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

“Though I cannot recall what I wrote, write I did evidently, and

obviously also with eagerness to prove that, while I accepted her

gentle reproof in the spirit in which she offered it, I held the point

of view immaterial; and no doubt a very crude epistle it was in thought

and diction....”

That summer my Poet and I were very happy receiving the congratulations

from our friends on the approaching termination of our nine years of

waiting. We were married on a Friday the 31st October 1884 at Christ

Church, Lancaster Gate, and his friend Eric S. Robertson—Editor of The

Great Writer Series, and afterward Professor of Literature and Logic

at Lahore Government College—acted as best man. Mrs. Craik lent us her

house at Dover for our honeymoon, and we also made a flying visit to

Paris.

The end of November found us settled in a little house in Talgarth

Road, West Kensington (No. 46): our relatives furnished the house for

us and we began our new life with high hopes and a slender purse. My

husband had £30 in his pocket, and I had an income of £35 a year.

Among the many kindly letters of congratulations came one from Mr.

Addington Symonds.

  DAVOS PLATZ, Dec. 22, 1884.

  MY DEAR MR. SHARP,

Allow me first to congratulate you on your marriage, and settlement

in London. You will remember that I was privileged at Venice to see a

volume of your “Transcripts from Nature,” in relation to which you told

me of your engagement. I am therefore interested to hear of the happy

event, and wish both you and Mrs. Sharp all the prosperity, which it is

possible for mortals to enjoy! When I come to London (which I hope to

do next year) I shall not forget your kind invitation.

I must give you most hearty thanks for the enjoyment of a rare delight

in your post-card and letter about my Sonnets. I have so high an esteem

of your own original work in poetry that to be appreciated by you

is no common pleasure. Such words as yours are more than many of the

ordinary reviews, even if kindly; and they take the annoyance away,

which some unjust and ignorant critiques leave upon a sensitive mind.

If it were not that men like yourself, who have the right and power to

judge, speak thus from time to time, I do not think I should care to go

on publishing what I take pleasure in producing, but what has hitherto

brought me no gains and caused me to receive some kicks. It is indeed

very good of you amid your pressing literary occupations and the more

delightful interests of your life at present, to find time to tell me

what you really value in my work. Thank you for noticing the omission

of the comma after _islands_ in Sonnet on p. 38 of Vag: Lit:

It has fallen out accidentally; and if such a remarkable event as a

2nd. edn. occurs, it shall be replaced. So also will I alter what you

rightly point out as a blemish in the Sonnet on p. 200—the repetition

of _deep deep_ and _sleep_ in the same line. That was questioned by my

own ear. I left it thus because I thought it added a sort of oppressive

dreaminess to the opening of the Sonnet, striking a keynote. But if it

has struck you as wrong, I doubt not that it should be altered; since

it will not have achieved the purposed effect. And those effects are

after all tricks.

I shall also attend to your suggestions about future work. I have

had it in my mind to continue the theme of “Animi Figura,” and to

attempt to show how a character which has reached apparent failure in

moral and spiritual matters may reconstruct a life’s philosophy and

find sufficient sources of energy and health. There is no doubt great

difficulty in this motif. But were it possible to succeed in some such

adumbration of what the Germans call a Versöhnung, then the purgation

of the passions at which a work of art should aim would be effected.

Believe me, with renewed thanks, to be very sincerely yours,

  JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.

Many were the pleasant literary households that gave a welcome to us,

and in particular those of Mr. and Mrs. Craik, of Mr. and Mrs. George

Robinson, whose beautiful daughters Mary, the poetess, and Mabel, the

novelist, I already knew; of Mr. and Mrs. Francillon, of Mrs. Augusta

Webster, and of Dr. and Mrs. Garnett. In these and other houses we met

many common friends and interesting people of note; most frequently,

among others, Mr. Walter Pater, Mr. Robert Browning, Dr. Westland

Marston, Mr. and Mrs. Ford Madox Brown, Mr. and Mrs. William Rossetti,

Mr. and Mrs. William Morris, Mr. and Mrs. Holman Hunt, Mr. Andrew Lang,

Mr. Austin Dobson, Mr. Frederick Shields, Mr. Theodore Watts, Sir

Frederick Leighton, Miss Mathilde Blind, Miss Olive Schreiner, Miss

Louise Bevington, Mr. and Mrs. John Todhunter, Mr. and Mrs. Oscar Wilde

and Mrs. Lynn Linton.

CHAPTER VI

SONNETS OF THIS CENTURY

1885 was a year of hard work. It was our desire that such work should

be done that should eventually make it possible for my husband to

devote himself exclusively to original work—perhaps in a year or two at

most. Meanwhile the outlook was satisfactory and encouraging. He held

the post of London Art-Critic to the _Glasgow Herald_, was on the staff

of _The Academy_ then under the Editorship of his good friend Mr. James

Cotton; and he wrote for _The Examiner_, _The Athenaeum_ and other

weeklies.

On the appearance in _The Athenaeum_ of his Review on _Marius the

Epicurean_ the author expressed his satisfaction in a letter:

  2 BRADMORE ROAD,

  March 1, 1885.

