WILLIAM SHARP
CHAPTER IX
WILLIAM SHARP ("FIONA MACLEOD")
There were relations other than that of a common purpose between William Sharp and the Irish writers of the Celtic Renaissance. He was a friend of Mr. Yeats, a correspondent of Mr. Russell, and the chief commentator in the English reviews on the work of the Irish group of its writers. At one time, after 1897, the relationship promised to be very close, indeed. William Sharp, experimenting in psychics with Mr. Yeats, found occasion to interest him in "Fiona Macleod," and as a result of that interest Mr. Yeats came to think the new writer might write Celtic plays for performances he intended to arrange for Irish literary organizations. Thus it is that Mrs. Sharp has to include in her memoir of her husband a long letter to "Fiona Macleod" from Mr. Yeats, in which he suggests: "The plays might be almost in some cases modern mystery plays. Your 'Last Supper,' for instance, would make such a play." Mr. Sharp, apparently, did not follow up this suggestion, but shortly after the first performances of "The Irish Literary Theatre" in 1899 he wrote the two plays that, together with "Vistas," comprise all the dramatic writing that he has to his name. That "The Immortal Hour" and "The House of Usna" were intended for "The Irish Literary Theatre," I think there is little doubt, and it was only, I take it, when circumstances dictated that only plays by Irish writers should be put on by that theatre that Mr. Sharp looked elsewhere for their presentation. Only "The House of Usna" was, however, placed,—in the spring performances in London of The Stage Society, on April 29, 1900. Two months later "The House of Usna" was published in the July number of "The National Review." It pleased more, if we are to judge by the reviews, in the pages of the magazine than on the stage, but I hardly know why. "The House of Usna" is profoundly moving read in the study, surely, and if acted in such simplicity and enthusiasm as is that of the Abbey Theatre Players, I should think it would appeal as do the verse plays of Mr. Yeats. No play I have read carries me further into antiquity than this, none preserves more of what imagination tells us must have been the wilder beauty of what still are places of wild beauty, of the savagery of that old life of the hero tales of Ireland. Mr. Yeats's plays do not so recapture the past, they take us rather to places out of time, where all things are possible, because the world we know is put aside and all but forgot. Even on the stage, however, the new beauty of "The House of Usna" was recognized, a beauty as distinctive as that of the two plays of M. Maeterlinck that were produced with it, "Interior" and "The Death of Tintagiles," but it was adjudged not to be drama in the accepted sense of the word. "The House of Usna" is written in a prose that has many of the effects of verse, but that is less luxuriant than the prose of "Vistas." "The Immortal Hour," published shortly afterwards in the "Fortnightly Review" (1900), is written in blank verse that shows its author has been carefully attentive to the rhythms of the blank verse of Mr. Yeats, but it is neither so poetic nor so dramatic as "The House of Usna." Both plays are written out of the old legends that are the common property of Irish and Scottish Gael, and in both Sharp has treated his material with his wonted freedom of adaptation, a freedom that is generally justified by his results, his instinctive surety of reconstruction of myths being such as to make one wonder, with Mr. Russell, if Sharp is not, in some fashion, a reincarnation of a shanachie that sang as contemporary in the wars of Gael and Gall.
A common preoccupation with the plays of M. Maeterlinck is another bond between the founder of the Abbey Theatre and Sharp, a preoccupation passing rather quickly from Mr. Yeats, but long retaining its hold on the changing selves of Sharp. For all his early interest in "spiritual things," an interest very definitely expressed in "Romantic Ballads" (1888), Sharp would not have come to "Vistas" (1894) without the guidance of M. Maeterlinck, and he admits as much in his preface to these "psychic episodes." "Vistas" he often referred to as heralding a "great dramatic epoch," and he evidently regarded them as, in a way, drama, but it is hardly likely that he dreamed of their enactment on the stage. Many of them are essentially dramatic, but their method of presentation is almost always lyric or narrative rather than dramatic, even in the Maeterlinckian sense of the word.
It is possible, however, that Sharp might have written other of his projected plays, "The Enchanted Valleys," "The King of Ys," "Drosdan and Yssul," and their many fellows he had projected by title, and others, too, had not developments in Dublin, as I have said, carried Mr. Yeats away from him during 1899 and 1900, and had Sharp himself not during this drifting written that article "Celtic" which so aroused many in Ireland on its appearance in "The Contemporary Review." In this essay, basically a literary protest, "Fiona Macleod" declared "herself" against Separatist politics and affirmed "her" belief, as "she" had in "The House of Usna," that the future greatness of Ireland was to come, not through independence, but through the rebirth of her ancient spirituality in other nations to whom she had given her children.
The Celtic element in our national life [wrote "Fiona Macleod"] has a vital and great part to play. We have a most noble ideal if we will but accept it. And that is, not to perpetuate feuds, not to try to win back what is gone away upon the wind, not to repay ignorance with scorn, or dullness with contempt, or past wrongs with present hatred, but so to live, so to pray, so to hope, so to work, so to achieve, that we, what is left of the Celtic races, of the Celtic genius, may permeate the greater race of which we are a vital part, so that, with this Celtic emotion, Celtic love of beauty, and Celtic spirituality, a nation greater than any the world has seen may issue, a nation refined and strengthened by the wise relinquishings and steadfast ideals of Celt and Saxon, united in a common fatherland, and in singleness of pride and faith.
