Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu (Illustrated), page 869
Think how you found me;
Dreams come around me —
The dew of my childhood, and life’s morning beam;
Now I sleep by the roadside, a wretch all in rags.
My heart that sang merrily when I was young,
Swells up like a billow and bursts in despair;
And the wreck of my hopes on sweet memory flung,
And cries on the air,
Are all that is left of the dream.
Wirrasthrue!
My father and mother,
The priest, and my brother —
Not a one has a good word for you.
But I can’t part you, darling, their preaching’s all vain;
You’ll burn in my heart till these thin pulses stop;
And the wild cup of life in your fragrance I’ll drain
To the last brilliant drop.
Then oblivion will cover
The shame that is over,
The brain that was mad, and the heart that was sore;
Then, beautiful witch,
I’ll be found — in a ditch,
With your kiss on my cold lips, and never rise more.
SONG: THE AUTUMN LEAF WAS FALLING
The autumn leaf was falling
At midnight from the tree,
When at her casement calling,
“I’m here, my love,” cried he.
‘Come down and mount behind me,
And rest your little head,
And in your white arms wind me,
Before that I be dead.
“You’ve stolen my heart by magic,
I’ve kissed your lips in dreams;
Our wooing, wild and tragic,
Has been in ghostly gleams.
The wondrous love I bear you
Has made one life of twain,
And it will bless or scare you,
In deathless peace or pain.
“Our dreamland shall be glowing,
If you my bride will be
To darkness both are going,
Unless you ride with me.
Come now, and mount behind me,
And rest your little head,
And in your white arms wind me,
Before that I be dead.”
MEMORY
One wild and simple bugle sound,
Breathed o’er Killarney’s magic shore,
Awakes sweet floating echoes round
When that which made them is no more.
So slumber in the human breast
Wild echoes that will sweetly thrill
Through memory’s vistas when the voice
That waked them first for aye is still.
Oh! memory, though thy records tell
Full many a tale of grief and folly,
Of mad excess, of hope decayed,
Of dark and cheerless melancholy.
Yet, memory, to me thou art
The dearest of the gifts of mind,
For all the joys that touch my heart
Are joys that I have left behind.
THE STREAM
When moonlight falls on wave and wimple,
And silvers every circling dimple,
That onward, onward sails:
When fragrant hawthorns wild and simple
Lend perfume to the gales,
When the pale moon in heaven abiding,
O’er midnight mists and mountains riding,
Shines on the river smoothly gliding
Through quiet dales —
I wander on in solitude,
Charmed by the chiming music rude
Of streams that fret and flow,
For by that eddying stream she stood,
On such a night I trow:
For her the thorn its breath was lending,
On this same tide her eye was bending,
And with its voice her voice was blending
Long, long ago.
Wild stream! I walk by thee once more,
I see thy hawthorns dim and hoar,
I hear thy waters moan,
And night winds sigh from shore to shore
With hushed and hollow tone;
But breezes on their light way winging,
And all thy waters’ heedless singing,
No more to me are gladness bringing —
I am alone.
Years after years, their swift way keeping,
Like sere leaves down thy current sweeping,
Are lost for aye, and sped —
And Death the wintry soil is heaping
As fast as flowers are shed.
And she who wandered by my side,
And breathed enchantment o’er thy tide,
That makes thee still my friend and guide —
And she is dead.
A DOGGREL IN A DORMANT-WINDOW
Among the gray roofs nooked,
As Chronos in the skies,
Red chimneys, old and crook’d,
Like headstones round me rise.
The chimneys, crook’d and old,
My neighbours in the air,
Like gods of dingy gold,
Bend sadly here and there.
The crows to roost returning
In their misty woods below —
The hill-tops dimly burning
In the sun’s refracted glow —
Like purple shadows sailing
Across the sea-green sky,
Like far waves hoarsely wailing
Call dimly as they fly.
My senses, sadly dreaming,
Just hear and see them fly,
Like bygone shadows streaming
Along pale memory’s sky.
From the gray tower with its corbels,
And its belfry arching fair,
The mellow curfew warbles
Its old tune on the air;
It sails above me welling
Like long soft summer waves,
Still quivering on and swelling
Across the village graves.
My lattice open flies,
The dewy evening air,
Fresh from the starry skies,
Just stirs my silvered hair.
Come forth, my graceful pipe,
My halfpenny pipe of clay,
With Latachia ripe
We’ll wile the hour away.
Then musical by space,
Up from the gloaming street
Float sounds and songs apace,
And random prattle sweet —
Bold fellows laughing boldly
With soft-tongued maidens near,
Old people prating oldly,
And children’s voices clear.
And in their faint gradations,
While changeless stars gleam o’er us,
I hear three generations
All chiming in one chorus.
The twilight deepens fast,
My pipe grows like a star,
Or a distant smithy’s blast,
Or a lighthouse flash from afar.
A lonely man am I,
In my dormant-window thinking,
So lowly, and so high,
The dreamy vapour drinking.
The vapour hangs and dozes,
And the stars no more I see;
The opening film discloses
A loved pale face to me.
