THE SPORT OF CHANCE

Shelley

In the summer of 1885 we went to Scotland and looked forward to an idyllic month on West Loch Tarbert. While staying with Mr. Pater in Oxford my husband had seen the advertisement of a desirable cottage to be let furnished, with service, and garden stocked with vegetables. He knew the neighbourhood to be lovely, the attraction was great, so we took the cottage for August, and in due time carried our various MSS. and work to the idyllic spot. Beautiful the surroundings were indeed:—An upland moor sloping to the loch, with its opposite hilly shore thickly wooded. The cottage was simplicity itself in its appointments, but—the garden was merely a bit of railed-in grass field destitute of plants; the vegetables consisted of a sack of winter potatoes quite uneatable, and the only service that the old woman owner would give was to light the fires and wash up the dishes and black our boots. Everything else devolved on me, for help I could get nowhere and though my husband’s intentions and efforts in that direction were admirable, their practical qualities ended there! Yet to all the drawbacks we found compensation in the loveliness of the moorland, the peace of the solitude, and in the magnificent sunsets. One sunset I remember specially. We had gone for a wander westward. The sun was setting behind the brown horizon-line of the moor, and the sky was aflame with its glow. Suddenly we heard the sound of the pipes, sighing a Lament. We stopped to listen. The sound came nearer, and we saw walking over the brow of the upland an old man with bag-pipes and streamers outlined against the orange sky. We drew aside into a little hollow. As he neared we saw he was gray haired, his bonnet and clothes were old and weatherworn. But in his face was a rapt expression as he played to himself and tramped across the moor, out of the sunset toward the fishing village that lay yonder in the cold evening light.

The summer was a wet one, and shortly after our return to town the poet developed disquieting rheumatic symptoms. Nevertheless we were both hard at work with the reviewing of pictures and books, and among other things he was projecting a monograph on Shelley. It was about this time I think that he decided to compete for a prize of £100 offered by the Editor of The People’s Friend for a novel suited to the requirements of that weekly, and these requirements of course dictated the sensational style of story. It was my husband’s one attempt to write a novel in three volumes. He did not gain the prize but the story ran serially through The People’s Friend, and was afterward published in 1887 by Messrs. Hurst and Blackett. The scene is laid in Scotland and in Australia, with a Prologue dealing with Cornwall, where he had once spent a few days in order to act as best man to one of his fellow-passengers on the sailing ship that brought him back from Australia.

The following Review from The Morning Post and letter from our poet-friend Mathilde Blind will give an idea of the style and defects of the novel:

“The many who have the mental courage to allow that they prefer the objective to the subjective novel may pass some delightful hours in the perusal of Mr. Sharp’s ‘The Sport of Chance.’ It has prim facie an undeniable advantage to start with, i. e. it is unlike almost anything hitherto written in the shape of a novel in three volumes. Slightly old-fashioned, the author’s manner is simple and earnest, while he shows much skill in unravelling the tangled skein of a complicated plot. He deals also in sensationalism, but this is of a peculiar kind, and it rarely violates the canons of probability. To southerners his highly-coloured pictures of Highland peasant life, with their accompaniments of visions and second sight, may savour of exaggeration, but not so to those whose youth has been past amidst similar surroundings. Many episodes of the shipwrecks of ‘The Fair Hope’ and ‘The Australasian,’ are as effective as the best of those written by authors who make a specialty of ‘Tales of the Sea.’ Hew Armitage’s ‘quest,’ in Australia, is related with graphic force. The descriptions of the natural features of the country, of life in the bush, and at the outlying settlements, are all stamped with the vivid fidelity that is one of the great merits of the book. Charles Lamb, alias Cameron, is a singular conception. Too consistently wicked, perhaps, to escape the reproach of being a melo-dramatic villain, his misdeeds largely contribute to the interest of this exciting novel.”

Nov. 6, 1888.

Dear William,

... Your “Sport of Chance” has helped me to while away the hours and certainly you have crammed sensation enough into your three volumes to furnish forth a round dozen or so. The opening part seemed to me very good, especially the description of the storm off the Cornish coast, and the mystery which gradually overclouds Mona’s life, but her death and the advent of a new set of characters seems to me to cut the story in two, while the sensational incidents are piled on like Ossa on Olympus. What seemed best to me, and also most enjoyable to my taste at least, are the personal reminiscences which I recognised in the voyage out to Australia and the descriptions of its scenery, full of life and freshness. Most of all I liked the weird picture of the phosphorescent sea with its haunting spectral shapes. You have probably seen something of the kind and ought to have turned it into a poem; if there had been a description of some scene like it in your last volume I should doubtless remember it.

With best love to Lillie,

Your sincere friend,

Mathilde Blind.

