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

by Elizabeth A. Sharp

“It is not easy to avoid extravagance in speaking of one who was in all things an illusionist. Sharp’s sensations, doings, artistic ideas, and performances were not to be counted by rule and measure. He was capable of predicting a new religion as he paced the Thames Embankment, or of devising an imaginary new theatre for romantic drama—whose plays were yet to be written (by himself)—as he rode home from the Haymarket.

“Before we separated, at that first meeting, he had made more plans for events and new great works than the most sanguine of imaginers and writers could hope to effect in a lifetime. And, alas! for his control of circumstance, within a fortnight I was summoned to his sick-bed. He was down with scarlet fever, and it fell to me to write from his notes, or otherwise to complete, more than one essay and review which he had undertaken before he fell ill....

“There was another side to William Sharp. He had a spirit of fun, boyish mischief even, which found the slightest reflection in his work; for his writing is not remarkable for its humour. His extravagance of energy, which vehemently sped his pen, led him, in the course of his earlier life, into a hundred wild exploits. To him a piece of writing was an adventure. He delighted in impossible feats of composition, such as trying to finish a whole romance between sunset and sunrise. It follows that, with all this huge impetuosity, he was a poet who was rather disinclined by temperament for the ‘poetic pains.’ What he wrote in haste he was not always anxious to correct at leisure; and he was happy about what he wrote—at any rate, until a colder mood supervened at some later stage of his development.

“In keeping with this mental restlessness, Sharp was an insatiable wanderer. No sooner did he reach London than he was intriguing to be off again. Some of his devices in order to get work done, and to equip these abrupt expeditions, were as absurd as anything told by Henri Murger. Thanks to his large and imposing presence, his sanguine air, his rosy faith in himself, he had a way of overwhelming editors that was beyond anything, I believe, ever heard of in London, before or since. On one occasion he went into a publisher’s office, and gave so alluring an account of a long-meditated book that the publisher gave him a check for £100, although he had not written a word of it.

“These things illustrate his temperament. He was a romanticist, an illusionist. He did not see places or men and women as they were; he did not care to see them so: but he had quite peculiar powers of assimilating to himself foreign associations—the ideas, the colours, the current allusions, of foreign worlds. In Italy he became an Italian in spirit; in Algiers, an Arab. On his first visit to Sicily he could not be happy because of the sense of bloodshed and warfare associated with the scenes amid which he was staying; he saw bloodstains on the earth, on every leaf and flower.

“The same susceptibility marked his intercourse with his fellows. Their sensations and emotions, their whims, their very words, were apt to become his, and to be reproduced with an uncanny reality in his own immediate practice. It was natural, then, that he should be doubly sensitive to feminine intuitions; that he should be able, even on occasion, thanks to an extreme concern with women’s inevitable burdens and sufferings, to translate, as men are very rarely able to do, their intimate dialect.”

The description given by Mr. Rhys of William Sharp’s method of work as characterised by an impetuosity which made him “disinclined for the poetic pains” belonged to one phase of his development. During the early days of hard work for the bare necessities of life, he had little time to devote to the writing of poetry or of purely imaginative work. His literary efforts were directed toward the shaping of his prose critical writings, toward the controlled exercise of the mental faculties which belonged to the William Sharp’s side of himself. From time to time the emotional, the more intimate self would sweep aside all conscious control; a dream, a sudden inner vision, an idea that had lain dormant in what he called “the mind behind the mind” would suddenly visualise itself and blot out everything else from his consciousness, and under such impulse he would write at great speed, hardly aware of what or how he wrote, so absorbed was he in the vision with which for the moment he was identified. In those days he was unwilling to retouch such writing; for he thought that revision should be made only under a similar phase of emotion. Consequently he preferred for the most part to destroy such efforts if the result seemed quite inadequate, rather than alter them. Later, when that side of his nature found expression in the Fiona Macleod writings—when those impulses became more frequent, more reliable, more coherent—he changed his attitude toward the question of revision, and desired above all things to give as beautiful an expression as lay in his power to what to him were dreams of beauty.

For his critical work, however, he studied and prepared himself deliberately. He believed that the one method of attaining to a balanced estimate of our literature is by a comparative study of foreign contemporary writing.

“The more interested I became in literature,” he on one occasion explained to an interviewer, “the more convinced I grew of the narrowness of English criticism and of the importance to the English critic of getting away from the insular point of view. So I decided that the surest way of beginning to prepare myself for the work of the critic would be to make a study of three or four of the best writers among the older, and three or four among the younger school of each nation, and to judge from the point of view of the nation. For example, in studying French literature, I would try to judge from the point of view of a Frenchman. When this task was done I tried to estimate the literature under consideration from an absolute impersonal and impartial point of view. Of course, this study took a long time, but it furnished me material that has been invaluable to me in my work ever since.”