There was, however, if less intimacy with the Irish writers in these later years, no less admiration of their art, an admiration that led not only to praise of them in critical articles, but to a greater praise of imitation of their art. So possessed, indeed, was Sharp by the verse of the younger Irish poets as he read them to write of them, that when he turned to verse as "Fiona Macleod," he fell into their rhythms and reproduced the colors of their styles. Writing in prose as a critic of Mr. Yeats, Sharp came to write in verse as Mr. Yeats wrote, as in "The Dirge of the Four Cities": writing of "A. E." in prose as critic, Sharp came to write in verse as "A. E." wrote, as in "Flame on the Wind": writing of "Moira O'Neill," in prose as critic, Sharp came to write in verse as "Moira O'Neill" wrote, as in "I—Brasil": writing in prose as critic, of "Ethna Carberry," Sharp came to write in verse as "Ethna Carberry" wrote, as in "The Exile." So it was, also, that, coming to write of Celtic literature after study of Renan and Arnold, Sharp attained to something of their large utterance.
Sharp sees the Celtic Renaissance, however, always in relation to English literature, and always, it should be added, with French literature and Greek literature in the background. In this wide outlook, in his freedom from political prejudice, in his sympathy with Celtic literature and his knowledge of it, is his greatest strength as a critic of the Celtic Renaissance. His greatest weakness is his willingness in this writing, as elsewhere in his writing, to abide by first impressions, to abide also by the first-come phrase or epithet, banes of the ready writer. But read his essay "Celtic" after you have read the great essays of Renan and Arnold, and read it alongside of what Mr. Yeats has to say of that literature, and you will find it, as I said, of the stature of these. You will at the same time find in this writing the answer to the contention that there were really two personalities in William Sharp. Even Mrs. Sharp, who writes so restrainedly about this question of dual personality, believes the analytical faculty belonged to William Sharp, the imaginative to "Fiona Macleod." But in this criticism of the Celtic Renaissance which is signed "Fiona Macleod," there is as much analysis as is to be found anywhere in his work as William Sharp. So obviously was he identifying "F. M." with "W. S." in this critical writing that Mrs. Janvier, of those in the secret, wrote to him to take warning lest he betray himself. She pointed out to him that such a display of learning as he was making in the later "Fiona Macleod" work would surely lead to discovery. But he did not heed. The truth probably was that he wrote about Celtic things as "Fiona Macleod" because he perhaps felt about them, as "Fiona Macleod," as one who is bilingual thinks about work he is doing, say in German, in German, and about work he is doing in English, in English; but just as surely I believe, because what "Fiona Macleod" wrote commanded more respect than what William Sharp wrote, readier entrance into the magazines, and better pay. If there are those to whom such an explanation seems belittling to William Sharp, I can only say that they cannot have realized that he was a driven man earning his living by his pen. I am not, I confess, a sentimentalist in such matters, and while I do not wholly like his procedure in maintaining the fiction of "Fiona Macleod," it does not seem to me a very heinous sin.
He who would write of the work of William Sharp, indeed, must be resolute to remember that it is to be considered as an essay in the art of letters. There are so many temptations toward writing of it as a scientific problem,—for who is not interested in "dual personality"?—or as a "psychic revelation," if one is bitten—and who is not?—by curiosity about hidden "things"; or as an irritating hoax, if one has been befooled—and who, for one moment or another has not been?—into believing that this writing under the pseudonym of "Fiona Macleod" was the confession of a woman. The romance of it remains, no matter from what point of view you consider it, and, despite your preoccupation with this or that phase of it, the beauty of literary art of parts of it. Parts of it, I say, for to me no writer of our time was more uneven in his work. My point of view, indicated perhaps brutally, and with a firstly and secondly is:—
Firstly, that until he was nearly forty, William Sharp was no more than a skillful literary practitioner, a higher sort of hack, who had done some better writing of a tenuous kind of beauty but imitative in substance and art, in "Sospiri di Roma" and "Vistas," and that after forty, when he was developing one undeveloped side of himself as "Fiona Macleod," he developed another undeveloped side of himself in "Silence Farm." That he attained in a sort of writing, and greatly, that he had not attained in before, in "Silence Farm," has not been acknowledged, so easy has it been to those interested in his work to lose sight of all else in their pursuit of the "Fiona Macleod" side of his nature. It is true of "Silence Farm," as of almost all his other work done under the name of William Sharp, that it is imitative; but it is equally true that a large part of the "Fiona Macleod" work is imitative, too. "Silence Farm" is done under the influence of the later work of Mr. Hardy, but the material of "Silence Farm" is its author's own, and the color of the writing is as distinctly of the Lowlands as the color of "Tess" is of Wessex. That "Silence Farm" is better work in its kind, though that kind is less original than some of his writing as "Fiona Macleod," I have been forced against my prejudices to believe. If I did not so believe I would not have spoken of it side by side with "Tess."
Secondly, that as "Fiona Macleod," William Sharp did much good writing in almost everything published under the pseudonym, achieving wholeness of good tissue in certain sketches and tales and verses on rather varying kinds of subjects, but that his work as "Fiona Macleod" that is really distinguished is in stories of prehistoric Scotland and Ireland, and of Scotland and Ireland in the earliest historic time. In these tales of the Gaels of old time he for the first time breaks ground for others. Before he wrote "Silk o' the Kine," and "The Harping of Cravetheen," "The Annir Choile," and "Enya of the Dark Eyes," there were no short tales of like temper and content and style in literature.
To me little is significant in the early verse of "Fiona Macleod," as little was significant in all the verse of William Sharp until the time of "Sospiri di Roma." And for all the beauty of these pictures in words of the Campagna it is but a transient beauty. It was not until he was mastered by the new beauty that Mr. Yeats brought into English poetry that the verse of William Sharp won to itself abiding beauty and glamour and inevitable phrase. "The House of Usna" (1900) brought to me "Dim face of beauty haunting all the world," and the 1901 edition of "From the Hills of Dream," "The Enchanted Valleys,"; but it was not until after his death that I came upon his best verse of all, the verse of his last five years, which was gathered together posthumously in the 1907 edition of "From the Hills of Dream," and included as "The House of Beauty" in "The Poems and Dramas" of 1911. Who does not know these sets of verses and "The Dirge of the Four Cities," does not know the ultimate accomplishment of William Sharp in poetry.
