WILLIAM SHARP (FIONA MACLEOD) A MEMOIR COMPILED BY HIS WIFE ELIZABETH A. SHARP by ELIZABETH A. SHARP (mobi ebook reader txt) 📕

missed you there. I shall be delighted to see you here; and can give

you a bed at Brasenose, where I shall reside this term.

Thank you again for the pleasure your book has given, and will give me,

in future reading. Excuse this hurried letter, and

  Believe me,

  Very sincerely yours,

  WALTER PATER.

It had been William Sharp’s intention to rewrite his Study on Rossetti;

for in later years he was very dissatisfied with the early book, and

considered his judgment to have been immature. He had indeed arranged

certain publishing preliminaries; and he wrote the dedicatory chapter;

but the book itself was untouched save one or two opening sentences.

For this project, with many others planned by William Sharp, was laid

aside when the more intimate, the more imperative work put forward

under the pseudonym of “Fiona Macleod” began to shape itself in his

brain. In his dedication to Walter Pater (the only portion of the book

that was finished), the author explains his reasons for wishing to

write a second Study of the painter-poet. He describes the new material

available, and relates that in Rossetti’s lifetime it was planned

that a “Life should be written by Philip Bourke Marston and myself,

primarily for publication in America. Rossetti took a humorous interest

in the scheme, and often alluded to it in notes or conversation as the

Bobbies’ book (a whimsical substitute for the Boston firm of Roberts

Brothers, whom we intended to honour with our great—unwritten—work):

but nothing came of the project.... Rossetti was eager to help Marston;

so he said he was charmed with the idea, and promised to give all the

aid in his power. A week later he told me that ‘there was no good in

it,’ and that ‘it had better drop’: but, instead he suggested that _he_

should write an article upon Marston and his poetry for _Harper’s_, or

_Scribner’s_, if it were more expedient that such an article should

appear in an American periodical, or, if preferred, for some important

Quarterly here.

“But you, cognizant as you are of much of this detail, will readily

understand and agree with me when I say that no really adequate

portrait of Rossetti is likely to be given to us for many years

to come. Possibly never: for his was a nature wrought of so many

complexities, his a life developed perplexedly by such divers elements,

that he will reappear, for those who come after us, not in any one

portraiture but as an evocation from many....

“Of all that has been written of Rossetti’s genius and achievement

in poetry nothing shows more essential insight, is of more striking

and enduring worth, than the essay by yourself, included in your

stimulating and always delightful _Appreciations_. You, more than any

one, it seems to me, have understood and expressed the secret of his

charm. And though you have not written also of Rossetti the painter, I

know of no one who so well and from the first perceived just wherein

lies his innate power, his essential significance.

“Years ago, in Oxford, how often we talked these matters over! I have

often recalled one evening, in particular, often recollected certain

words of yours: and never more keenly than when I have associated

them with the early work of Rossetti, in both arts, but preëminently

in painting: ‘To my mind Rossetti is the most significant man among

flame—than perhaps even enthusiasts like yourself imagine.’

“We are all seeking a lost Eden. This ideal Beauty that we catch

glimpses of, now in morning loveliness, now in glooms of tragic terror,

haunts us by day and night, in dreams of waking and sleeping—nay,

whether or not we will, among the littlenesses and exigencies of

our diurnal affairs. It may be that, driven from the Eden of direct

experience, we are being more and more forced into taking refuge

within the haven guarded by our dreams. To a few only is it given to

translate, with rare distinction and excellence, something of this

manifold message of Beauty—though all of us would fain be, with your

Marius, ‘of the number of those who must be made perfect by the love of

visible beauty.’ Among these few, in latter years in this country, no

one has wrought more exquisitely for us than Rossetti.

“To him, and to you and all who recreate for us the things we have

vaguely known and loved, or surmised only, or previsioned in dreams, we

owe what we can never repay save by a rejoicing gratitude. Our own Eden

may be irrecoverable, its haunting music never be nearer or clearer

than a vanishing echo, yet we have the fortunate warranty of those

whose guided feet have led them further into the sunlit wilderness, who

have repeated to us, as with hieratic speech, what they have seen and

heard.

“‘From time to time,’ wrote Rossetti in one of those early prose

passages of his which are so consecrated by the poetic atmosphere—‘from

time to time, however, a poet or a painter has caught the music (of

that garden), and strayed in through the close stems: the spell is

on his hand and his lips like the sleep of the Lotus-eaters, and his

record shall be vague and fitful; yet will we be in waiting, and open

our eyes and our ears, for the broken song has snatches of an enchanted

harmony, and the glimpses are glimpses of Eden.’”

       *       *       *       *       *

It was during the preparation of this early book that the first volume

of William Sharp’s poems was published—too late however to be welcomed

by either of the two friends who had taken so keen an interest in

its growth: Rossetti, to whom all the poems had been read—and John

Elder to whom it was originally dedicated. It is entitled _The Human

Inheritance; Motherhood; Transcripts from Nature_ (Elliot Stock), and

contains a prefatory poem, and last lines dedicated to myself.