  MY DEAR SHARP,

I have read your article in _The Athenaeum_ with very real pleasure;

feeling criticism, at once so independent and so sympathetic, to be a

reward for all the long labours the book has cost me. You seem to me to

have struck a note or criticism not merely pleasant but judicious; and

there are one or two important points—literary ones—on which you have

said precisely what I should have wished, and thought it important for

me, to have said. Thank you sincerely for your friendly work! Also,

for your letter, and promise of the other notices, which I shall look

out for, and greatly value. I was much pleased also that Mrs. Sharp

had been so much interested in my writing. It is always a sign to me

that I have to some extent succeeded in my literary aim when I gain the

approval of accomplished women.

[Illustration: WALTER PATER]

I should be glad, and feel it a great compliment, to have Marius

translated into German, on whatever terms your friend likes—provided

of course that Macmillan approves. I will ask him his views on this

point. As regards the ethical drift of Marius, I should like to talk to

you, if you were here. I _did_ mean it to be more anti-Epicurean than

it has struck you as being. In one way however I am glad that you have

mistaken me a little on this point, as I had some fears that I might

seem to be pleading for a formal thesis, or “parti pris.” Be assured

how cheering your praise—praise from so genuine and accomplished a

fellow-workman—has been to me. Such recognition is especially a help

to one whose work is so exclusively personal and solitary as the kind

of literary work, which I feel I can do best, must be. I fancied you

spoke of bringing your wife to Oxford this term; and wish we had a room

to offer you. But I think you know that we have at most only room for

a single visitor. It will however give my sisters great pleasure to

make the acquaintance of Mrs. Sharp. Only let us know a week or so, if

possible, before you come to Oxford, that we may see as much of you as

possible: and with our united kind regards, believe me, my dear Sharp,

  Very sincerely yours,

  WALTER PATER.

I hope that in generosity to me you are not wasting too much of the

time that belongs to your own original work. I have told Macmillan to

send you a properly bound copy of Marius, with only a few misprints.

       *       *       *       *       *

Mr. Theodore Watts had frequently spoken to us about a romance he had

in hand, and partly in print. After much persuasion he sent several

chapters of _Aylwin_ to us during our summer holiday, and we read them

on the shores of West Loch Tarbert in Argyll with keen enjoyment. An

enthusiastic letter from the younger author brought this reply:

  SEAFORD, Sept. 16, 1885.

  MY DEAR SHARP,

My best thanks for your most kind and suggestive letter. I am much

gratified to know that in you and Mrs. Sharp I have true sympathisers

in a story which although it may and I hope will be generally popular,

can only deeply appeal to the heart of hearts of here and there one of

the true romantic temper. Swinburne, who has read it all, tells me that

the interest grows sharply and steadily to the very end and the finest

volume is the last.

You are right in your surmise as to the rapidity in which the story was

written to dictation. Both its merits and its defects you will find to

arise from the fact that the conception came to me as one whole and

that my eagerness to pour it out while the imagination was at white

heat conquered everything. I doubt if it ever _could_ have been written

save to dictation. When do you return?

Kindest regards to Mrs. Sharp,

  Yours affectly,

  THEO. WATTS.

P.S.—I and Swinburne are getting some delicious bathing.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the article written for _The Century Magazine_, 1907, on William

Sharp and Fiona Macleod, Mr. Ernest Rhys gives a reminiscent

description of the young author and of his impressions of him, on their

first acquaintance:

“One summer morning, some twenty years ago, in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea,

I was called down to an early visitor, and found waiting me a superb

young man—a typical Norseman, as I should have thought him—tall,

yellow-haired, blue-eyed. His cheeks were as rosy as a young girl’s,

his manners as frank and impulsive as a boy’s. He had come with

an introduction from a common friend (Mrs. William Bell Scott), a

would-be contributor to a new periodical; but he soon passed from

the discussion of an article on De Quincey to an account of himself

that was joyously and consciously exuberant. He told of adventures

in Australian backwoods, and of intrigues in Italy that recalled

Cellini; and then he turned, with the same rapid flow of brief staccato

sentences, to speak of his friend Mr. Swinburne’s new volume of poems,

or of the last time he walked along Cheyne Walk to spend an evening

with Rossetti. He appeared to know everybody, to have been everywhere.

Finally, though he had apparently been sitting up all the night before

to write an epic or a ‘Quarterly’ article, he was quite ready to start

the same evening for Paris, not only to be present at a new play there,

but in order to be able to talk, hours on end in the dark, about the

‘Contes Extraordinaires’ of M. Ernest Hello, or about a very different

and still more wonderful being, then little known in London, called

Nietzsche.

“It is not easy to avoid extravagance in speaking of one who was in all

things an illusionist. Sharp’s sensations, doings, artistic ideas, and

performances were not to be counted by rule and measure. He was capable

of predicting a new religion as he paced the Thames Embankment, or of

devising an imaginary new theatre for romantic drama—whose plays were

yet to be written (by himself)—as he rode home from the Haymarket.

“Before we separated, at that first meeting, he had made more plans

for events and new great works than the most sanguine of imaginers and

writers could hope to effect in a lifetime. And, alas! for his control

of circumstance, within a fortnight I was summoned to his sick-bed. He

was down with scarlet fever, and it fell to me to write from his notes,

or otherwise to complete, more than one essay and review which he had

undertaken before he fell ill....

“There was another side to William Sharp. He had a spirit of fun,

boyish mischief even, which found the slightest reflection in his work;

for his writing is not remarkable for its humour. His extravagance of

energy, which vehemently sped his pen, led him, in the course of his

earlier life, into a hundred wild exploits. To him a piece of writing

was an adventure. He delighted in impossible feats of composition,

such as trying to finish a whole romance between sunset and