That the "'Fiona Macleod' mystery" ended with the death of William Sharp is, then, my belief, as it is that it began before he conceived of exploiting a feminine sub-self he had long been aware of in himself. The beginnings of that sort of writing that made "Fiona Macleod" a reputation are to be found very early in his writing, in "The Son of Allan" of 1881, in the "Record" of 1884, in the preface to the "Romantic Ballads" of 1888, in the "Vistas" of 1894. That these earlier expressions of "spiritual" states and guesses at mysteries are not, except for certain parts of "Vistas," so well written as the best writing of similar kind by "Fiona Macleod," is true, and perhaps, at first glance, a matter of wonder. It is, however, I think, not difficult to find an explanation of the better quality of the later work, and that explanation is afforded, firstly and most largely, by the Celtic Renaissance. A man of thirty-five, to all who know him a very vital force, a very original personality, who has all his life wanted to make beautiful things in words out of his dream of life, has disappointed himself and his friends. He is suddenly afforded the opportunity, by the interest in Gaelic subjects that the Celtic Renaissance has awakened, to gain a hearing for work of a kind he has long wanted to do. He had not done such work previously, because he had to live by his pen and could work consistently only at the sort of thing that would sell. He was well known as a journeyman of letters, so well known for bookmaking, and the ways of getting commissions from London editors and publishers, that his knowledge of Highland life would be questioned. All in London knew him as a Londoner. It would be useless for him to say that the Celtic Renaissance had brought back his childhood to him, a childhood as definitely dominated by a Highland nurse as Stevenson's was by the Lowland Alison Cunningham. It would be useless to tell of his summers in Argyllshire and among the inner isles, his intimacy with fishermen who were as elemental as his own dreams of old time. It would have been cast up to him that the editor of "The Canterbury Poets" could not be an original writer, and the very nine days' wonder of "Vistas" would have been pointed to to prove that he might now do well enough, as an imitator, perhaps of Mr. Yeats, as he was in "Vistas;" successful as an imitator of M. Maeterlinck, but that an original Highland writer could not come out of Hampstead. There is no doubt in my mind that it was the part of wisdom for Sharp to put out the new work under a pseudonym, worldly wise if you will, but wise, too, with a higher wisdom. If he could keep the side of him he had never yet exhausted through hackwork apart from his other work, it would grow as it could not if it were a part of his daily stint.
Why Sharp chose a woman's name for his pseudonym has troubled many, but this choice was, I think, as was the assumption of a pseudonym, the part of wisdom. I do not believe, as he at times liked to believe, that he attained a woman's standpoint. He had been complimented on all sides for his composition of the wife's letters in "A Fellowe and his Wife" (1892), in which Mrs. von Teuffel wrote the husband's. Sharp enjoyed their writing as a tour de force and he probably believed they were very womanly. I should say that they showed insight into womanly ways of looking at things rather than a dramatic identification of himself with woman such as is George Meredith's. Sharp had already been experimenting with pseudonyms, that of "H. P. Siwaarmill," an anagram on his own name, being that he recurred to most often. He had written the whole of "The Pagan Review" in 1892 under eight different pseudonyms, and though, in the estimation of those to whom "Fiona Macleod" is all but a sacred name, it be sacrilegious to say it, William Sharp loved all sorts of fantastic tricks, hoaxes, mystifications, though in almost all his writing save in "Wives in Exile" he was seriousness itself. But the chiefest reason of all, in my estimation, for his assumption of a woman's name as his pseudonym was that it afforded greater protection against discovery. There are those who believe that he chose it because he wanted a chance to express that womanly element of human nature there is in all men, and there are others who believe that he was the possessor of a real dual personality in which the "Fiona Macleod's self" was a woman's consciousness; but he very infrequently, after "The Mountain Lovers" (1895), kept in mind in the writings he published as "Fiona Macleod's" that their author was supposed to be a woman, and it is wonderful, indeed, that he was able to preserve the secret until the end. In the earlier "Fiona Macleod" writing there is no revelation of the wide acquaintance with literature that was Sharp's, but despite his harassment by the constant identification of himself with "Fiona Macleod," he gradually allowed to creep into that writing more and more of what was known to be the knowledge of William Sharp, a knowledge unlikely to be also that of a Highland lady who lived apart from the world. His friends pointed out to him the danger he was running in writing from what was obviously a man's standpoint, as in his tales of the wars of Gael and Gall, and of revealing several sorts of interest that were known to be his, but their warnings were in vain. He was apparently unable to limit himself to the restrictions of the part of himself he had essayed to restrict himself to.
For my own part I was now sure the writing must be Sharp's and now sure it could not be his. I did not know of his intimate concern with questions of feminism until I read Mrs. Sharp's "Memoir," so that outspoken chant, the "Prayer of Women" in "Pharais," "Fiona Macleod's" first book, colored my outlook on all the writing that followed. I had no doubt at all but that "Pharais" was written by a woman, but "The Dan-nan-Ron" and "Silk o' the Kine" in "The Sin-Eater" (1895) seemed to me hardly a woman's. "The Washer of the Ford" (1896) was written from the man's point of view, too, but "Green Fire" (1896) seemed feminine again. So I wobbled in my opinion until "The Divine Adventure" (1900) and the critical writings of the volume that story gives title to, and the critical writing in "The Winged Destiny" (1905), made me believe again that "Fiona Macleod" was surely Sharp. I did not come upon the articles that now make up "Where the Forest Murmurs" (1907) until after the death of Sharp and the disclosure of the secret. Had his death not divulged the secret of the identity of "Fiona Macleod," it seems to me that collection must have disclosed it. Had Sharp lived after this there would not have been possible for him much further work from the seclusion his pseudonym gave him, and I doubt, once the secret was out, it would have been possible for him to write of things Celtic with the old gusto.