“The Human Inheritance” is a long poem in four cycles—the Inheritance

of Childhood, Youth, Manhood and Womanhood, and Old Age, and was an

expression of his belief that the human being should fearlessly reach

out to every experience that each period might have to offer. Eager,

and intensely alive, the poet thirsted till his last breath after

whatever might broaden and deepen his knowledge, his understanding, his

enjoyment of life.

The second long poem, “The New Hope: a Vision of the Travail of

Humanity,” was especially connected with John Elder, the outcome

of many talks and letters concerning the purport of the Travail of

Humanity—concerning a belief they both held that a great new spiritual

awakening is imminent that

                        ... “the one great Word

  That spake, shall wonderfully again be heard” ...

To “Motherhood” allusion has been made in one or two letters.

Notwithstanding that some of the critics predicted that the new name

was destined to become conspicuous, it was not by these poems, but by

the Life of Rossetti that the real impetus was given to his literary

fortunes and emphasised the fact of his existence to publishers and the

reading public. But to the poet himself—and to me—the publication of

the book of poems was a great event. We looked upon it as the beginning

of the true work of his life, toward the fulfilment of which we were

both prepared to make any sacrifice.

I have a few letters relating to this volume of poems, and append the

three which the recipient especially cared to preserve:

  2 BRADMORE ROAD,

  July 30th.

MY DEAR SHARP,

Since you have been here I have been reading your poems with great

enjoyment. The presence of philosophical, as in “The New Hope” and

of such original, and at the same time perfectly natural motives as

“Motherhood” is certainly a remarkable thing among younger English

poets, especially when united with a command of rhythmical and verbal

form like yours. The poem “Motherhood” is of course a bold one; but

it expresses, as I think, with perfect purity, a thought, which all

who can do so are the better for meditating on. The “Transcripts from

Nature” seem to me precisely all, and no more than (and just how is the

test of excellence in such things) what little pictures in verse ought

to be.

  Very sincerely yours,

  WALTER PATER.

DEAR MR. SHARP,

I have really not much to say about your poems. That you are of the

tribe or order of prophets, I certainly believe. What rank you may take

in that order I cannot guess. But the essential thing is that you are

the thing _poet_, and being such I doubt much whether talk about your

gift and what you ought to do with it will help you at all.

In “Motherhood” I think you touch the highest point in the volume.

The “Transcripts from Nature”—some of them—give me the _feel_ in

my nerves of the place and hour you describe, I like the form but

I think you have written a sufficient mass in this form, and that

future _rispetti_ ought to be rare, that is, whenever it is necessary

and right to express yourself in that form. (It is harder to take in

many in succession than even sonnets.) The longer poems seem to me as

decisively the poetry of a poet as the others, but they seem not so

successful (while admirable in many pages and in various ways).

I believe a beautiful action, beautifully if somewhat severely handled,

would bring out your highest. I wish you had some heroic old Scotch

story to brood over and make live while you are in Scotland.

I look forward with much interest to your Pre-Raphaelism and Rossetti.

  Very sincerely yours,

  EDWARD DOWDEN.

  Sept. 6, 1882.

DEAR MR. SHARP,

... I came abroad and brought your book with me. I have read it again

through among the mountains and have found much to admire and more than

like in it; so that the hours I passed in reading it are and will be

pleasant hours to remember. 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. It won’t do to become like the being in the “Palace

of Art.” It will not do either to live in a Palace of Nature, alone.

But all this is more a suggestion than an objection, and it is partly

suggested to me at first by the fact that the poem in the midst of The

Human Inheritance, Cycle III, is the nearest to the human heart and

yet the least well written of all the cycles—at least so it seems to

nearer the kind of poem in which the Poet’s Shuttle weaves into one web

Nature and Humanity and the close is very solemn and noble.

You asked me to do a critic’s part. It is a part I hate, and I am not a

critic. But I say what I say for the sake of men and women whom you may

help through the giving of high pleasure even more than you help them

in this book.

  With much sympathy and admiration,

  I am yours most sincerely,

  STOPFORD A. BROOKE.

Two other deaths occurred in this year, and made a profound impression

on the young writer. I quote his own words:

“It was in 1882 also that another friend, to whom Philip Marston had

also become much attached—attracted in the first instance by the common

bond of unhappiness—died under peculiarly distressing circumstances.

Philip Marston and myself were, if I am not mistaken, the last of his

acquaintances to see him alive. Thomson had suffered such misery and

endured such hopelessness, that he had yielded to intemperate habits,

including a frequent excess in the use of opium. He had come back from

a prolonged visit to the country, where all had been well with him,

but through over confidence he had fallen a victim again immediately

on his return. For a few weeks his record is almost a blank. When the

direst straits were reached, he so far reconquered his control that he

felt able to visit one whose sympathy and regard had stood all tests.

Marston soon realised that his friend was mentally distraught, and

endured a harrowing experience, into the narrative of which I do not

care to enter.

“I arrived in the late afternoon, and found Philip in a state of

nervous perturbation. Thomson was lying down on the bed