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

It follows that, with all this huge impetuosity, he was a poet who was

rather disinclined by temperament for the ‘poetic pains.’ What he wrote

in haste he was not always anxious to correct at leisure; and he was

happy about what he wrote—at any rate, until a colder mood supervened

at some later stage of his development.

“In keeping with this mental restlessness, Sharp was an insatiable

wanderer. No sooner did he reach London than he was intriguing to be

off again. Some of his devices in order to get work done, and to equip

these abrupt expeditions, were as absurd as anything told by Henri

Murger. Thanks to his large and imposing presence, his sanguine air,

his rosy faith in himself, he had a way of overwhelming editors that

was beyond anything, I believe, ever heard of in London, before or

since. On one occasion he went into a publisher’s office, and gave so

alluring an account of a long-meditated book that the publisher gave

him a check for £100, although he had not written a word of it.

“These things illustrate his temperament. He was a romanticist, an

illusionist. He did not see places or men and women as they were;

he did not care to see them so: but he had quite peculiar powers of

assimilating to himself foreign associations—the ideas, the colours,

the current allusions, of foreign worlds. In Italy he became an Italian

in spirit; in Algiers, an Arab. On his first visit to Sicily he could

not be happy because of the sense of bloodshed and warfare associated

with the scenes amid which he was staying; he saw bloodstains on the

earth, on every leaf and flower.

“The same susceptibility marked his intercourse with his fellows. Their

sensations and emotions, their whims, their very words, were apt to

become his, and to be reproduced with an uncanny reality in his own

immediate practice. It was natural, then, that he should be doubly

sensitive to feminine intuitions; that he should be able, even on

occasion, thanks to an extreme concern with women’s inevitable burdens

and sufferings, to translate, as men are very rarely able to do, their

intimate dialect.”

The description given by Mr. Rhys of William Sharp’s method of work

as characterised by an impetuosity which made him “disinclined for

the poetic pains” belonged to one phase of his development. During

the early days of hard work for the bare necessities of life, he had

little time to devote to the writing of poetry or of purely imaginative

work. His literary efforts were directed toward the shaping of his

prose critical writings, toward the controlled exercise of the mental

faculties which belonged to the William Sharp’s side of himself.

From time to time the emotional, the more intimate self would sweep

aside all conscious control; a dream, a sudden inner vision, an idea

that had lain dormant in what he called “the mind behind the mind”

would suddenly visualise itself and blot out everything else from

his consciousness, and under such impulse he would write at great

speed, hardly aware of what or how he wrote, so absorbed was he in the

vision with which for the moment he was identified. In those days he

was unwilling to retouch such writing; for he thought that revision

should be made only under a similar phase of emotion. Consequently

he preferred for the most part to destroy such efforts if the result

seemed quite inadequate, rather than alter them. Later, when that side

of his nature found expression in the Fiona Macleod writings—when those

impulses became more frequent, more reliable, more coherent—he changed

his attitude toward the question of revision, and desired above all

things to give as beautiful an expression as lay in his power to what

to him were dreams of beauty.

For his critical work, however, he studied and prepared himself

deliberately. He believed that the one method of attaining to a

balanced estimate of our literature is by a comparative study of

foreign contemporary writing.

“The more interested I became in literature,” he on one occasion

explained to an interviewer, “the more convinced I grew of the

narrowness of English criticism and of the importance to the English

critic of getting away from the insular point of view. So I decided

that the surest way of beginning to prepare myself for the work of the

critic would be to make a study of three or four of the best writers

among the older, and three or four among the younger school of each

nation, and to judge from the point of view of the nation. For example,

in studying French literature, I would try to judge from the point

of view of a Frenchman. When this task was done I tried to estimate

the literature under consideration from an absolute impersonal and

impartial point of view. Of course, this study took a long time, but it

furnished me material that has been invaluable to me in my work ever

since.”

It was his constant endeavour to understand the underlying motive in

any phase of modern literature; and he believed that “what is new in

literature is not so likely to be unfit for critics, as critics are

likely to be unfit for what is new in literature.” Concerning the art

of Criticism he expressed his belief in an unfinished article: “When I

speak of Criticism I have in mind not merely the more or less deft use

of commentary or indication, but one of the several ways of literature

and in itself a rare and fine art, the marriage of science that knows,

and of spirit that discerns.”

“The basis of Criticism is imagination: its spiritual quality is

sympathy: its intellectual distinction is balance.”

The occasion of his visit to Mr. Ernest Rhys was in connection with a

scheme for the publication of two series of cheap re-issues of fine

literature—a comparatively new venture five-and-twenty years ago—to

be published by Messrs. Walter Scott: _The Camelot Classics_ to be

edited by Ernest Rhys and to consist of selected prose writings, and

_The Canterbury Poets_ to be edited by William Sharp;—Each volume

to be prefaced by a specially written introduction. For the Prose

Series William Sharp prepared De Quincey’s _Confessions of an Opium

Eater_, and Mrs. Cunningham’s _Great English Painters_. For a third

series—Biographies of _Great Writers_ edited by Eric S. Robertson and

Frank T. Marzial, he wrote his monographs on Shelley in 1887, on Heine

in 1888 and on Browning in 1890.

Meanwhile he contributed a volume from time to time to _The Canterbury

Poets_, among others: Collections of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Great Odes,

American Sonnets, and his Collection of English Sonnets. In preparing

the Edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets he consulted Mr. Edward Dowden on

one or two points and received the following reply:

  DAVOS PLATZ, Dec. 6, 1885.

