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

98 concerning this disenchantment with all

mortal passion struck me as most happily felt and expressed. I have

only one fault to find with you, and that you will think a very selfish

one (so you must excuse it), to wit that when speaking of _The Revolt

of Islam_ you did not mention in a line or so that I was the first

writer who pointed out, first in the “Westminster Review” and afterward

in my Memoir of the poet, that in Cythna Shelley had introduced a new

type of Woman into poetry. I am rather proud of it, and as it was

mentioned by several of Shelley’s subsequent biographers I would have

been pleased to have seen it in a volume likely to be so popular as

yours.

 

But enough of this small matter.

 

I wish you and your dear wife health and happiness.

 

  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.

 

PART I  (WILLIAM SHARP) CHAPTER VIII (  ROMANTIC BALLADS )

 

_The Children of To-morrow_

 

 

The three years spent at Wescam were happy years, full of work and

interest. Slowly but steadily as health was re-established, the command

over work increased, and all work was planned with the hope that before

very long William should be able to devote himself to the form of

imaginative work that he knew was germinating in his mind. Meanwhile

he had much in hand. Critical work for many of the weeklies, a volume

of poems in preparation, and a monograph on Heine, were the immediate

preoccupations.

 

_Romantic Ballads and Poems of Phantasy_ was published in the spring

(Walter Scott). The poems had been written at different times during

the previous five or six years. “The Son of Allan” had met with the

approval of Rossetti, whose influence was commented upon by certain of

the critics. The book was well received both in England and America.

_The Boston Literary World_ considered that in such poems as “The Isle

of Lost Dreams,” “Twin Souls,” and “The Death Child” “a conjuring

imagination rises to extraordinary beauty of conception.” These three

poems are undoubtedly forerunners of the work of the “Fiona Macleod”

period. In the Preface the writer stated his conviction that “a

Romantic Revival is imminent in our poetic literature, a true awakening

of genuinely romantic sentiment. The most recent phase thereof,”

however, “that mainly due to Rossetti, has not fulfilled the hopes of

those who saw in it the prelude to a new great poetic period. It has

been too literary, inherently, but more particularly in expression....

Spontaneity it has lacked supremely.... It would seem as if it had

already become mythical that the supreme merit of a poem is not

perfection of art, but the quality of the imagination which is the

source of such real or approximate perfection.... In a sense, there is

neither Youth nor Age in Romance, it is the quintessence of the most

vivid emotions of life.” And further on he voices the very personal

belief “Happy is he who, in this day of spiritual paralysis, can still

shut his eyes for a while and dream.”

 

Concerning the idea of fatality that underlies the opening ballad “The

Weird of Michel Scott”—“meant as a lyrical tragedy, a tragedy of a soul

that finds the face of disastrous fate set against it whithersoever

it turn in the closing moments of mortal life,” he wrote to a friend,

“What has always impressed me deeply—how deeply I can scarcely say—is

the blind despotism of fate. It is manifested in Æschylus, in Isaiah

and in the old Hebrew Prophets, in all literature, in all history and

in life. This blind, terrible, indifferent Fate, this tyrant Chance,

stays or spares, mutilates or rewards, annihilates or passes by without

heed, without thought, with absolute blankness of purpose, aim, or

passion....

 

“I am tortured by the passionate desire to create beauty, to sing

something of ‘the impossible songs’ I have heard, to utter something

of the rhythm of life that has most touched me. The next volume of

romantic poems will be daringly of the moment, vital with the life and

passion of to-day (I speak hopefully, not with arrogant assurance, of

course), yet not a whit less romantic than ‘The Weird of Michel Scott’

or ‘The Death Child.’”

 

Many encouraging and appreciative letters reached him from friends

known and unknown.

 

In Mr. William Allingham’s opinion “Michel Scott clothing his own Soul

with Hell-fire is tremendous!”

 

Professor Edward Dowden was not wholly in accord with the poet’s views,

as expressed in the Introduction:

 

 

  RATHMINES, DUBLIN,

  July 10, 1888.

 

  MY DEAR SHARP,

 

It gave me great pleasure to get your new volume from yourself. I think

that a special gift of yours, and one not often possessed, appears

in this volume of romance and phantasy. I don’t find it possible to

particularise one poem as showing its presence more than another, for

the unity of the volume comes from its presence. And I rejoice at

anything which tends to make this last quarter of the century other

than what I feared it would be—a period of collecting and arranging

facts, with perhaps such generalisations as specialists can make. (Not

that this is not valuable work, but if it is the sole employment of a

generation what an ill time for the imagination and the emotions!) At

the same time I don’t think I should make any _demand_, if I could, for

Romance. I should not put forth any manifesto in its favour, for this

reason—that the leaders of a movement of phantasy and romance will have

such a sorry following. The leaders of a school which overvalued form

and technique may have been smaller men than the leaders of a romantic

school, yet still their followers were learning something; but while

the chiefs of the romantic and phantastic movement will be men of

genius, what a lamentable crowd the disciples will be, who will try to

be phantastic _prepense_. We shall have the horrors of the spasmodic

school revived without that element of a high, vague, spiritual

intention which gave some nobility—or pseudo-nobility—to the disciples

of the spasmodists. We shall have every kind of extravagance and folly

posing as poetry.