The opening of the new year 1886—from which we hoped much—was unpropitious. A wet winter and long hours of work told heavily on my husband, whose ill-health was increased by the enforced silence of his “second self” for whose expression leisure was a necessary condition. In a mood of dejection induced by these untoward circumstances he sent the following birthday greeting to his friend Eric S. Robertson:

46 Talgarth Road, W.

My Dear Friend,

Yours ever, my dear Eric,

W. S.

TO ERIC SUTHERLAND ROBERTSON
(On his birthday, 18: 2: 86)

I

Already in the purple-tinted woods
The loud-voiced throstle calls—sweet echoings
Down leafless aisles that dream of bygone springs:

Already towards their northern solitudes

The fieldfares turn, and soaring high, wheel broods
Of wild swans with a clamour of swift wings:
A tremor of new life moves through all things

And earth regenerate thrills with joyous moods.

Let not spring’s breath blow vainly past thine heart,
Dear friend: for Time grows ruinously apace:
Yon tall white lily in its holy grace

The winds will draggle soon: for an unseen dart
Moves ever hither and thither through each place,

Nor know we when or how our lives ’twill part.

II

A little thing it is indeed to die:
God’s seal to sanctify the soul’s advance—
Or silence, and a long enfevered trance.

But no slight thing is it—ere the last sigh

Leaves the tired heart, ere calm and passively
The worn face reverent grows, fades the dim glance—
To pass away and pay no recompense

To Life, who hath given to us so gloriously.

Not so for thee—within whose heart lie deep
As ingots ‘neath the waves, thoughts true and fair.
Nor ever let thy soul the burden bear,

Of having life to live yet choosing sleep:
Yea even if thine the dark and slippery stair,

Better to toil and climb than wormlike creep.

In the early spring my husband was laid low with scarlet fever and phlebitis. Recovery was slow, and at the press view of the Royal Academy he caught a severe chill; the next day he was in the grip of a prolonged attack of rheumatic fever. For many days his life hung in the balance.

During much of the suffering and tedium of those long weeks the sick man passed in a dream-world of his own; for he had the power at times of getting out of or beyond his normal consciousness at will. At first he imagined himself the owner of a gipsy travelling-van, in which he wandered over the to him well-known and much-loved solitudes of Argyll, resting where the whim dictated and visiting his many fisher and shepherd friends. Later, during the long crises of the illness, though unconscious often of all material surroundings, he passed through other keen inner phases of consciousness, through psychic and dream experiences that afterward to some extent were woven into the Fiona Macleod writings, and, as he believed, were among the original shaping influences that produced them. For a time he felt himself to be practically dead to the material world, and acutely alive “on the other side of things” in the greater freer universe. He had no desire to return, and rejoiced in his freedom and greater powers; but, as he described it afterward, a hand suddenly restrained him: “Not yet, you must return.” And he believed he had been “freshly sensitised” as he expressed it; and knew he had—as I had always believed—some special work to do before he could again go free.

The illusion of his wanderings with the travelling van was greatly helped by the thoughtfulness of his new friend Ernest Rhys who brought him branches of trees in early leaf from the country. These I placed upright in the open window; and the fluttering leaves not only helped his imagination but also awoke “that dazzle in the brain,” as he always described the process which led him over the borderland of the physical into the “gardens” of psychic consciousness or, as he called it, “into the Green Life.”

At the end of ten weeks he left his bed. As soon as possible I took him to Northbrook, Micheldever, the country house of our kind friends Mr. and Mrs. Henryson Caird, who put it at our disposal for six weeks. Slowly his strength came back in these warm summer days, as he lay contentedly in the sunshine. But as he began to exert himself new disquieting symptoms developed. His heart proved to be badly affected and his recovery was proportionately retarded.

The Autumn found us face to face with problems hard to solve, how to meet not only current expenses but also serious debt, with a limited stock of precarious strength. At the moment of blackest outlook the invalid received a generous friendly letter from Mr. Alfred Austin enclosing a substantial cheque. The terms in which it was offered were as kindly sympathetic as the thought which prompted them. He had, he said, once been helped in a similar way with the injunction to repay the loan not to the donor but to some one else who stood in need. Therefore he now offered it with the same conditions attached. During the long months of illness it had been a constant source of regret to us that we were unable to see Philip Marston or to read to him as was our habit. We were anxious, too, for in the autumn he had been prostrated by a heat stroke, followed by an epileptic seizure. At last, on Christmas day 1886 William Sharp went to see him and spent an hour or so with him. As he tells in his prefatory Memoir to Marston’s “Song-tide” (Canterbury Poets): “He was in bed and I was shocked at the change—as nearly a year had elapsed since I had seen him I found the alteration only too evident.... Throughout the winter his letters had been full of foreboding: ‘You will miss me, perhaps, when I am gone, but you need not mourn for me. I think few lives have been so deeply sad as mine, though I do not forget those who have blessed it.’”