After all has been said it must be confessed, I think, that Sharp did not know the Highlander, either of the mainland or of the islands, very intimately. He wrote much better of his dream of life on the west coast in prehistoric times—out of his imagination of what that life must have been, an imagination founded on the reading of the old legends and modern collections of folk-lore, such as the "Carmina Gadelica" of Mr. Carmichael—than he did out of his knowledge of Highland life of to-day. The Achannas are in many of his tales of modern times, and wherever they are there is unreality, if not melodrama. Unreality, too, there is, in many phases, in the modern tales, and "highfalutinness" everywhere in them. And both unreality and "highfalutinness" offend in these modern tales as they would not in the tales of far times, though in these, as a matter of fact, they are not so much in evidence.
It would almost seem that the approach to reality drove Highland atmosphere from the stories. In "The Sin-Eater," one of the best of his writings that might be classed as a short story, the sin-eater and his confidant are Highlanders, but the description of the scene of his misfortune, the steading of the Blairs, might well have been that nearest to "Silence Farm." It is faithfully described, the scenes about the little home, whose owner lies dead, having the very smack of realism. In the latter part of the story the scene shifts to the coast and the tang of the story turns Gaelic and unreal. Was it thus, I wonder, always to the imagination of William Sharp, Lowland life real, Highland life mystical?
Sharp was handicapped, of course, in coming to the subject material he could best handle late in life, "Pharais" (1894) and "The Mountain Lovers" (1895), the first books published as by "F.M.," being just as definitely 'prenticework in their kind as was "Children of To-morrow" (1890) in its kind. Of the long stories other than "Children of To-morrow" published in his own name, "A Fellowe and his Wife" (1892) and "Wives in Exile" (1896) have no very serious intention, though both are well done after their kind, records of imaginings, respectively, of experiences of art life in Rome, and of yachting experiences in the Irish Sea. It was not until "Silence Farm" (1899), as I have said, that, as William Sharp, he found himself.
"The Gypsy Christ" (1896), which might well have been developed into a full-fledged romance, is less original than any of his longer writings. It is, like "The Weird of Michael Scott" and "A Northern Night," closely allied to essays of his other rôle, that of "F.M.," to catch and express "the tempestuous loveliness of terror," such as the catastrophe of "The Mountain Lovers," "The Barbaric Tales," and those short stories in which Gloom Achanna is hero-villain. It is in such work that Sharp shows his affinities to Poe, affinities which are not elsewhere as obvious as his affinities to De Quincey. Narrative was not native to De Quincey any more than it was to Sharp, though Sharp was led toward it by his interest in character, an interest that was not in any large measure given to De Quincey, who, when he turned to narrative other than that which relates what had happened to him or what he had dreamed had happened to him, makes the reader feel he did so as a concession to the public. Another interest that was Sharp's, an interest amounting to a passion,—out-of-doors,—De Quincey had not at all, for all his devotion to Wordsworth and to Wordsworth's interests. Like De Quincey, on the other hand, Sharp delights in "fine writing," in both senses of the phrase, in the "highfalutin" that is objectionable, and in the ornately beautiful that is one fitting expression of romantic thought. Both men preferred the mouth-filling word to the simple one, the Latinical adjective to the Saxon; both had rather see visions and dream dreams than write about the "common light of common hours"; both goad their imaginations until they run riot and so confuse their possessors, who should control them, that they are unable to distinguish between what is fact and what is fancy. You could carry the analogy further, to events of their lives—the runnings-away in boyhood; the devoted friendships to poets in youth; the incredible amount of hard work achieved in manhood despite of often recurring illnesses.
Of the long stories published as by "F.M.," Sharp repudiated "Flora MacDonald" because it was too much in the way of "ordinary romance," and "Green Fire" for the same reason and because it was largely about Brittany, a country with which, by some strange chance, he did not make himself familiar, though he had visited and learned to know well at least parts of all the other Celtic countries. It is to my mind, however, if not so definitely of a wholeness of texture as "Pharais" or "The Mountain Lovers," or so singular, less monotonous than either. All three of these stories disappoint my memory of them when I again read them. This is, I believe, because all three of them—and for that matter many of the short stories as well—are incompletely realized, or because—in the case of two of them, "The Mountain Lovers" and "Green Fire"—they are unevenly written. Their high intention and atmosphere remain with you after you have put the books aside, and in the course of time you forget their hurried writing, their inconsistencies, and their qualities of the "Shilling Shocker," the result of their author's failure to attain "the tempestuous loveliness of terror" that are in so many of them, long or short. As aids to this effacement of the cheapening elements are the very materials of the tales, their characters, now elemental, now other-worldly, and their background of mountains that uplift the spirit, and of menacing sea.
That Sharp wrote less exactly of the present-day people of the Highlands than of the background of their lives was largely because he had few opportunities to learn to know them intimately. There was a basis for such intimacy laid in his childhood, in the fact that his nurse was a Highland woman; there was something built on this basis by his boyhood's vacations in many parts of Argyllshire and voyages elsewhere along the west coast. Youth spent in Arran and Skye would have counted for much more, for the boy, once he is no longer child and before he has reached his youth and is awakening man, is not much more interested in people in real life for what they are than he is in minute description of their characters in books. He likes men for the sportsmanlike and adventurous things they can do, and he likes to read records of things sportsmanlike and adventurous, but men as men, unless they are eccentric to grotesqueness, do not arrest his attention. Even the dreamy boys, the artistic boys, are not likely to learn much of others, so preoccupied are they with themselves.
