William Sharp (Fiona Macleod): A Memoir Compiled by His Wife Elizabeth A. Sharp

by Elizabeth A. Sharp

CHAPTER XIV

THE PSEUDONYM

Pharais

The summer of 1893 was hot and sunny: and we delighted in our little garden with its miniature lawns, its espalier fruit trees framing the vegetable garden, and its juvenile but to us fascinating flower beds. Horsham, our nearest town, was seven miles distant and the village of Rudgwick lay a mile away up a steady ascent beyond the station. William Sharp was happy once more to be resident in the country, although the surroundings were not a type of scenery that appealed to him. But, as he wrote to a friend, it was not so much the place that he liked “as what is in it conducive to that keen perturbation, elation, excitement of mind, which is life worth living.”

At Phenice Croft his imagination was in a perpetual ferment. Out of the projected work that he had noted in his diary, out of those subjects that lay in his mind to germinate and mature, or to wither and be rejected, grew one or two achievements; and in particular after the completion of Vistas, a romance of the Isles, Pharais, about which his friend Mr. Cotterell in acknowledging a copy of these Dramatic Interludes, wrote to the author:

“Vistas should mark a point in your career from which you should go forward to greater things. I am eager to see the Celtic romance.”

The quiet and leisure at Phenice Croft, the peace, the “green life” around were unspeakably welcome to my husband. Once again, he saw visions and dreamed dreams; the psychic subjective side of his dual nature predominated. He was in an acutely creative condition; and, moreover he was passing from one phase of literary work to another, deeper, more intimate, more permanent. So far, he had found no adequate method for the expression of his “second self” though the way was led thereto by Sospiri di Roma and Vistas.

The Sospiri di Roma was the turning point. Those unrhymed poems of irregular meter are filled not only with the passionate delight in life, with the sheer joy of existence, but also with the ecstatic worship of beauty that possessed him during those spring months we spent in Rome, when he had cut himself adrift for the time from the usual routine of our life, and touched a high point of health and exuberant spirits. There, at last, he had found the desired incentive towards a true expression of himself, in the stimulus and sympathetic understanding of the friend to whom he dedicated the first of the books published under his pseudonym. This friendship began in Rome and lasted throughout the remainder of his life.

And though this newer phase of his work was at no time the result of collaboration, as certain of his critics have suggested, he was deeply conscious of his indebtedness to this friend, for—as he stated to me in a letter of instructions, written before he went to America in 1896, concerning his wishes in the event of his death—he realised that it was “to her I owe my development as ‘Fiona Macleod’ though, in a sense of course, that began long before I knew her, and indeed while I was still a child,” and that, as he believed, “without her there would have been no ‘Fiona Macleod.’”

Because of her beauty, her strong sense of life and of the joy of life; because of her keen intuitions and mental alertness, her personality stood for him as a symbol of the heroic women of Greek and Celtic days, a symbol that, as he expressed it, unlocked new doors in his mind and put him “in touch with ancestral memories” of his race. So, for a time, he stilled the critical, intellectual mood of William Sharp to give play to the development of this new found expression of subtler emotions, towards which he had been moving with all the ardour of his nature.