The sad face smiling there,
The young face as of yore,
Inexorably fair,
To speak or change no more.
The brown hair now is gray,
Of him you loved, but to
Your lovely shadow years away
His lonely heart beats true.
And now my pipe is out,
I drop it in the weeds,
It served its little bout,
And quietude succeeds.
And when my glow is o’er,
In ashes quenched my fire,
When its fragrance is no more
And spark and smoke expire;
O’er me may some one say,
As I, of you to-day,
Beneath the nettles and the flowers
Where lies my worn-out clay;.
He did in his allotted hours —
What fellows sometimes shirk —
In this enormous world of ours,
His halfpenny-worth of work.
The Criticism
A FORGOTTEN CREATOR OF GHOSTS: JOSEP
H SHERIDAN LE FANU by Edna Kenton
“He foresaw that the proprietors of Stayes would do him very well. In his bedroom at a country house he always looked first at the books on the shelf and the prints on the walls; he considered that these things gave a sort of measure of the culture and even of the character of his hosts. Though he had but little time to devote to them on this occasion a cursory inspection assured him that if the literature, as usual, was mainly American and humorous, the art consisted neither of the water-color studies of the children nor of “goody” engravings.... There was the customary novel of Mr. Le Fanu for the bedside; the ideal reading in a country house for the hours after midnight. Oliver Lyon could scarcely forbear beginning it while he buttoned his shirt.” From “The Liar,” by Henry James.
To a searcher in the barren field of Le Fanuana, who had run through innumerable indexes of literary “Histories” and “Studies” on the steadily diminishing chance of finding anywhere even bare mention of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, it was almost a shock to come upon a sturdy little row of figures following his name in one of the volumes of The Cambridge History of English Literature. Was it that in this dignified compendium of criticism he was at last recognized, “revived”? But no! Only in the light of the ever-projected Brontës did he shine on a few of their particular pages.
Straight into Charlotte Bronte’s centenary year — 1916, when this thirteenth volume of The Cambridge History was issued — Professor A. A. Jack, of the University of Aberdeen, who wrote the Brontë chapter, shot a little shell which somehow failed to explode. With a theory of his own regarding the “sources” of Jane Eyre, he suggested that “the tale of actual and intended bigamy which Sheridan Le Fanu contributed to the Dublin University Magazine in 1839” might have been at once’ the source of the famous “plot” and the source of Thackeray’s vague disturbance over Jane Eyre’s reminiscent quality.
It is Le Fanu’s odd fate that his name should pass. Suggestions wilder than this have sufficed to rally the Brontëans for annihilation of the unfortunate suggestor; witness that naïve victim of Irish amiability, The Rev. William Wright, who looked up The Brontës in Ireland, or that unlucky prey of the deadly parallel who “proved”, that Branwell Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights. But Professor Jack’s stimulating chapter on Le Fanu’s possible influence has passed unchallenged. Today Wuthering Heights is more sacrosanct than Jane Eyre. Yet, if he had gone further, as he might have, and had suggested probable origins in The Purcell Papers for Emily Bronte’s “greatest villain in fiction”, Le Fanu’s predestined obscurity would doubtless have worked to hush even that profane pronouncement into silence. However, a book might be written (let us hope it will not be) on the correspondences between The Purcell Papers of Le Fanu and the Brontë novels.
Surely the unmitigated famelessness of Sheridan Le Fanu can be ranked among the outstanding curiosities of literature. One of the literal “best sellers” of the 1860-188o’s, he has disappeared even from cursory addenda to Victorian literary history. Author of some of the really remarkable ghost stories of our literature, he is remembered today only by the “occultists” — the people, by the way, who really recognize a really ghostly tale. You will find his “Green Tea”, his “Carmilla” and his “The Room in the Dragon Volonté” referred to still in occult literature. But if you should glance through Miss Dorothy Scarborough’s exhaustive work, The Supernatural in Fiction, you will search in vain for even passing mention of Sheridan Le Fanu as a craftsman of parts in the delicate art of transferring shadows to the printed page; and this omission from her extensive survey is high evidence of how completely he has passed away from the literary earth. Curious are the fates of little books and little writers — most curious of all sometimes when they are called great. Le Fanu was not a great writer, but he wrote a few great ghost stories. And even as the “sensation” author of Uncle Silas, The House by the Churchyard, Checkmate and Wylder’s Hand, to mention no others of a list so famous fifty years ago, his unqualified passing within a half-century’s short span is hardly comprehensible.
Only one biographer — and he a personal friend — has tried to keep his name alive. Alfred Perceval Graves wrote Le Fanu’s obituary in 1873 for the Dublin University Magazine which Le Fanu had owned. He wrote the preface for The Purcell Papers, the legends of the “wonderful priest of Drumcoolagh,” collected from the old Dublin University Magazine files of 1838-1839 and published in 1880. In 1886 he prefaced the posthumous Poems, and in the ‘nineties assisted Le Fanu’s son, Richard Brinsley Sheridan Le Fanu, in editing a short-lived series of reprints of the father’s work with illustrations by the son. In 1904 Mr. Graves published another edition of the Poems with another preface and, as recently as 1913, in his Irish Literary and Musical Studies, he gave many pages to what is probably his final tribute to his friend — a study pathetically reminiscent of all his others. He had so early said it all. Only a brother, William Le Fanu, in his autobiography, has contributed further to the picture of this charming Irish gentleman, littérateur, raconteur and occultist of old Dublin.