It was thus, I think, that Sharp's childhood was not what he would in later years have had it, not what in "The Laughter of Peterkin" he alleges the childhood of "Fiona Macleod" to have been. For all the influence of "Barabal," his nurse, it seems from his writing that her stories remain with him more as suggestions to imagination than as definite memories, and that the fisherman referred to in "Sheumas" left with him little more than "Barabal." How fresh and wonderful to him was actual contact with Highland life is almost pathetically revealed in a letter he wrote to Mrs. Sharp from Kilcreggan in the summer of 1894. In this letter he is all but exultant in the recording of the securing of "Celtic" material from a "Celtic Islesman from Iona." Of the actual life of the Islesmen and Glensmen he could have known but little, for long living among them is necessary to their understanding,—they are, as he wrote in this same letter, "passionately reticent." It was not the way of Sharp to fall back, in this deficiency of experience, on old legends and folk-tales collected in his own day, but to trust to his imagination as that was quickened by what knowledge he had of life in the inner isles and in Argyllshire, and by the very atmosphere of known places there that seemed to demand, as Stevenson put it, to have stories invented to fit them.
It is said, too,—Mrs. Sharp gives her authority to the story,—that friendship with the woman to whom he dedicated "Pharais," "E.W.R.," stimulated him to the work. "Because of her beauty, her strong sense of life, and of her joy of life," writes Mrs. Sharp in her memoir of her husband, "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 the ancestral memories of his race." And Mrs. Sharp quotes him further as declaring "without her there would have been no 'Fiona Macleod.'" Perhaps; but I doubt if, after the Celtic Renaissance had won a hearing, anything could have prevented Sharp from following what was, after all, a natural bent. I am not going to argue the matter out, but he himself admitted that his development as "Fiona Macleod" began "while I was still a child," and there is proof in almost every volume he published, even before he knew Mrs. Rinder ("E. W. R.," must of course be the author of "The Shadow of Arvor"), that his tendency was toward what became characteristic of "Fiona Macleod."
It was the love that Sharp had for all sorts of "psychic things," the mysterious, the unaccountable, the hidden, that led him to believe that "without her there would have been no 'Fiona Macleod.'" Sharp himself, when his "other self," with sense of humor alert, was more than willing to admit that it is easy to believe what one wishes to believe; and he delighted to tell a story at the expense of Mr. Yeats illustrative of the trite fact. Sharp went one day, in London, to call on Mr. Yeats. When lunch-time came, they set about cooking eggs. Mr. Yeats held them in a frying-pan over the little fire in the grate. As they slipped about, Mr. Yeats, all the while looking back in the room away from the fire as he talked to Sharp, allowed the pan to tip too far and the eggs fell out into the fire. So absorbed was he in the topic of conversation, most appropriately the disappearance of material things, that he did not notice the catastrophe or the quick disappearance of the eggs among the coals. When his perfervidness subsided for a moment, he turned to see if they were done. "There, what did I tell you!" said he; "our talk of these things has conjured up the powers and the eggs are gone." Sharp did not tell him of the accident. And there were no more eggs in the room to have for lunch.
One of the reasons that led William Sharp to write "Silence Farm" (1899) was to have something under his own name that might be very different from the stories of "Fiona Macleod." And "Silence Farm" is very different, a story without the distinguishing qualities of "Pharais" or "The Divine Adventure," and suggesting kinship to the work of his other self only through certain likenesses of domestic irregularity in the family of Archibald Ruthven to other domestic irregularity in the family of Torcall Cameron of "The Mountain Lovers." Though not of so original a kind, perhaps, as the best of the "Fiona Macleod" work, "Silence Farm" has to it a "wholeness of good tissue" that belongs to little work of this most uneven writer. "Silence Farm," I would emphasize again as I emphasized at the opening of this paper, is better written, both as regards style and architectonic quality, and it is a truer reading of life, than any of the Highland stories. Though it is a story of to-day, and about a life much like that made familiar by the writers of the Kailyard school, it is not to them, but to such kindred unsentimentalized work as Mr. Shan Bullock's, that you instinctively compare it. The people, indeed, are the same dour Presbyterians, though the one writes of Scotland and the other of the North of Ireland. And as you compare the material of "Silence Farm" with that of "The Squireen," for instance, you note, too, that the art of both is the art of Mr. Hardy.
There is little modern writing with which to compare the Highland stories of Sharp. It is not that the Highlands have not been much written about, but that they have been written about intimately by but few. No part of the world so out of the world as their outlying islands, the Hebrides, has been so bewritten by travelers from Martin's time to our own; but comparatively few have known either islands or mainland well enough to dare novels of their life, and of those who have so dared no one up to the time of Sharp had written a great realistic story of the Highlands, and but one or two great romances. Now we have Mr. Neil Munro, like Sharp a very uneven writer, whose "Children of Tempest"—to take one of his best stories—now delights and now tortures you; and yesterday we had William Black, famous for sunsets. Black knew the Hebrides well, very well for a Lowlandman turned Londoner, and he labored hard to make his books true and beautiful. Unfortunately it was not in him to do fine work, not even the best sort of the second order of novelists,—such work as Trollope's, for instance, which by dint of faithfulness and humanity almost persuades you now and then that it is of higher than second order. Black was faithful to what he saw and broadly sympathetic, but his writing not only lacks distinction, but, even at its best, as in "The Princess of Thule," home thrust to one's interest. Yet, such as it is, it is all but all that we have which attempts to put before us any broad view of Highland life. The one man of the generation older than the generation of Mr. Sharp who might have drawn Highland life greatly, Robert Buchanan, was diverted all his life, as Sharp was in the twenties and thirties, from doing what he would to what would boil the pot, but he left at least one story, a story of Sutherland, "A Child of Nature," to prove to us what his reading of Highland life might have been. Had Stevenson been born a Highlander, he might have given us both novels of the Highlands of the order of "Weir of Hermiston," and romances really Highland in quality, as "Kidnapped" and "Catriona" are not.
