William Sharp (Fiona Macleod): A Memoir Compiled by His Wife Elizabeth A. Sharp

by Elizabeth A. Sharp

The 24th has the interesting entry: “Met old Charles Severn at the Italian Restaurant near Portland Road Station and had a long talk with him. He confirmed his previous statement (end of September last year) about Keats having written “The Ode to the Nightingale” under “The Spaniards on Hampstead Heath.”

September found us in Stuttgart in order that my husband should collaborate with the American novelist Blanche Willis Howard. The first days were spent in wandering about the lovely hillsides around the town, which he described to Mrs. Janvier:

Johannes Strasse 33,

3: 9: 91.

... I know that you would revel in this glowing golden heat, and in the beautiful vinelands of the South. Southern Germany in the vintage season is something to remember with joy all one’s life. Yesterday it seemed as if the world above were one vast sea of deep blue wherever a great glowing wave of light straight from the heart of the sun was flowing joyously. I revel in this summer gorgeousness, and drink in the hot breath of the earth as though it were the breath of life. Words are useless to depict the splendour of colour everywhere—the glimmer of the golden-green of the vines, the immeasurable sunfilled flowers, the masses of ripening fruit of all kinds, the hues on the hill-slopes and in the valleys, on the houses and the quaint little vineyard-cots with their slanting red roofs. In the early afternoon I went up through the orchards and vineyards on the shoulder of the Hasenberg. It was a glory of colour. Nor have I ever seen such a lovely purple bloom among the green branches—like the sky of faerieland—as in the dark-plum orchards. There was one heavily laden tree which was superb in its massy richness of fruit: it was like a lovely vision of those thunder-clouds which come and go in July dawns. The bloom on the fruit was as though the west wind had been unable to go further and had let its velvety breath and wings fade away in a soft visible death or sleep. The only sounds were from the myriad bees and wasps and butterflies: some peasants singing in the valley as they trimmed the vines: and the just audible sussurrus of the wind among the highest pines on the Hasenberg. There was the fragrance of a myriad odours from fruit and flower and blossom and plant and tree and fructifying soil—with below all that strange smell as of the very body of the living breathing world. The festival of colour was everywhere. As I passed a cottar’s sloping bit of ground within his vineyards, I saw some cabbages high up among some trailing beans, which were of the purest and most delicate blue, lying there like azure wafts from the morning sky. Altogether I felt electrified in mind and body. The sunflood intoxicated me. But the beauty of the world is always bracing—all beauty is. I seemed to inhale it—to drink it in—to absorb it at every pore—to become it—to become the heart and soul within it. And then in the midst of it all came my old savage longing for a vagrant life: for freedom from the bondage we have involved ourselves in. I suppose I was a gipsy once—and before that “a wild man o’ the woods.”

A terrific thunderstorm has broken since I wrote the above. I have rarely if ever seen such continuous lightning. As it cleared, I saw a remarkably beautiful sight. In front of my window rose a low rainbow, and suddenly from the right there was slung a bright steel-blue bolt, seemingly hurled with intent right through the arch. The next moment the rainbow collapsed in a ruin of fading splendours....

I have had a very varied, and, to use a much abused word, a very romantic life in its external as well as in its internal aspects. Life is so unutterably precious that I cannot but rejoice daily that I am alive: and yet I have no fear of, or even regret at the thought of death.... There are many things far worse than death. When it comes, it comes. But meanwhile we are alive. The Death of the power to live is the only death to be dreaded....

His Diary also testifies to his exultant mood:

Wednesday, 2:9:1891.—Another glorious day. This flood of sunshine is like new life: it is new life. I rejoice in the heat and splendour of it. It seems to get into the heart and brain, and it intoxicates with a strange kind of rapture.... How intensely one lives sometimes, even when there is little apparently to call forth quintessential emotion. This afternoon was a holiday of the soul. And yet how absolutely on such a day one realises the savage in one. I suppose I was a gipsy once: a ‘wild man’ before: a wilder beast of prey before that. We all hark back strangely at times. To-day I seemed to remember much.... What a year this has been for me: the richest and most wonderful I have known. Were I as superstitious as Polycrates I should surely sacrifice some precious thing lest the vengeful gods should say “Thou hast lived too fully: Come!...”

The following extracts from William’s Diary indicate the method of the collaboration used by the two authors: