One morning he told me that during sleep he had visited a city of psychic mechanism. In a huge building he had seen this silent mechanism at work; he had watched a force plunge into molten metal and produce a shaped vessel therefrom. He could see nothing that indicated by what power the machinery was driven. He asked his guide for explanation, and he was led along passages to a small room with many apertures in the walls, like speaking tubes. In the centre was a table, on a chair sat a man with his arm on the table, his head in his hand. Pointing to him the guide said “His thought is the motive force.”
In another dream he visited a land where there was no more war, where all men and women were equal; where humans, birds and beasts were no longer at enmity, or preyed on one another. And he was told that the young men of the land had to serve two years as missionaries to those who lived at the uttermost boundaries. “To what end?” he asked. “To cast out fear, our last enemy.” The dream is too long to quote in its entirety, for it spread over two nights, but one thing impressed him greatly. In the house of his host he was struck by the beauty of a framed painting that seemed to vibrate with rich colour. “Who painted that?” he asked. “His host smiled, “We have long ceased to use brushes and paints. That is a thought projected from the artist’s brain, and its duration will be proportionate with its truth.”
Once again he saw in waking vision those Divine Forges he had sought in childhood. On the verge of the Great Immensity that is beyond the confines of space, he saw Great Spirits of Fire standing at flaming anvils. And they lifted up the flames and moulded them on the anvils into shapes and semblances of men, and the Great Spirits took these flaming shapes and cast them forth into space, so that they should become the souls of men.
He was, as Mrs. Mona Caird has truly said of him, “almost encumbered by the infinity of his perceptions; by the thronging interests, intuitions, glimpses of wonders, beauties and mysteries which made life for him a pageant and a splendour such as is only disclosed to the soul that has to bear the torment and the revelations of genius. He had much to suffer, but in spite of that—perhaps partly because of that—he was able to bring to all a great sense of sunshine and boyish freshness, of joy in life and nature and art, and in the adventure and romance of it all, for those who knew how to dare enough to go to meet it with open hands. He gave ever the sense of new power, new thresholds, new realms. His friendship was a spiritual possession.” And though indeed, as Mr. Frank Rinder has written “there may be those inclined to censure William Sharp for his silence about Fiona Macleod, yet, probably, had the world known, ‘she’—for in thought it is always that—would have written no more. May we not remember Ossian and others who shrank from revealing to all their secret?... I can but bear testimony to the ever-ready and eager sympathy, to the sunny winsomeness, to the nobility of the soul that has passed. William Sharp was one of the most lovable, one of the most remarkable men of our time.”
And, I would add,—to quote my husband’s own words—ever, below all the stress and failure, below all the triumph of his toil, lay the beauty of his dream.
To live in beauty—which is to put into four words all the dream and spiritual effort of the soul of man.
F. M.