I suppose that, back of all the failure to deal realistically with Highland life, this rare attainment of a romance of Highland life at all faithful to it, is the making of the Highlander into a stage hero by Scott. There are those to-day who fail to find any glamour in "Waverley" or "Rob Roy" or "The Legend of Montrose," but it is still there to me, investing the figures of Fergus MacIvor and the MacGregor and the Children of the Mist as it did in childhood, when I was so fascinated that I prized my Campbell plaided paper soldiers next to my Continentals in blue and buff. In going through an old trunkful of school-books only the other day, I came upon one of these bonneted fellows, still wonderfully preserved, in an old atlas of the heavens, and then I knew all of a flash why it was that the poor boy soldiers that I saw in Highland accoutrement in the yard of Edinburgh Castle during the Boer War so disappointed me by their appearance and bearing. They were not half so brave as the piper who used to make the rounds of my boyhood's town and bring tears to my eyes with his "Campbells are Comin'." I write this that my quarrel with much of what Sharp has written of the Highlands, that portion that seems to me sentimentalized or one-sided, may not be put down to lack of appreciation of the romance, the eeriness, and otherworldliness that there unquestionably are in that life.
It is their aloofness from the everyday story, their unusual use of the supernatural that has given the longer stories written out of the "Fiona mood," as Mr. Sharp once spoke of his possession, their appeal to most readers, but there is here in America a class who put the highest valuation on the shorter stories Mr. Sharp called "spiritual tales." To those who hold this view "The Divine Adventure" is of the nature of revelation. To me it is hardly this, but very interesting, not so much for its putting of the relations of Body, Will, and Spirit to one another in life and at death, as for its beautiful writing, and for its definite betrayal, when its author is writing most intimately, of a man's attitude, though he published the story as the work of "Fiona Macleod." These "spiritual tales" do not belong, all of them, to his "Fiona Macleod" period, for "Vistas" (1894) contains many of them, though they are cast here in dialogue form, and there are others among the work published under his own name. In fact, the writing under the two names never becomes liker in quality and intention than when it is "spiritual." The sketch from Part II of "The Dominion of Dreams" (1899), entitled "The Book of the Opal," for instance, is written on the very key of "Fragments of the Lost Journals of Piero di Cosimo" (1896), far apart their subject material, and "The Hill-Wind" by "W. S." dedicated as it is to "F. M.," might well be a rejected passage from "The Mountain Lovers." There is the color of the Highlands and Islands about many of these mystical stories, about "The Hill-Wind," by "W. S." and "The Wind, the Shadow, and the Soul," the epilogue "F. M." wrote to the "Dominion of Dreams"; but most of these shorter mystical tales have not the tang and savor of farm-home on lonely moors, or fisher's hut on the lonelier machar, that is characteristic of most of the tales long and short, that deal with modern days.
Nor are the meanings of these "spiritual tales" consistently indicated in symbols taken from Scottish life, nor is their supernaturalism native to it. Mrs. Spoer (Ada Goodrich-Freer), in her "Outer Isles" (1902), tells us "The Celtic Gloom" amuses the Hebridean. If so, what effect would such discussion as that of "The Lynn of Dreams" and "Maya" have upon him? But if such essays are not written out of Highland life, they are none the less interesting, and in the case of "Maya," with its consideration of waking dream, beautiful as art, and valuable, too, as a contribution to science.
So far does Sharp go in his belief as to the apprehension of thought through powers other than those of the senses, that in "The Winged Destiny" he can look forward to a time "when the imagination shall lay aside words and pigments and clay, as raiment needless during the festivals of the spirit, and express itself in the thoughts which inhabit words—as light inhabits water or as greenness inhabits grass." Not only does he foresee such a time, but he foreshadows it, heralds it in some of his sketches, "Aileen" for one, by attempting it. Perhaps he has succeeded, perhaps not. To me the attempt is a failure, not, I think, because he is writing for to-morrow, for that age when the spiritual awakening he so often prophesied shall have come, but because he is attempting what cannot be done in any age. If he were seeking only suggestion, well and good. But he seeks more, and fails, I think, to attain more. It seems to me impossible that the suggestions he creates can ever be more than suggestions. They cannot become definite concepts that will mean the same thing to all men. Suggestion, the opening-up of vistas, is a high attribute of the art he follows; but he is not content with suggestion, he would seek more definite expression of what, after all, is not thought but mood. So it is that he is most successful when conveying mood and less successful when conveying esoteric thought. As a critic, of course, on a plane easier for the conveyance of thought, Sharp is definite enough, completely successful in conveying the ideas that he intends to convey.
Often, I fear, when Sharp intends "spiritual history," either in a tale wholly devoted to this purpose, as "The Divine Adventure," or as explanatory to the incidents of some more tangible tale, he is really only playing with words, beautiful words, words sometimes so beautiful that we are apt to forget that words are to be used not alone for beauty's sake. Often, again, I fear, he will introduce beautiful symbols simply for their beauty and not because they have a real purpose, not because they will more intimately convey, even to the initiated, the intent of his writing. That these practices are the result of carelessness, sometimes, as well as of his subservience to beauty, the fascination that words merely as words or visions merely as visions exert upon him, is, I think, true. It is but seldom, I believe, that the underlying thought is incoherent. In almost all of his earlier writing, however, even in the earlier "Fiona" writing, he is very careless. He contradicts himself in his short stories as to facts, he gets his family relationships tangled in a way that cannot be explained by any process of nature, and so, too, I think, he gets his symbols mixed, or deludes himself into the belief that something that was hastily written "came to him" that way and so should be preserved in that exact expression, even though to him at the second reading it meant nothing definite. He jumps to conclusions again and again in what he writes about birds, where I can follow him on a certain footing of knowledge. If he is so careless about facts, if he can, even though it is a slip, confuse Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary, if he can mention birds in a description of Highland landscape that is characteristic of a certain time of year when birds of that species would be in the Highlands only by accident at that time of year, it is more than likely, slips though these may be, that there will be similar slips in all he writes, no fewer, it is likely, in his writings of psychic things than elsewhere.