  DEAR MR. SHARP,

The most welcome gift of your _Songs, Poems and Sonnets_ of Shakespeare

reached me to-night. I have already looked it quickly through, and have

seen enough to know that this volume will be my constant companion in

future upon all my wanderings. Comparisons are odious. So I will not

make a list of the other travelling companions, which your edition of

Shakespeare’s lyrics is destined to supersede.

I will only tell you _why_ yours has the right to supersede them. First

and foremost, it is more scientifically complete.

Secondly, it is invaluable in its preservation of the play-atmosphere,

by such introductory snatches as you insert e. g. on p. 20. Hitherto,

we had often yearned in our Shakespearean anthologies for a whiff of

the play from which the songs were torn. You have given this just where

it was needed, and else not. That is _right_.

Thirdly, the Preface (to my mind at least) is more humanly and humanely

true about Shakespeare’s attitude in the Sonnets than anything which

has yet been written about them.

(I thank you, par parenthèse, for “the _vox humana_ of Hamlet!”) And

apropos of p. 11, I think you might have mentioned François Victor

Hugo’s translation of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. It is a curious piece of

French criticism. But the main thing left upon my mind by this first

cursory perusal is that you are one of those who live (as Goethe has

for ever put it) in “_the whole_.” It is the great thing for modern

criticism to get itself up out of holes and corners, mere personal

proclivities and scholarly niceties, into the large air of nature and

of man.

The critic who does this, has to sacrifice the applause of coteries and

the satisfaction which comes from “discovering” something and making

for his discovery a following.

But I am sure this is the right line for criticism, and the one which

will ultimately prevail, to the exclusion of more partial ways.

I therefore, who, in my own humble way, have tried as critic to

preserve what Goethe also calls the “abiding relations,” _bleibende

Verhältnisse_, feel specially drawn to your work by the seal of

largeness set upon it.

You test Shakespeare in his personal poems as man, from the standpoint

of the whole; and this seems to me eminently scientific—right. In a

minor point, I can tell you, as no one else could, that your critical

instinct is no less _acute_ than generally right. You have quoted

one of my sonnets in the notes. This Sonnet was written, to myself

consciously, under the Shakespearean influence. The influence was

complex, but very potent; and your discernment, your “spotting” of it,

appears to me that you have the right scent—fiuto (as Italians) flair

(as Frenchmen call that subtle penetration into the recesses of a mind

regulated by style).

Thank you from my heart for this gift, which (I hope, if years enough

are given me) shall wear itself out in the daily service of your friend,

  JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.

In the following letter to Mr. Symonds the Editor explained the

intention of his collected _Sonnets of this Century_:

  12: 11: 85.

  MY DEAR MR. SYMONDS,

I am shortly going to bring out a Selection of the Best Sonnets of

this Century (including a lengthy Introductory Essay on the Sonnet as

a vehicle of poetic thought, and on its place and history in English

Literature)—and I should certainly regard it as incomplete if your fine

sonnet-work were unrepresented. I am giving an average of _two_ to each

writer of standing, but in your case I have allowed for _five_. This is

both because I have a genuine admiration for your sonnet-work in the

main, and because I think that you have never been done full justice to

as a poet—though of course you have met with loyal recognition in most

of those quarters where you would most value it....

I have taken great pleasure in the preparation of the little book,

and I think that both poetically and technically it will be found

satisfactory. My main principles in selection have been (1) Structural

correctness. (2) Individuality, with distinct poetic value. (3)

Adequacy of Sonnet-Motive.

I hope that you are hard at work—not neglecting the shyest and dearest

of the muses—? Is there any chance of your being in London in the late

Spring? I hope so.

  Sincerely yours,

  WILLIAM SHARP.

In the preparation of the volume he received several interesting

communications from well-known English sonnet writers from which I

select four. The first is from the Irish poet Aubrey de Vere; in the

second Mr. George Meredith answers a question concerning his volume of

sequent poems, _Modern Love_:

  CURRAGH CHASE, ADARE,

  Dec. 5, 1885.

  DEAR MR. SHARP,

... I am much flattered by what you say about my sonnets, and glad

that you like them; but I hope that in selecting so many as five for

your volume you have not displaced sonnets by other authors. Sir R.

Hamilton’s are indeed, as you remark, excellent, and I rejoice that you

are making them better known than they have been hitherto. Wordsworth

once remarked to me that he had known many men of high talents and

several of real genius; but that Coleridge, and Sir W. H. Hamilton were

the only men he had known to whom he would apply the term “wonderful.”

  Yours faithfully,

  AUBREY DE VERE.

  BOXHILL, DORKING,

  Nov. 12, 1885.

  DEAR SIR,

You are at liberty to make your use of the Sonnet you have named. The

Italians allow of 16 lines, under the title of “Sonnets with a tail.”

But the lines of “Modern Love” were not designed for that form.

  Yours very truly,

  GEORGE MEREDITH.

The third letter is from Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton:

  THE PINES, PUTNEY HILL,

  Jan. 8, 1886.

  MY DEAR SHARP,

I sent off the proofs by Wednesday afternoon’s post. I had no idea that

the arrangement of the sonnets would give bother and took care to write

to you to ask. The matter was not at all important, and I shall be

vexed, indeed, if the printers are put to trouble. The printers would,

unless the snow storms interfered, get my verses by Thursday morning’s

_first_ post.

My theory of the