin-Eater and the Washer of the Ford, and Messrs. Harper Green Fire) which I would be pleased to issue through him, if he is agreeable to my terms — royalty of 12½% (instead of 15% — as usual), with an advance on publication of £20 ($100), and a dozen copies free on publication — terms which I imagine will commend themselves as moderate, only, I should like to hear soon.
No, it is not quite true that Mr. Yeats and I are collaborating on a drama: but we are each writing a drama, which we hope to see brought out in the new Celtic theater in Dublin next year. Yes — “Ulick Deane” in Mr. Moore’s Evelyn Innes is an exact (indeed an extraordinarily exact) portraiture of Mr. Yeats.73 It is a remarkable book, with all its faults — and interested me profoundly. It has not been at all adequately treated, I think.
My recent stories in the Dome and Cosmopolis were very well received. Among others that might interest you are “The Wells of Peace” coming out soon I believe in Good Words: “Enya of the Dark Eyes”, coming out in one of the autumn issues of Literature: and “The White Heron”, with illustrations, in the Christmas number of Harper’s. (By the way you might mention this latter fact to Mr. Lamson when you write — as I understand that the appearance of a story in the Christmas number is held of great account in U.S.A. as an advertisement — you will be thinking I am becoming very commercial!)
I hope that “Paul Smith’s, Franklin County” means that you are to be in some beautiful place for a holiday.
You can think of me in August among the lochs of Eastern Argyll, and in September among the Isles.
As soon as I have finished my new book74 I shall get on with the two [for three] short plays, “The Hour of Beauty” and “The King of Ys” and “Dahut the Red.”75
I send you a little spray of Highland heather,
Yours most sincerely | Fiona Macleod
ALS Huntington Library
To Edward Martyn, [early August, 1898]76
Scalasaig | Isle of Colonsay | (Inner Hebrides)
My dear Martyn
Very many thanks — but it must be some other time: not this summer or autumn now, I fear. I shall be in the isles till September any way.
But sometime I hope very much to see you again, in Ireland.
Ever sincerely yours | William Sharp
ALS Princeton University
To John Macleay, August 8, 1898
Argyll House / Kilcreggan / Scotland
Dear Mr. Macleay,
Your letter found me in the North we both love so well. Yes, I know & love Glenmoriston[?] & Loch Duich & Glengnoich[?]: it is a lovely region, a haunted land.
The Loch Duich neighborhood will, I understand, figure largely in Miss Macleod’s historical romance — though I believe she has changed the original plan as I heard it a year or two ago. I expect to see her in September — either in Skye or the Hebrides — unless, as is possible, I may have to go abroad at the beginning of Sept., tho’ I hope not. I fear that this romance of hers has been lagging — partly because of her preoccupation with work more after her own heart and (as I believe) more suitable for her. However, the result will be the only proof, one way or the other. Have you seen her recent published stories in the Dome and Cosmopolis? She tells me that in a few weeks (i.e. either in August or September) there is to be a short story by her in Literature, & that Mr. Sterner(?)77
ALS National Library of Scotland
To (Manager for) Messrs. Herbert S. Stone & Co., [August 16, 1898]78
30 Greencroft Gardens | South Hampstead | London | NW
Thanks for your Royalty statement of Vistas to hand. Please send me one, or two, copies in lieu of the small sum due. Please note not to address Miss Macleod’s statements or letters to my care as I very often do not know her address. Her business address is c/o Miss Rea | The Columbia Literary Agency | 9 Mill St. | Conduit St. | London.
I have just had a letter from her to this effect, also … book as I have done above covering mine.79
Yrs very truly | William Sharp
ACS Newberry Library
To Coulson Kernahan, August 24, 189880
Kilcreggan | Argyll
My dear Kernahan
Pray excuse a Postal Card in lieu of note paper — but I am “en route”, & have nothing at hand.
Thanks for your kind words my dear fellow. Your notice will, I am sure, help the book;81 & in any case I thank you for it. For myself, I do not agree with you abt the “personal element” — & that part in your notice I do not like. The “Tirebuck” was an impossible & absurd slip of some stupid compiler, long ago corrected & forgotten: and the Fiona Macleod matter is also one no longer mixt up with my name, Miss M’s work standing so unmistakably by itself & she herself now being known to a few at least. The A. Hope matter is persiflage of course. But I am certainly thankful the article was not headed “The Mystery of W. S.”, as I wd. have had published a protest.82 Well, dear old man, I am frank you see. But you know that for your good will & good deed I am grateful. The book was a mere jiu d’esprit — & has been both over-praised & unduly disparaged.
Our joint love to you both, dear friends. | W. S.
ACS Princeton University
To Benjamin Burgess Moore, September 17, 1898
c/o Miss Rea | The Columbia Literary Agency | 9 Mill Street | Conduit St. | London | 17: Sept: 98
My dear Mr. Moore
Prolonged absence must be my excuse for not writing to you sooner to send you my grateful thanks for all the trouble you have so kindly taken on my behalf. I will write to you again as soon as I hear from Mr. Lamson, to whom I wrote at once. I send you a copy of last week’s Literature, containing a short story of mine. If you can’t get Good Words in America (September number) let me know, and I will get a copy and send to you. It contains “The Wells of Peace.” The new issue of the Dome (Oct.) will also have two short poems by me.83
Meanwhile in great haste, | Believe me | Most cordially yours, | Fiona Macleod
ALS Huntington Library
To Edmund Clarence Stedman, [September 28, 1898]
30 Greencroft Gardens | South Hampstead, | London
For the birthday! I have written it to reach you on morning of the 8th!