There is possible, of course, no hard-and-fast classification of his writings. Class shades into class almost imperceptibly. It is particularly difficult to draw the line between the several kinds of stories and sketches he writes that involve supernaturalism of one kind and another. There is possible, however, a rough-and-ready distinction between those stories of his which are esoterically mystical and those which, while concerned with the supernatural, are concerned with it in the way familiar in old romance. Of this "usual supernatural" are those in which "second sight" is the motive, second sight which is always to be looked for as the commonest supernatural motive in the writing of all Gaels, either Alban or Irish. Sharp introduced "second sight" into "The Son of Allan" (1881); it is in "Pharais" (1894), the first of his "F. M." work; it is developed at some length in "Iona" (1900), which is a microcosm of all his writing. In "Iona," Sharp puts himself on record as holding stoutly belief in the reality of the power:—
The faculty itself is so apt to the spiritual law that one wonders why it is so set apart in doubt. It would, I think, be far stranger if there were no such faculties. That I believe, it were needless to say, were it not that these words may be read by many to whom this quickened inward vision is a superstition, or a fantastic glorification of insight.
The Achannas, in the uncanny stories in which they are heroes and villains, are all possessed by the power of the second sight, but second sight is not the most remarkable of their supernatural powers. Hypnotic suggestion Gloom uses as an everyday agent in his affairs. It is through hypnotic suggestion that he puts madness upon Alasdair M'Ian, playing to him the Pibroch of the Mad, Alasdair M'Ian, in telling whose story "Fiona Macleod" revealed—I suppose, by chance—something of the struggle of William Sharp to succeed in letters. Much more frequently, however, he uses a supernatural power that is further removed from those in which modern science is interested, such as the machination of fairies that made Allison Achanna the "Anointed Man"—that, in plain speech, had driven him fey; or such as the lure of the serpent goddess that drove to his death the piper hero of "By the Yellow Moon Rock," or the exchanging of human child for fairy child that is the burden of "Faraghaol."
It is much more likely that William Sharp would have made more of this changeling motive had it not come so near to the question of dual personality, which it would be dangerous to him to discuss, as would that question so closely akin, the question of people who are "away,"—that is, with the fairies,—a kindly explanation of insanity, chronic or recurrent. As William Sharp he has touched on the question of dual personality several times in his verses, and very definitely in "A Fellowe and his Wife." In this last-named book he says, in a letter that the Countess Ilse writes to her husband in Rügen: "This duality is so bewildering. I to be myself, whom you know, and whom I know—and then that other I, whom you do not know at all and whom I only catch glimpses of as in a mirror, or hear whispering for a moment in the twilight." That he could not take up the topic so definitely in his later writings must have, indeed, been a cross to him, for there was hardly any other question, unless perhaps that of "ancestral memory," which interested him more deeply. It might be argued, I suppose, that he did discuss it in "The Divine Adventure," in considering the relations of Spirit, Will, and Body. Mrs. Sharp, I take it, so holds when she says in her "Memoir" that the William Sharp work was that of the Will and the "Fiona Macleod" work beyond the control of the Will. And it is true that these three, the Spirit, Will, and Body, though each is given a distinctive personality, each a memory distinct from the memory of the others, are all but the component parts of one man. Mrs. Sharp does not, however, anywhere avow directly a belief in the possession of a real dual personality by her husband, and she definitely contradicts Mr. Yeats for his expression of belief that "William Sharp could not remember what as 'Fiona Macleod' he had said to you in conversation."
Very different from these short stories I have been discussing are three of the four contained in the volume entitled "Madge o' the Pool" (1896), published as by William Sharp. Of the one that is somewhat in the manner of certain of the "F. M." stories, the "Gypsy Christ," I have spoken. Two, "The Coward" and "The Lady in Hosea," are but "the usual thing." "Madge o' the Pool" is the one really worth while. In this story, with such river pirates as we have met, sentimentalized, in "Our Mutual Friend," as material, Sharp writes as realistically as he does in "Silence Farm," and with a sympathy and pathos that his objective method cannot exclude.
