“And there is no Evil anywhere in the Light of this creative Breath: but only, everywhere, a redeeming from Evil, a winning towards Good.”
CHAPTER XV
THE MOUNTAIN LOVERS
The Sin-Eater
It was soon evident that the noise and confused magnetism of the great City weighed disastrously on William Sharp. At the New Year, 1895, he wrote to a friend:
“London I do not like, though I feel its magnetic charm, or sorcery. I suffer here. The gloom, the streets, the obtrusion and intrusion of people, all conspire against thought, dream, true living. It is a vast reservoir of all the evils of civilised life with a climate which makes me inclined to believe that Dante came here instead of to Hades.”
The strain of the two kinds of work he was attempting to do, the immediate pressure of the imaginative work became unbearable, “the call of the sea,” imperative.
As he has related in “Earth, Fire and Water”: “It was all important for me not to leave in January, and in one way I was not ill-pleased for it was a wild winter. But one night I awoke hearing a rushing sound in the street, the sound of water. I would have thought no more of it had I not recognised the troubled sound of the tide, and the sucking and lapsing of the flow in muddy hollows. I rose and looked out. It was moonlight, and there was no water. When after sleepless hours I rose in the grey morning I heard the splash of waves, I could not write or read and at last I could not rest. On the afternoon of that day the waves dashed up against the house.”