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

by Elizabeth A. Sharp

CHAPTER XXVII

CONCLUSION

“How the man subdivided his soul is the mystery,” wrote Mr. James Douglas. And in trying to suggest an answer I would say with “F. M.”—“I write, not because I know a mystery and would reveal it, but because I have known a mystery, and am to-day as a child before it, and can neither reveal nor interpret it.” For that mystery concerns the evolution of a human soul; and the part of it for which ‘the man’ is consciously and personally responsible, is the method he used, the fiction he created and deliberately fostered,—rightly or wrongly—for the protection of his inner, compelling self.

This deliberate ‘blind’—which according to some critics “is William Sharp’s most notable achievement in fiction rather than the creation of any of ‘her’ works”—is largely the cause of the sense of confusion that exists in the minds of certain of his friends, to whom he told the half but not the whole of the facts. He purposely did not dispel the idea of a collaborator, an idea which grew out of the half veiled allusions he had made concerning the friend of whom I have written, whose vivid personality appealed so potently to a phase of his complex nature, and stirred his imagination as no one else had done.

In a letter to Mr. W. B. Yeats signed “Fiona Macleod,” and written in 1899, about herself and her friend (namely himself) William tried “as far as is practicable in a strange and complex manner to be explicit.” ‘She’ stated that, “all the formative and expressional as well as nearly all the visionary power is my friends. In a sense only his is the passive part, but it is the allegory of the match, the wind, and the torch. Everything is in the torch in readiness, and as you know, there is nothing in the match itself. But there is a mysterious latency of fire between them ... the little touch of silent igneous potency at the end of the match—and in what these symbolise, one adds spiritual affinity as a factor—and all at once the flame is born. The torch says all is due to the match. The match knows the flame is not hers. But beyond both is the wind, the spiritual air. Out of the unseen world it fans the flame. In that mysterious air both the match and the flame hear strange voices. The air that came at the union of both is sometimes Art, sometimes Genius, sometimes Imagination, sometimes Life, sometimes the Spirit. It is all.

“But before that flame people wonder and admire. Most wonder only at the torch. A few look for the match beyond the torch, and finding her are apt to attribute to her that which is not hers, save as a spiritual dynamic agent. Now and then the match may have in petto the qualities of the torch—particularly memory and vision: and so can stimulate and amplify the imaginative life of the torch. But the torch is at once the passive, the formative, the mnemonic, and the artistically and imaginatively creative force. He knows that in one sense he would be flameless or at least without that ideal blend of the white and the red—without the match: and he knows that the flame is the offspring of both, that the wind has many airs in it, and that one of the most potent is that which blows from the life and mind and soul of ‘the match’—but in his heart he knows that, to all others, he and he alone is the flame, his alone both the visionary, the formative, the expressional.”

At the last, realising with deep regret that one or two of the friends he cared greatly for would probably feel hurt when they should know of the deception, he left the following note to be sent to each immediately on the disclosure of the secret:

“This will reach you after my death. You will think I have wholly deceived you about Fiona Macleod. But, in an intimate sense this is not so: though (and inevitably) in certain details I have misled you. Only, it is a mystery. I cannot explain. Perhaps you will intuitively understand or may come to understand. “The rest is silence.” Farewell.

William Sharp.