This was the keynote to each infinitely sad letter.

“On the last day of January 1887 paralysis set in, and for fourteen days, he lay speechless as well as sightless, but at last he was asleep and at peace. Looking at his serene face on the day ere the coffin lid enclosed it, where something lovelier than mortal sleep subtly dwelt, there was one at least of his friends who forgot all sorrow in a great gladness for the blind poet—now no longer blind, if he be not overwhelmed in a sleep beyond our ken. At such a moment the infinite satisfaction of Death seems beautiful largess for the turmoil of a few ‘dark disastrous years.’”

The Spring of 1887 brought a more kindly condition of circumstances to us, in the form of good steady work. Mr. Eric Robertson had then been selected to fill the vacant chair of Literature and Logic at the University of Lahore, and, on accepting, he suggested to Mr. Joseph Henderson that William Sharp should be his successor as Editor of the “Literary Chair” in The Young Folk’s Paper—the boys’ weekly paper for which Robert Louis Stevenson had written his “Treasure Island.” “The Literary Olympic” was a portion of the paper devoted to the efforts in prose and verse of the Young Folk who wished to exercise their budding literary talents. Their papers were examined, criticised; a few of the most meritorious were printed, prefaced by an article of criticism and instruction written by their Editor and critic. The work itself was congenial; and the interest was heightened by the fact that it put us into touch with the youth of all classes, in England, Scotland, and Ireland, in town and country, alike. Several of the popular novelists and essayists of to-day received the chief early training in the “Olympic.” Many were the confidential personal letters to the unknown editor, who was imagined by one or two young aspirants to be white-haired and venerable. This work, moreover, could be done at home, by us both; and it brought a reliable income, a condition of security hitherto unknown to us, which proved an excellent tonic to the delicate Editor.

In August a letter came from Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton suggesting the possibility that an original poem, The Ode to Mother Carey’s Chicken contributed to my little anthology Sea-Music, should be re-printed in The Young Folk’s Paper:

In the early part of the year “The Sport of Chance” had run serially through The People’s Friend. Its success incited the author to write a sensational boys’ story for The Young Folk’s Paper; and accordingly in the Xmas number of that weekly appeared the first installment of “Under the Banner of St. James,” a tale of the conquest of Peru. This story was followed at intervals by others such as “The Secret of the Seven Fountains,” “Jack Noel’s Legacy,” “The Red Riders.” Although the weaving of these sensational plots was a great enjoyment to the writer of them, he at no time regarded them as other than useful pot-boilers.

A letter written about this time to the American poet E. C. Stedman led to a life-long friendship with him of so genial a nature that, on becoming personally acquainted in New York two years later, the older poet laughingly declared that he adopted the younger man from across the seas as his “English son.”

In an article on “British Song” in The Victorian Poets, the Scottish poet was referred to as a Colonial. He wrote to the author to point out the mistake “since you are so kindly going to do me the honour of mention in your forthcoming supplementary work, I should not like to be misrepresented.”

In replying Mr. Stedman explained that no great harm has been done:

Something in your work made me suspect that, despite your Australian tone, etc., you did not hail (as we Yankees say) from the Colonies. So you will find in my new vol. of Victorian Poets that I do not place you with the Colonial poets, but just preceding them, and I have a reference to your Rosetti volume. The limited space afforded by my supplementary chapter has made my references to the new men altogether too brief and inadequate. Of this I am seriously aware, but trust that you and others will take into consideration the scope and aim of the chapter. You see I have learned that “The Human Inheritance” is scarce! Of course I shall value greatly a copy from the author’s hands. And I count among the two pleasant things connected with my prose work—my earlier and natural metier being that of a poet—such letters as yours, which put me into agreeable relations with distant comrades-in-arms.

Beginning, as you have, with the opening of a new literary period, and with what you have already done, I am sure you have a fine career before you—that will extend long after your American Reviewer has ceased to watch and profit by its course.

Very sincerely yours,

Edmund C. Stedman.

A few months later Mr. Stedman wrote again:

New York, March 27, 1888.

My dear Sharp,

Let me thank you heartily, if somewhat tardily, for your very handsome and magnanimous review of the Victorian Poets. It breathes the spirit of fairness—and even generosity—throughout. You have been more than “a little blind” to my faults, and to my virtues most open-eyed and “very kind” indeed. I am sufficiently sure of my own purpose to believe that you have ground for perceiving that the spirit of my major criticisms is essential, rather than merely “technical.” I look more to the breadth and imagination of the poet than to minute details—though a stickler for natural melody and the lasting canons of art. The real value of the book lies, of course, in the chapters on some of the elder poets. You are quite right in pointing out the impossibility of correct proportion in the details of the last chapter. It is added to give more completeness to the work as a whole. For the same reason, the earlier chapters on “The General Choir” were originally introduced; but in them I knew my ground better, and could point out with more assurance the tendencies of the various “groups.” But I write merely to say that I am heartily satisfied with your criticism, and grateful for it; and that I often read your other reviews with advantage—and shall watch your career, already so fruitful, with great interest. A man who comes down to first principles and looks at things broadly, as you are doing, is sure in the end to be a man of mark.