 

The way to control or check this is for the men who have a gift for

romance to use that gift—which you have done—and to prove that phantasy

is not incoherence but has its own laws. And they ought to discourage

any and every one from attempting romance who has not a genius for

romance.

 

  Sincerely yours,

DOWDEN.

 

       *       *       *       *       *

 

Meanwhile, the author of the ballads was at work preparing two volumes

for the _Canterbury Series_—a volume of selected Odes, and one of

American Sonnets, to which he contributed prefaces—and writing critical

articles for the _Academy_, _Athenæum_, _Literary World_, etc. Various

important books were published that spring, and among those which came

into his hands to write about were _Underwoods_ by R. L. Stevenson, _In

Hospital_ by W. Henley; and from these writers respectively he received

letters of comment. I am unable to remember what was the occasion of

the first of the R. L. Stevenson notes, what nature of request it was

that annoyed the older writer. Neither of his letters is dated, but

from the context each obviously belongs to 1888.

 

 

  DEAR MR. SHARP,

 

Yes, I was annoyed with you, but let us bury that; you have shown so

much good nature under my refusal that I have blotted out the record.

 

And to show I have repented of my wrath: is your article written? If

not, you might like to see early sheets of my volume of verse, not very

good, but still—and the Scotch ones would amuse you I believe. And you

might like also to see the plays I have written with Mr. Henley: let me

know, and you shall have them as soon as I can manage.

 

  Yours very truly,

  ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

 

The notice I had seen already, and was pleased with.

 

       *       *       *       *       *

 

After the appearance of the review of _Underwoods_, R. L. S. wrote

again:

 

 

  DEAR MR. SHARP,

 

What is the townsman’s blunder?—though I deny I am a townsman, for I

have lived, on the whole, as much or more in the country: well, perhaps

not so much. Is it that the thrush does not sing at night? That is

possible. I only know most potently the blackbird (his cousin) does:

many and many a late evening in the garden of that poem have I listened

to one that was our faithful visitor; and the sweetest song I ever

heard was past nine at night in the early spring, from a tree near the

E. gate of Warriston cemetery. That I called what I believe to have

been a merle by the softer name of mavis (and they are all turdi, I

believe) is the head and front of my offence against literal severity,

and I am curious to hear if it has really brought me into some serious

error.

 

Your article is very true and very kindly put: I have never called my

verses poetry: they are verse, the verse of a speaker not a singer;

but that is a fair business like another. I am of your mind too in

preferring much the Scotch verses, and in thinking “_Requiem_” the

nearest thing to poetry that I have ever “clerkit.”

 

  Yours very truly,

  ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

 

L. S. SARANAC, NEW YORK.

 

Mr. Henley wrote:

 

 

  MERTON PLACE, CHISWICK, W.,

  5: 7: 88.

 

  MY DEAR SHARP,

 

I am glad to have your letter. Of course I disagreed with your view of

_In Hospital_; but I didn’t think it all worth writing about. I felt

you’d mistaken my aim; but I felt that your mistake (as I conceived it

to be) was honestly made, and that if the work itself had failed to

produce a right effect upon you, it was useless to attempt to correct

the impressions by means outside art.

 

Art (as I think) is treatment _et præteria nil_. What I tried to do in

_In Hospital_ was to treat a certain subject—which seems to me to have

a genuine human interest and importance—with discretion, good feeling,

and a certain dignity. If I failed, I failed as an artist. My treatment

(or my art) was not good enough for my material. _Voilà._ I thought

(I will frankly confess it) that I had got the run of the thing—that

my results were touched with the distinction of art. You didn’t think

so, and I saw that, as far as you were concerned, I had failed of my

effort. I was sorry to have so failed, and then the matter ended. To

be perfectly frank, I objected to but one expression—“occasionally

crude”—in all the article. I confess I don’t see the propriety

of the phrase at all. My method is, I know, the exact reverse of

your own; but I beg you to believe that my efforts—of simplicity,

directness, bluntness, brutality even—are carefully calculated, and

that “crude”—which means raw, if it means anything at all—is a word

that I’d rather not have applied to me. The _Saturday_ Reviewer

made use of it, and I had it out with him, and he owned that it was

unfortunately used—that it didn’t mean “raw,” but something un-Miltonic

(as it were), something novel and personal and which hadn’t had time

to get conventionalised. It’s