“The poetry of these men is beautiful in itself apart from the relation they bear to their times. We may not care for Dryden (though I do) or Prior or Cowley, because in the verse of these latter there is nothing to withstand the ages, nothing that rises above their times. In looking at Rubens, or Leonardo da Vinci, or Fra Angelico, we must school ourselves to admiration by saying ‘How wonderful for their time, what a near attempt at a perspective, what a near success in drawing nature—external and human!’ Would you, or any one, care for a painting of Angelico’s if executed in exactly the same style and in equally soft and harmonious colours at the present day? Could you enjoy and enter into it apart from its relation to such-and-such a period of early Christian Art? It may be possible, but I doubt it. On the other hand take up the Old Masters of Poetry and judge them by the present high standard. Take up Homer—who has his width and space? Dante—who has his fiery repressed intensity? Theocritus, who has sung sweeter of meadows and summer suns and flowers? Chaucer—who is as delicious now as in the latter part of the fourteenth century! Shakespeare—who was, is, and ever shall be the supreme crowned lord of verse!—Take up one of the comparatively speaking minor lights of the Elizabethan era. Does Jonson with his ‘Every Man in his Humour,’ or his ‘Alchemist,’ does Webster with his ‘Duchess of Malfi,’ does Ford with his ‘Lover’s Melancholy,’ does Massinger, with his ‘Virgin Martyr,’ do Beaumont and Fletcher with their ‘Maid’s Tragedy,’ does Marlowe with his ‘Life and Death of Dr. Faustus,’ pall upon us? Have we ever to keep before us the fact that they lived so many generations or centuries ago?
“I never tire of that wonderful, tremendous, magnificent epoch in literature—the age of the Elizabethan dramatists.
“Despite the frequent beauty of much that followed I think the genius of Poetry was of an altogether inferior power and order (excepting Milton) until once again it flowered forth anew in Byron, in Coleridge, in Keats, and in Shelley! These two last names, what do they not mean! Since then, after a slight lapse, Poetry has soared to serener heights again, and Goethe, Victor Hugo, Tennyson, and Browning have moulded new generations, and men like Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris, Marston, Longfellow, and others have helped to make still more exquisitely fair the Temple of Human Imagination. Men like Joaquin Miller and Whitman are the south and north winds that soothe or stir the leaves of thought surrounding it.
“We are on the verge of another great dramatic epoch—more subtle and spiritual if not grander in dimensions than that of the sixteenth century. I hope to God I live to see the sunrise which must follow the wayward lights of the present troubled dawn....
“On Monday evening (from eight till two) I go again as usual to Marston’s. I called at his door on my way here this afternoon and left a huge bouquet of wallflowers, with a large yellow heart of daffodils, to cheer him up. He is passionately fond of flowers....”
That winter, despite his continued delicacy, was full of interest to William, who had always a rare capacity for throwing himself into the enjoyment of the moment, whatever it might be, or into the interests of others and dismissing from his mind all personal worries. No matter how depressed he might be, when with friends he could shake himself free from the thraldom of the black clouds and let his natural buoyant spirit have full play. His genial sunny manner, his instinctive belief in and reliance on an equal geniality in others assured him many a welcome.
Among the literary houses open to him were those of Mr. and Mrs. William Rossetti, Miss Christina Rossetti, Mr. and Mrs. William Bell Scott, Mr. and Mrs. Francillon, Mr. Robert Browning, and Mr. Theodore Watts. Mr. and Mrs. George Robinson, whose daughter, Mary, distinguished herself among the poets of her generation, were especially good to him. Among artists whose studios he frequented were Mr. Ford Madox Brown, Mr. William Morris and Mr. Holman Hunt, and Sir Frederick Leighton; and among his intimate friends he counted Mathilde Blind, the poet, Louise Bevington, Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton, Belford Bax and others.
There was a reverse side to the picture however. His desire and effort not to identify himself—in his original work, with any set of writers, or phase of literary expression, tended to make him of no account in the consideration of some of his fellow writers. His was a slow development, and while he gained greatly in the technical knowledge of his art through the wise and careful advice of Rossetti, the sensitive taste of Philip Marston, the more severe criticism of Theodore Watts, he felt he had a definite thing to say, a definite word of his own to express sooner or later. It was long before this finally shaped its utterance, and in the interval he experimented in many directions, studied various methods—and of course to make a livelihood wrote many “pot-boilers”—always hoping that he would ultimately “find himself.” Unquestionably, with his nature—which vibrated so sensitively to everything that was beautiful in nature and life, and had in it so much of exuberance, of optimism—the severe grind for the bare necessities of life, the equally severe criticism that met his early efforts, proved an invaluable-schooling to him. The immediate result, however, was that his “other self,” the dreaming psychic self, slept for a time, or at any rate was in abeyance. “William Sharp” gradually dominated, and before long he was accepted generally as literary critic and later as art critic also. So complete, apparently, for a time, was this divorce between the two radical strains in him, that only a few of his intimates suspected the existence of the sensitive, delicate, feminine side of him that he buried carefully out of sight, and as far as possible out of touch with the current of his literary life in London where at no time did the “Fiona Macleod” side of his nature gain help or inspiration.
Just as of old, when in Glasgow, he had wandered in the city and beyond it, and made acquaintances with all sorts and conditions of men and women, so, too, did he now wander about London, especially about the neighbourhood of “The Pool” which offered irresistible attractions and experiences to him. These he touched on later in “Madge o’ the Pool” and elsewhere. I remember he told me that rarely a day passed in which he did not try to imagine himself living the life of a woman, to see through her eyes, and feel and view life from her standpoint, and so vividly that “sometimes I forget I am not the woman I am trying to imagine.” The following description of him, at this date, is taken from a letter quoted in Mrs. Janvier’s article on “Fiona Macleod and her Creator” in The North American Review.
“You ask about our acquaintance with Willie Sharp. Yes, we knew him well in the days when we all were gay and young.... He was a very nice-looking amiable young fellow whom every one liked, very earnest with great notions of his own mission as regards Poetry, which he took very seriously. He used to have the saving grace of fun—which kept him sweet and wholesome—otherwise he might have fallen into the morbid set.”