One desirable result of this good fortune was a change of residence to a higher part of the town, where the air was purer, and access to green fields easier. To this end in the Spring of 1887 we took a little house for three years in Goldhurst Terrace, South Hampstead. As it was numbered 17a, much annoyance was caused as our letters frequently were delivered at No. 17. A name therefore had to be found, and we dubbed our new home Wescam, a name made up of the initials of my husband, myself and our friend Mrs. Caird whose town house was within two minutes’ walk of us. There was a sunny study for the invalid on the ground floor, to obviate as much as possible the need of going up and down stairs. The immediate improvement in his health from the higher air and new conditions was so marked that we had every reason to hope it would before many months be practically re-established.
The most important undertaking after the long illness was the monograph on Shelley written for Great Writers’ Series (Walter Scott) and published in the autumn of 1887. It was a work of love, for Shelley had been the inspiring genius of his youth, the chief influence in his verse till he knew Rossetti. He was in sympathy with much of Shelley’s thought: with his hatred of rigid conventionality, of the tyranny of social laws; with his antagonism to existing marriage and divorce laws, with his belief in the sanctity of passion when called forth by high and true emotion. He exclaimed that
“It is my main endeavour in this short life of Shelley to avoid all misstatement and exaggeration; to give as real a narrative of his life from the most reliable sources as lies within my power; to recount without detailed criticism and as simply and concisely as practicable, the record of his poetic achievements. To this end I shall chiefly rely on anecdote and explanatory detail, or poems and passages noteworthy for their autobiographical or idiosyncratic value, and on indisputable facts.”
He proposed merely to give a condensation of all really important material; and based his monograph mainly on Professor Dowden’s memorable work (then recently published). Many statements written by William Sharp about Shelley may be quoted as autobiographic of himself. For instance: “From early childhood he was a mentally restless child. Trifles unnoticed by most children seem to have made keen and permanent impression on him—the sound of wind, the leafy whisper of trees, running water. The imaginative faculties came so early into play, that the unconscious desire to create resulted in the invention of weird tales sometimes based on remote fact in the experience of more or less weird hallucinations.”
Or again: “The fire of his mind for ever consuming his excitable body, his swift and ardent emotions, his over keen susceptibilities all combined to increase the frailty of his physical health.” Or this in particular: “He did not outgrow his tendency to invest every new and sympathetic correspondent (and I would add, friend) with lives of ideal splendour.”
And in explanation of each idealization appearing to him “as the type of that ideal Beauty which had haunted his imagination from early boyhood,” he adds: “No fellow mortal could have satisfied the desire of his heart. Perhaps this almost fantastic yearning for the unattainable—this desire of the moth for the star—is the heritage of many of us. It is a longing that shall be insatiable even in death.” With Shelley he might have said of himself: “I think one is always in love with something or other; the error—and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it—consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is, perhaps, eternal.”
From the many letters the biographer received after the publication of his book I select three:
Brasenose College, Nov. 23d.
My dear Sharp,
I am reading your short life of Shelley with great pleasure and profit. Many thanks for your kindness in sending it. It seems to me that with a full, nay! an enthusiastic, appreciation of Shelley and his work, you unite a shrewdness and good sense rare in those who have treated this subject. And then your book is pleasant and effective, in contrast to a French book on Shelley of which I read reluctantly a good deal lately. Your book leaves a very definite image on the brain.