Very faithfully yours,

Edmund C. Stedman.

One desirable result of this good fortune was a change of residence to a higher part of the town, where the air was purer, and access to green fields easier. To this end in the Spring of 1887 we took a little house for three years in Goldhurst Terrace, South Hampstead. As it was numbered 17a, much annoyance was caused as our letters frequently were delivered at No. 17. A name therefore had to be found, and we dubbed our new home Wescam, a name made up of the initials of my husband, myself and our friend Mrs. Caird whose town house was within two minutes’ walk of us. There was a sunny study for the invalid on the ground floor, to obviate as much as possible the need of going up and down stairs. The immediate improvement in his health from the higher air and new conditions was so marked that we had every reason to hope it would before many months be practically re-established.

The most important undertaking after the long illness was the monograph on Shelley written for Great Writers’ Series (Walter Scott) and published in the autumn of 1887. It was a work of love, for Shelley had been the inspiring genius of his youth, the chief influence in his verse till he knew Rossetti. He was in sympathy with much of Shelley’s thought: with his hatred of rigid conventionality, of the tyranny of social laws; with his antagonism to existing marriage and divorce laws, with his belief in the sanctity of passion when called forth by high and true emotion. He exclaimed that

“It is my main endeavour in this short life of Shelley to avoid all misstatement and exaggeration; to give as real a narrative of his life from the most reliable sources as lies within my power; to recount without detailed criticism and as simply and concisely as practicable, the record of his poetic achievements. To this end I shall chiefly rely on anecdote and explanatory detail, or poems and passages noteworthy for their autobiographical or idiosyncratic value, and on indisputable facts.”

He proposed merely to give a condensation of all really important material; and based his monograph mainly on Professor Dowden’s memorable work (then recently published). Many statements written by William Sharp about Shelley may be quoted as autobiographic of himself. For instance: “From early childhood he was a mentally restless child. Trifles unnoticed by most children seem to have made keen and permanent impression on him—the sound of wind, the leafy whisper of trees, running water. The imaginative faculties came so early into play, that the unconscious desire to create resulted in the invention of weird tales sometimes based on remote fact in the experience of more or less weird hallucinations.”

Or again: “The fire of his mind for ever consuming his excitable body, his swift and ardent emotions, his over keen susceptibilities all combined to increase the frailty of his physical health.” Or this in particular: “He did not outgrow his tendency to invest every new and sympathetic correspondent (and I would add, friend) with lives of ideal splendour.”

And in explanation of each idealization appearing to him “as the type of that ideal Beauty which had haunted his imagination from early boyhood,” he adds: “No fellow mortal could have satisfied the desire of his heart. Perhaps this almost fantastic yearning for the unattainable—this desire of the moth for the star—is the heritage of many of us. It is a longing that shall be insatiable even in death.” With Shelley he might have said of himself: “I think one is always in love with something or other; the error—and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it—consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is, perhaps, eternal.”

From the many letters the biographer received after the publication of his book I select three:

Brasenose College, Nov. 23d.

My dear Sharp,

I am reading your short life of Shelley with great pleasure and profit. Many thanks for your kindness in sending it. It seems to me that with a full, nay! an enthusiastic, appreciation of Shelley and his work, you unite a shrewdness and good sense rare in those who have treated this subject. And then your book is pleasant and effective, in contrast to a French book on Shelley of which I read reluctantly a good deal lately. Your book leaves a very definite image on the brain.

With sincere kind regards,

Very truly yours,

Walter Pater.

Cimiez, prÈs Nice.

22d Dec., 1887.

My dear Friend,

Ever yours,

Mathilde Blind.

Box Hill (Dorking),

Feb. 13, 1888.

Dear Mr. Sharp,

I have read your book on Shelley, and prefer it, matched with the bulky. Putting out of view Matthew Arnold’s very lofty lift of superterrestrial nose over the Godwin nest, one inclines to agree with him about our mortal business of Shelley. We shall be coming next to medical testimony, with expositions. You have said just enough, and in the right tones. Yesterday a detachment of the Sunday tramps under Leslie Stephen squeezed at the table in the small dining-room you know, after a splendid walk over chalk and sand. When you are in the mood to make one of us, give me note of warning, and add to the pleasure by persuading your wife to come with you.

And tell her that this invitation would be more courtly were I addressing her directly.

I am,

Very truly yours,

George Meredith.