My everdear Poet & Friend
Illness — followed by heavy work, & latterly a big exigent writing commission in Holland, for “Cosmopolis” etc. — are responsible for much, including a necessarily more brief note now, for I have hours & hours of work to do yet — But however busy I have never yet & I hope never will let the time go past without sending you my deep & true affection, my comradely greetings, & my homage too, to you on the occasion of your birthday. Dear Edmund of the Bays, may your new year be one of better health & more peace & rest than you have had of late — & may in all ways all things go well with you. If the love & loyal devotion of one of your truest friends on this side the Atlantic — & indeed, on my part, I will yield to no one! — can count for anything. Then at least one good influence goes to the making of a happy new year.
I had a very wonderful & happy time this summer with the dear friend of whom you know, & whose writings you admire so much — & I look to another week at least about mid-October. My love to my dear friend Mrs. Stedman. I often think of you both longingly — & “Casa Laura.”84 And Miss Mary Stuart? I wrote her a long letter (and you too!) but neither was ever acknowledged or answered! I hope she is well. She is a dear girl. She was to be married this autumn perhaps: Has it come off! If so, please send me her address. She is a friend of whom I do not wish to lose sight. In another letter I must tell you of my many literary doings — more ambitious now. (In magazine way, see Fortnightly for August, etc. etc. Also Cosmopolis in Nov. — am now writing for all the big mags here and U.S.A.).
Lovingly your friend, | Will | (to others, | William Sharp)
ALS Columbia University Library
To Theodore Watts-Dunton [? Early October, 1898]
[E. A. S. printed (Memoir, pp. 302–3) a letter from Theodore Watts-Dunton to “My Dear Sharp” dated October 19, 1898, which is a response to letter he had recently received from Sharp. That letter has not surfaced, but Watts-Dunton writes at some length about Aylwin, a novel which had been completed for several years and was finally about to be published late in 1898 (by Hurst and Blackett in London, and, in 1899, by Dodd, Mead and Company in New York). Of that novel, which chronicles the passionate and ultimately spiritualistic love of two Romany (Gypsy) men for the girls of their dreams, Watts-Dunton wrote to Sharp: “Although it is of course primarily a love-story, and, as such, will be read by the majority of readers, it is intended to be the pronouncement of something like a new gospel — the gospel of love as the great power which stands up and confronts a materialistic cosmogony.” Watts-Dunton sent Sharp with this letter a copy of a book of poems, The Coming of Love, which had recently been published by John Lane (London). The title poem of that volume, Watts-Dunton told Sharp, was a sequel to Aylwin, though it preceded the publication of the novel, and it more fully expressed his “gospel of love.” This idea, deriving from Blake, Shelley, and other romantic poets of the early nineteenth century, was a central theme of the Fiona Macleod writings.]
To Ernest James Oldmeadow [December, 1898]85
c/o Miss Rea
Dear Mr. Oldmeadow86
If you can use the enclosed in your January number, I will not only be glad that it would appear in The Dome but will in this instance waive the question of payment.87 The Dome is the only periodical where I would care to see this poem, which of necessity must appeal only to the few. It will appear in a book which I hope to issue early in the Spring.
With cordial regards, | Sincerely yours, | Fiona Macleod
ALS National Library of Scotland
To [Dora Sigerson Shorter,88 December, 1898]
For you, high hopes — and for you and yours Bliadha mhath ur!
Fiona Macleod
P.S. In an article in the forthcoming (Jan 7) number of The Fortnightly89 on what I take to be the true significance of the so-called Celtic movement, and on certain representative writers, I have had great pleasure in saying how much I enjoy your work, tho’ unavoidably (when proofs come) with less detail and quotation than what was in my overlong original.
Fiona Macleod
ACS University of Texas, Austin
To Catherine Ann Janvier, December 20, 1898
The House of Dreams90 | 20th Dec., 1898
… It has been a memorable time here. I have written some of my best work — including two or three of the new things for The Dominion of Dreams — viz. “The Rose of Flame”, “Honey of the Wild Bees”, and “The Secrets of the Night.”91
What a glorious day it has been. The most beautiful I have ever seen at Pettycur I think. Cloudless blue sky, clear exquisite air tho’ cold, with a marvelous golden light in the afternoon. Arthur’s Seat, the Crags and the Castle and the 14 ranges of the Pentlands all clear-cut as steel, and the city itself visible in fluent golden light. The whole coast-line purple blue, down to Berwick law and the Bass Rock, and the Isle of May 16 miles out in the north sea.
And now I listen to the gathering of the tidal waters under the stars. There is an infinite solemnity — a hush, something sacred and wonderful. A benediction lies upon the world. Far off I hear the roaming wind. Thoughts and memories crowd in on me. Here I have lived and suffered — here I have touched the heights — here I have done my best. And now, here, I am going through a new birth.
“Sic itur ad astral!”92
Memoir, pp. 300–01