Elizabeth A. Sharp

“ I have no words to express my delight as to Venice and its surroundings—it makes up an hundredfold for my deep disappointment as to Rome. I am in sympathy with everything here—the art, the architecture, the beauty of the city, everything connected with it, the climate, the brightness and joyousness, and most of all perhaps the glorious presence of the sea.... From the first moment, I fell passionately and irretrievably in love with Venice: I should rather be a week here than a month in Rome or even Florence: the noble city is the crown of Italy, and fit to be empress of all cities. ”

“ The Sin-Eater came in holiday week and was one of my most welcome remembrances. I have read it with deep pleasure, almost with envy; so full is it of the stuff which makes literature. It has the vitality and beauty of a rich and living imagination. The secrets of the spirit are in it, and that fellowship with the profounder experiences which gets at the heart of a race. I have not forgotten your kind words about my own work; words which gave me new heart and hope. For you are the very type of man to whose mind I should like to appeal. ”

“ Its palaces may be grander, the interiors of its churches more magnificent, its treasures of art more wonderful, but in beauty it is as far short as London is of Edinburgh. But it has one great loveliness which can never tire and which charms immeasurably—the fountains which continually and every here and there splash all day and night in the sunlight or in green grottoes in the courts of villas and palaces. I am certain that I should hate to live here—I believe it would kill me—for Rome is too old to be alive—unless indeed a new Rome entirely overshadows the past. ”

“ Another birthday has come, and I must frankly say that apart from the loss of another year, and from what the year has brought you in love and friendship and all that makes up life, it has not been to your credit. True, you have been in America and Italy and France and Scotland and England and Germany—and so have not been long settled anywhere—and true also that for a month or two you were seriously and for a few months partially ill or ‘down’—but still, after all allowances, I note not only an extraordinary indolence in effort as well as unmistakable laziness in achievement. ”

“ I had a splendid evening last night, and Rossetti read a lot more of his latest work. Splendid as his published work is, it is surpassed by what has yet to be published. The more I look into and hear his poems the more I am struck with the incomparable power and depth of his genius—his almost magical perfection and mastery of language—his magnificent spiritual strength and subtlety. He read some things last night, lines in which almost took my breath away. No sonnet-writer in the past has equalled him, and it is almost inconceivable to imagine any one doing so in the future. ”

“ Style (that is, the outer emotion that compels and the hidden life of the imagination that impels and the brooding thought that shapes and colours) should, spiritually, reflect a soul’s lineaments as faithfully as the lens of the photographer reflects the physiognomy of a man or woman. It is because I feel in you a deep instinct for beauty, a deep longing for beautiful expression and because I believe you have it in you to achieve highly in worth and beauty, that I write to you thus.... There is that Lady of Silence, the Madonna of Enigma, who lives in the heart of many women. ”

“ It is difficult to do anything here. I should like to come sometime without anything to do—without even a book to read: simply to come and dream, to re-live many of the scenes of this inexhaustible region of romance: to see in vision the coming and going of that innumerable company—from Ulysses and his wanderers, from Pythagoras and St. Peter, from that Pancrazio who had seen Christ in the flesh, from Æschylus, and Dionysius and Hiero and Gelon, from Pindar and Simonides and Theocritus, to Richard Cœur-de-Lion and Garibaldi and Lord Nelson—what a strange company!... ”

“ If I may venture a criticism it is that nature occupies more than three fourths of the Emotion of the Book, and not Humanity, and even the passion and childhood and youth, and later love and age—and all passions are painted in terms of Nature, and through her moods. It pleases me, for I care more for Nature myself when I am not pressed on by human feeling, than I do for Man, but an artist ought to love Man more than Nature, and should write about Him for his own sake. ”

“ There is no other writer whose good opinion could please me more—for I love your work, and take an endless delight in your poetry, and look to you as not only one of the rare few on whose lips is the honey of Magh Mell but as one the dark zone of whose mind is lit with the strange stars and constellations of the spiritual life. ”

“ In this book I have dealt—as I hope in all I write—only with things among which my thought has moved, searching, remembering, examining, sometimes dreaming....
It is not the night-winds in sad hearts only that I hear, or the sighing of vain fatalities: but, often rather, of an Emotion akin to that mysterious Sorrow of Eternity in love with tears, of which Blake speaks in Vala. It is at times, at least I feel it so, because Beauty is more beautiful there. It is the twilight hour in the heart, as Joy is the heart’s morning. ”

“ But, truly enough, wisdom does not lie in money making—not for the artist who cares for his work at any rate. I am tired of so much pot-boiling, such increasing bartering of literary merchandise: and wish to devote myself entirely—or as closely as the fates will permit—to work in which my heart is. I am buoyant with the belief that it is in me to do something both in prose and verse far beyond any hitherto accomplishment of mine: but to stay here longer, and let the net close more and more round me, would be fatal. ”

“ Elizabeth and I, with a young painter-friend came up here to a divine spot on the slopes of the steep and grand-shouldered Hill of Venus, bringing with us our writing and sketching materials and also fruit and wine and light luncheon. It is now about 3 p.m. and we have lain here for hours in the glorious warmth and cloudless sunglow—undisturbed by any sounds save the soft sighing of the sea far below, the fluttering of a young goatherd with his black flock on a steep across a near ravine, and the occasional passing of a muleteer or of a mountaineer with his wine-panier’d donkeys. ”

