Seaford, Sept. 16, 1885.
My dear Sharp,
My best thanks for your most kind and suggestive letter. I am much gratified to know that in you and Mrs. Sharp I have true sympathisers in a story which although it may and I hope will be generally popular, can only deeply appeal to the heart of hearts of here and there one of the true romantic temper. Swinburne, who has read it all, tells me that the interest grows sharply and steadily to the very end and the finest volume is the last.
You are right in your surmise as to the rapidity in which the story was written to dictation. Both its merits and its defects you will find to arise from the fact that the conception came to me as one whole and that my eagerness to pour it out while the imagination was at white heat conquered everything. I doubt if it ever could have been written save to dictation. When do you return?
Kindest regards to Mrs. Sharp,
Yours affectly,
Theo. Watts.
P.S.—I and Swinburne are getting some delicious bathing.
In the article written for The Century Magazine, 1907, on William Sharp and Fiona Macleod, Mr. Ernest Rhys gives a reminiscent description of the young author and of his impressions of him, on their first acquaintance:
“One summer morning, some twenty years ago, in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, I was called down to an early visitor, and found waiting me a superb young man—a typical Norseman, as I should have thought him—tall, yellow-haired, blue-eyed. His cheeks were as rosy as a young girl’s, his manners as frank and impulsive as a boy’s. He had come with an introduction from a common friend (Mrs. William Bell Scott), a would-be contributor to a new periodical; but he soon passed from the discussion of an article on De Quincey to an account of himself that was joyously and consciously exuberant. He told of adventures in Australian backwoods, and of intrigues in Italy that recalled Cellini; and then he turned, with the same rapid flow of brief staccato sentences, to speak of his friend Mr. Swinburne’s new volume of poems, or of the last time he walked along Cheyne Walk to spend an evening with Rossetti. He appeared to know everybody, to have been everywhere. Finally, though he had apparently been sitting up all the night before to write an epic or a ‘Quarterly’ article, he was quite ready to start the same evening for Paris, not only to be present at a new play there, but in order to be able to talk, hours on end in the dark, about the ‘Contes Extraordinaires’ of M. Ernest Hello, or about a very different and still more wonderful being, then little known in London, called Nietzsche.