In the Lives of the multitudinous Sheridans we find him now and then. Contemporary of all the great Victorians (he lived from 1814 to 1873) his blood was that of some of the greatest English lights, social and otherwise,’ of his age. Through his grandmother, Alicia, daughter of “Tom” and Frances Sheridan and sister of Richard Brinsley and Elizabeth, he was direct descendant of a family whose members have kept unbroken claim to fame for two hundred years. The Sheridan connection was double, for the two Sheridan sisters married two Le Fanu brothers. In Le Fanu’s Merrion Square home in Dublin hung a dozen Sheridan portraits, all his by inheritance; “Tom” Sheridan, actor, father of the brood; Frances Sheridan, author of the Eighteenth Century Memoirs of Miss Sidney Biddulph, with their children and their children’s children. Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s granddaughters, the famous “Sheridan-Sisters” of London when Victoria was its girl-queen, were cousins of the Dublin Sheridan-Le Fanus — Caroline, the Hon. Mrs. Norton, Georgiana, loveliest of all the Duchesses of Somerset, and Helen, Lady Dufferin. The family ramifications stretched back and forth across the Irish Sea, and the whole family, all sides of it, wrote, from the old mother lioness down.
No wonder, then, that Sheridan Le Fanu scribbled from his earliest years. His métier was the mysterious, when it wais not the ghostly and the lurid, and for a score of years, from the 1860’s on, he was read enormously on both sides of the Atlantic, for he was issued in America as fast as he was published in England. But, famous contemporary of other famous “mystery” writers — Collins, Braddon et al. — their names remain on any roll call of the Victorians while his is literally obliterated. His one-time vogue is noted by a no less meticulous recorder of his time than Henry James. In “The Liar”, one of three tales published in 1889 under the title of A London Life, Mr. James remarks that, upon his hero’s arrival at Stayes to paint Sir David’s portrait, he looked, for omens and signs, at the pictures and the books, and they promised well: “There was the customary novel of Mr. Le Fanu for the bedside; the ideal reading in a country house for the hours after midnight.”
For Le Fanu, better than most of his lurid school, could “write”; more than others of his school, with the exception of Bulwer-Lytton, he was “occult”; his backgrounds were distinguished, they were thick with medieval lore and his pages were whimsical as well as lurid.
He had, however, a special gift for dealing with luridities. He was a real forerunner of the “psychic horror school” which Arthur Machen later on was to proceed to make his own and, after Machen, Blackwood. Why Le Fanu’s “Dr. Hesselius,” whose “case histories” furnish the material for the ghostly tales of In a Glass Darkly, does not lead the long modern list of “psychic doctors” in fiction is another mysterious mischance. His “Notes” on maladies of the mind were pioneer excursions into a field much over-cultivated today; he is the true father of Machen’s Dr. Raymond, of Blackwood’s Dr. Silence, even of that great degreeless, lay scientist, Mr. Sherlock Holmes himself.’
In his Victorian Novelists (1906), Louis Benjamin includes Sheridan Le Fanu, but all mistakenly devotes his rather shallow, critical attention to the “sensation” novels. This irritating study, the later Graves essays and the disregarded niche Professor Jack hollowed for him beside the Brontë sisters in The Cambridge History of English Literature are the only Twentieth-Century recognitions of Le Fanu’s life and works that a tolerably comprehensive search has salvaged from the modern flood of printed matter. Others may have been missed, but his exclusion from Miss Scarborough’s exhaustive research into supernatural fiction, Le Fanu’s veritable field, is fair evidence that Sheridan Le Fanu, for all modern cognizance, might never have lived at all.
II
If, in that pathetic list of Charlotte Bronte’s ‘ reading sources for 1829, set down in Mrs. Gaskell’s extraordinary Life, the old Dublin University Magazine had been listed with Blackwood’s, or if it had figured in a later catalogue of the Haworth parsonage library, this at least can be asserted fairly — Professor Jack would not have been the first to suggest, in 1916, The Purcell Papers as a plot source for fane Eyre. Long before her centenary year the extent of Charlotte Brontë’s indebtedness to Sheridan Le Fanu would have been the subject of more than one profound opus. It is inexplicable, however, that Professor Jack’s theory of sources stops short with one of The Purcell Papers and one of the Brontë novels; for, the further the comparison is carried, the stronger his case becomes. But, midway in his chapter on the Brontës, he springs, with disconcerting suddenness, a merely partial “case”. He quotes a letter of Charlotte’s to Mr. Williams in the autumn of 1847, that one which refers to Thackeray’s well-known remark on the “reminiscent quality” of the Jane Eyre plot and carries her own asseveration of her belief that it was original. Then he comments as follows:
