Vanishing Roads and Other Essays

by Richard Le Gallienne

"It is only right, however, to add that I, and I only, was the author—in the literal and literary sense—of all written under the name of 'Fiona Macleod.'"

"Only, it is a mystery. I cannot explain." Does "I cannot explain" mean "I must not explain," or merely just what it says? I am inclined to think it means both; but, if so, the "must not" would refer to the purely personal mystification on which, of course, none would desire to intrude, and the "cannot" would refer to that psychological mystery which we are at liberty to investigate.

William Sharp's explanation to myself—as I believe to others of his friends—was to the same tenor as this posthumous statement. He and he only had actually written the "Fiona Macleod" fantasies and poems, but—yes! there was a real "Fiona Macleod" as well. She was a beautiful cousin of his, living much in solitude and dreams, and seldom visiting cities. Between her and him there was a singular spiritual kinship, which by some inexplicable process, so to say, of psychic collaboration, had resulted in the writings to which he had given her name. They were hers as well as his, his as well as hers. Several times he even went so far as to say that Miss Macleod was contemplating a visit to London, but that her visit was to be kept a profound secret, and that he intended introducing her to three of his friends and no more—George Meredith, W.B. Yeats, and myself. Probably he made the same mock-confidence to other friends, as a part of his general scheme of mystification. On one occasion, when I was sitting with him in his study, he pointed to the framed portrait of a beautiful woman which stood on top of a revolving book-case, and said "That is Fiona!" I affected belief, but, rightly or wrongly, it was my strong impression that the portrait thus labelled was that of a well-known Irish lady prominently identified with Home Rule politics, and I smiled to myself at the audacious white lie. Mrs. Sharp, whose remembrance of her husband goes back to "a merry, mischievous little boy in his eighth year, with light-brown curly hair, blue-grey eyes, and a laughing face, and dressed in a tweed kilt," tells us that this "love not only of mystery for its own sake, but of mystification also," was a marked characteristic of his nature—a characteristic developed even in childhood by the necessity he always felt of hiding away from his companions that visionary side of his life which was almost painfully vivid with him, and the sacredness of which in late years he felt compelled to screen under his pseudonym.

That William Sharp's affirmation of an actual living and breathing "Fiona Macleod" was, however, virtually true is confided by this significant and illuminating passage in Mrs. Sharp's biography. Mrs. Sharp is speaking of a sojourn together in Rome during the spring of 1891, in which her husband had experienced an unusual exaltation and exuberance of vital and creative energy.

There, at last [she says], he had found the desired incentive towards a true expression of himself, in the stimulus and sympathetic understanding of the friend to whom he dedicated the first of the books published under his pseudonym. This friendship began in Rome and lasted throughout the remainder of his life. And though this new phase of his work was at no time the result of collaboration, as certain of his critics have suggested, he was deeply conscious of his indebtedness to this friend, for—as he stated to me in a letter of instructions, written before he went to America in 1896, concerning his wishes in the event of his death—he realized that it was "to her I owe my development as 'Fiona Macleod,' though in a sense of course that began long before I knew her, and indeed while I was still a child," and that, as he believed, "without her there would have been no 'Fiona Macleod.'" Because of her beauty, her strong sense of life and of the joy of life; because of her keen intuitions and mental alertness, her personality stood for him as a symbol of the heroic women of Greek and Celtic days, a symbol that, as he expressed it, unlocked new doors in his mind and put him "in touch with ancestral memories" of his race. So, for a time, he stilled the critical, intellectual mood of William Sharp, to give play to the development of this new-found expression of subtle emotions, towards which he had been moving with all the ardour of his nature.

From this statement of Mrs. Sharp one naturally turns to the dedication of Pharais to which she refers, finding a dedicatory letter to "E.W.R." dealing for the most part with "Celtic" matters, but containing these more personal passages:

Dear friend [the letter begins], while you gratify me by your pleasure in this inscription, you modestly deprecate the dedication to you of this study of alien life—of that unfamiliar island-life so alien in all ways from the life of cities, and, let me add, from that of the great mass of the nation to which, in the communal sense, we both belong. But in the Domhan-Tòir of friendship there are resting-places where all barriers of race, training, and circumstances fall away in dust. At one of these places we met, a long while ago, and found that we loved the same things, and in the same way.

The letter ends with this: "There is another Pàras (Paradise) than that seen of Alastair of Innisròn—the Tir-Nan-Oigh of friendship. Therein we both have seen beautiful visions and dreamed dreams. Take, then, out of my heart, this book of vision and dream."

"Fiona Macleod," then, would appear to be the collective name given to a sort of collaborative Three-in-One mysteriously working together: an inspiring Muse with the initials E.W.R.; that psychical "other self" of whose existence and struggle for expression William Sharp had been conscious all his life; and William Sharp, general littérateur, as known to his friends and reading public. "Fiona Macleod" would seem to have always existed as a sort of spiritual prisoner within that comely and magnetic earthly tenement of clay known as William Sharp, but whom William Sharp had been powerless to free in words, till, at the wand-like touch of E.W.R.—the creative stimulus of a profound imaginative friendship—a new power of expression had been given to him—a power of expression strangely missing from William Sharp's previous acknowledged writings.

To speak faithfully, it was the comparative mediocrity, and occasional even positive badness, of the work done over his own name that formed one of the stumbling-blocks to the acceptance of the theory that William Sharp could be "Fiona Macleod." Of course, his work had been that of an accomplished widely-read man of letters, his life of Heine being perhaps his most notable achievement in prose; and his verse had not been without intermittent flashes and felicities, suggestive of smouldering poetic fires, particularly in his Sospiri di Roma; but, for the most part, it had lacked any personal force or savour, and was entirely devoid of that magnetism with which William Sharp, the man, was so generously endowed. In fact, its disappointing inadequacy was a secret source of distress to the innumerable friends who loved him with a deep attachment, to which the many letters making one of the delightful features of Mrs. Sharp's biography bear witness. In himself William Sharp was so prodigiously a personality, so conquering in the romantic flamboyance of his sun-like vitality, so overflowing with the charm of a finely sensitive, richly nurtured temperament, so essentially a poet in all he felt and did and said, that it was impossible patiently to accept his writings as any fair expression of himself. He was, as we say, so much more than his books—so immeasurably and delightfully more—that, compared with himself, his books practically amounted to nothing; and one was inclined to say of him in one's heart, as one does sometimes say of such imperfectly articulate artistic natures: "What a pity he troubles to write at all! Why not be satisfied with being William Sharp? Why spoil 'William Sharp' by this inadequate and misleading translation?"