“ Because of her beauty, her strong sense of life and of the joy of life; because of her keen intuitions and mental alertness, her personality stood for him as a symbol of the heroic women of Greek and Celtic days, a symbol that, as he expressed it, unlocked new doors in his mind and put him “in touch with ancestral memories” of his race. So, for a time, he stilled the critical, intellectual mood of William Sharp to give play to the development of this new found expression of subtler emotions, towards which he had been moving with all the ardour of his nature. ”

“ It seems strange to write to you on the Festival of Samhain—the Celtic Summer-end, our Scottish Hallowe’en—here [373] on these stormy waters between Sardinia and Italy. It is so strong a gale, and the air is so inclement and damp that it is a little difficult to realise we are approaching the shores of Italy. But wild as the night is I want to send you a line on it, on this end of the old year, this night of powers and thoughts and spiritual dominion.
It was a disappointment not to get ashore at Marseilles—but the fierce gale (a wild mistral) made it impossible. ”

“ He knows that in one sense he would be flameless or at least without that ideal blend of the white and the red—without the match: and he knows that the flame is the offspring of both, that the wind has many airs in it, and that one of the most potent is that which blows from the life and mind and soul of ‘the match’—but in his heart he knows that, to all others, he and he alone is the flame, his alone both the visionary, the formative, the expressional. ”

“ As God lives, the soul dies not. What though the grave be silent, and the darkness of the Shadow become not peopled—to those eyes that can see there is light, light, light—to those ears that can hear the tumult of the disenfranchised, rejoicing. I am borne down not with the sense of annihilation, but with the vastness of life and the imminence of things spiritual. I know from something beyond and out of myself that we are now but dying to live, that there is no death, which is but as a child’s dream in a weary night. ”

“ There is a fever of the ‘green life’ in my veins—below all the ordinary littlenesses 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. ”

“ I have the memory that recalls everything in proportion and sequence. I have often written that art is memory, is in great part memory, though not necessarily a recalling of mere personal experience: and the more deeply I live the more I see that this is so....
When you write, I mean imaginatively, you must write more and more with concentrated vision. Some time ago I re-read your Four Winds of the World; much of it is finely done, and in some of it your self lives, your own accent speaks. But you have it in you to do work far more ambitious. ”

“ Or rather the more mortal part of you begins to speak, the mere person, not the god. You, as I think, should seek the delights of style in utter simplicity, in a self-effacing rhythm and language; in an expression that is like a tumbler of water rather than like a cup of wine. I think that the power of your work in the future will depend on your choosing this destiny. Certainly I am looking forward to “The Laughter of the Queen.” I thought your last prose, that pilgrimage of the soul and mind and body to the Hills of Dream promised this simple style. ”

“ To praise a poem because of its optimism is like commending a peach because it loves the sunshine, rather than because of its distinguishing bloom and savour. To urge that a poem is great because of its high message is almost as uncritical as it would be obviously absurd to aver that a postman is illustrious because of some epic or history he may carry in his bag. In a word, the first essential concern of the artist must be with his vehicle. In the instance of a poet, this vehicle is language emotioned to the white-heat of rhythm [163] . ”

“ Going by himself seemed to promise chances of complete recovery of health; the unexplored and the unknown beckoned to him with promise of excitement and adventure.
As he wrote to Mr. Stedman: “I am a student of much else besides literature. Life in all its manifestations is of passionate interest for me, and I cannot rest from incessant study and writing. Yet I feel that I am but on the threshold of my literary life. I have a life-time of ambitious schemes before me; I may perhaps live to fulfil a tenth part of them.” ”

“ I fancy one needs to be an actual poet to feel this to the full, but every one, however dim and stagnant or coldly intellectual his or her soul, must feel more or less the marvellous beauty of this wedding of the spirit of emotional thought and the spirit of language, and the child thereof—divine, perfect expression. Our language in Rossetti’s hands is more solemn than Spanish, more majestic than Latin, deeper than German, sweeter than Italian, more divine than Greek. ”

“ An older poet and comrade than you once held that place in my thoughts, but Time and Work have somehow laid the sword between us—and neither of us is to blame. I never so well obeyed Emerson’s advice to recruit our friendship (as we grow older) as when I won, I scarcely know how or why, your unswerving and ever increasing affection. In truth, again, it has been of the greatest service to me, during the most trying portion of my life—the period in which you have given me so much warmth and air—and never has it been of more worth than now you might well think otherwise. ”

“ A vast sweep of sea is before us and beneath. To the left, under the almond boughs, are the broad straits which divide Sicily from Calabria—in front, the limitless reach of the Greek sea—to the right, below, the craggy heights and Monte Acropoli of Taormina—and, beyond, the vast slope of snow-clad Etna....
I have just been reading (for the hundredth time) in Theocritus. How doubly lovely he is, read on the spot. That young shepherd fluting away to his goats at this moment might be Daphnis himself. ”

“ I regretted his indifference, and asked him, banteringly, if his dislike extended equally to the early masters of the pen and to those of the brush.
He replied: “You ask me, if I dislike the Old Masters of Poetry as much as I do those of Painting? and I reply Certainly not, but at the same time the comparison is not fair. Most of the old poets are not only poets of their time but have special beauties at the present day, and can be read with as much or almost as much pleasure now as centuries ago. Their imagination, their scope, their detail is endless. ”

“ He had chanced upon some mood of an ancient life. I write to you of these things judging that you know of them to some extent here: that your inner nature preserves the memory of old initiations, so I talk to you as a comrade on the same quest. You know too I think that these alluring visions and thoughts are of little import unless they link themselves unto our humanity. It means only madness in the end. I know people whose lamps are lit and they see wonderful things but they themselves will not pass from vision into action. ”