There are episodes or sketches, some of them what sharp calls "prose imaginings," throughout his many books, that one may hardly call short stories, or myths, or studies in folk-lore, or criticism, or any of the other many kinds of writing that he essayed. Perhaps "memories" would be the proper general term for writing of this kind. In almost every one of these episodes or sketches there is a germ of a story, and some, I suppose, regard them as but unrealized art. But I for one am glad Mr. Sharp did not "work them up." In them are some of his best writing and some of that most personal and intimate. I have spoken of "Aileen" and "Barabal"; "Sheumas, a Memory," is another that is memorable, and memorable too, are "The Sea Madness" and "The Triad." "The Triad" is almost his credo, certainly a statement of the things he holds "most excellent"—"primitive genius, primitive love, primitive memory." Here Sharp recurs, as so often in his writing, to "ancestral memory," that possession of men by which they are aware of what was in the world before they were, through oneness with the universal memory into which they are absorbed in dream or vision or of which they become aware by what we call intuition. If such a power be restricted so that its possessor recalls only certain parts of antiquity, he is virtually in the state of him who believes he remembers what he remembers because of previous incarnations. I have no personal opinion to express on the subject, but if such memories exist in us because of our participation in a universal memory or because of reincarnation, it is easy to explain why Sharp is best in his writing of myths, his pictures of the wild beauties of love and war and dream in barbaric Erin and Alba. It is because he is the reincarnation of the shanachie of the Dark Ages. When he thought of reincarnation, however, in relation to himself, he thought, I have no doubt, of himself as the reincarnation of a druid, one who had been aware of mysteries; but what he really was, in life, with his magnificent enthusiasm and bravado,—picturesque raiment after all and no more for the high-hearted and inherently ailing body of him,—was this reincarnation of the shanachie, such an one as his own Oran the Monk turned tale-teller. If you doubt that he was shanachie, not druid, compare the two legends in "Beyond the Blue Septentrions." The ordered beauty of the legend that tells of the derivation of the name of Arthur from Arcturus falls familiarly on our ears. It is evidently made under a lamp by one who has read many old legends. It is no druidic revelation. The other, that which ends with the three great hero-leaps of Fionn from the Arctic Floes to the Pole, from the Pole up to Arcturus, from Arcturus to the Hill of Heaven itself, is fantastic, bizarre, extravagant to grotesqueness, with the very flamboyance of old Irish legend and modern Irish folk-tale. In other words, it is in the very manner of the shanachie of the Dark Ages, whether his work was recorded then as court poem or has been handed down by word of mouth among the folk. Nor is there anything inconsistent in this wild imagining with a very different power displayed in "moralities" like his "Last Supper." I have heard stories as incongruous, one uproarious, another of cloistral quiet and piety, from the old Irish gardener with whom I spent a large part of my happier days, the days from seven to seventeen. Lawrence lost his life doing a "retreat" morning after morning on the cold stone floor of a Vincentian church, not in any sudden repentance at fourscore and three for the sins of his youth for they had been fewer than those of almost all I know, but in the usual way of his austere life. Yet Lawrence was just as much himself when he was telling me stories of Dean Swift that were full of malice and brutality and orgiac ecstasy.
The range of the shanachie is wide, and wide, too, the range of Sharp in the rôle of shanachie of barbaric life on both sides of the Moyle. Among such writings there are few tellings of the order of the folk-tale, more of the order of the hero saga, many—perhaps the best of them—of an order all his own that has developed, it is likely, from the old "Saints' Lives," but to which he has given a ring of authenticity that makes them seem descended from an antiquity as remote as that of folk-tale or hero-tale. "The Flight of the Culdees" brings before you with vividness what must have been the life of the Celtic missionaries in the days when the men out of Lochlin began to seek the Summer Isles; and "The Annir Choile" and "The Woman with the Net," what was the fate they meted out to those among themselves who slipped back into the pleasant old ways of paganism. These are written out of his own revisualization of the past. More immediately sprung of the old legends are "The Three Marvels of Hy," which tells of the inner life of Columba and his brethren on Iona, and "Muime Chriosd," which utilizes folk-lore as old or older than the legends collected by Mr. Alexander Carmichael in his pursuit of the stories of St. Bride among the peasantry of the Outer Isles. "The Song of the Sword" and "Mircath" have in them the battle-madness of the Viking, whetted to its keenest intensity as he meets the hard resistance of the Hebrideans; and "The Laughter of Scathach" and "The Sad Queen," that more terrible fury of the Amazon who ruled in Skye. Than this last-named story Sharp has done no starker writing, but it is so evidently from a man's point of view that it confirmed many in the belief that "Fiona Macleod" could not be a woman.
"The Washer of the Ford" has its roots in folk-lore, but it is so remoulded in the mind of the writer that it is rather a re-creation of the old belief than a restoration of it. There are those who would rather have had Sharp follow the tales as they are told by Campbell of Islay, Cameron of Brodick, and Carmichael of South Uist, but to me, unless the tale is one familiar to many readers, such a remoulding, if done with power, is surely a prerogative of the artist. But when he takes a well-known legendary character, as well known among the Gaels as Achilles among English school-boys, and changes his hair from black to golden and his stature from short to tall, utterly transforming not only our picture of him, but the significance of his deeds, then I object, as I would object if he had made the fair-haired and great-statured Achilles into such "a little dark man" as the Red Branch legends record Cuchullin to have been. Nor would I quarrel even with his changing of the spirit of the old tales if he had always, as he has almost always, substituted a new beauty for the old beauty of the legend in its bardic or folk form. It is in the few instances in which his dream of the old tale does not lift to so great a power in its way as the old tale possessed in its way that I protest. Of such a nature are some of the changes Sharp made in his retelling of the "Three Sorrows of Story-Telling" in "The Laughter of Peterkin," which, it must be remembered, however, was hurried work, almost hackwork.
Sharp was particularly successful, I think, in his handling, in the three tales—he calls them "legendary moralities"—in which he brings Christ to the straths of Argyll. These three are "The Last Supper," "The Fisher of Men," and "The Wayfarer." The last is the least successful of the three, but significant in its attack on certain forms of Presbyterianism for their attempts to kill out, as un-Christian, the old ways of life among the Highlanders. This charge was made fifty years ago by Campbell of Islay, and it had been repeated only yesterday by Mr. Carmichael. William Black and Mr. Munro confirm it, too, in their novels, and, in fact, it is only what one expects of Puritanism, whether in its dominating of the Scotch Presbyterian minister or of the Irish Catholic priest. The latter is to-day doing as much to kill the joy of life in Connacht as did even the minister of the Free Kirk yesterday on the Lews. It may have been partly to hide his identity that Sharp assumed what some thought an anti-Presbyterian attitude in his "Fiona Macleod" writing; it may have been the sympathy of the artist toward a church that has conserved art that led him to what some thought a pro-Catholic attitude; but scratch this gypsy artist and you find, surprising as it may be, moral prejudice for Protestantism. Does he not admire Torcall Cameron and Archibald Ruthven, stern Calvinists both? "The Fisher of Men," and "The Last Supper" have in them the austere beauty of the old morality plays, a beauty that is akin to the beauty of the Puritan imagination of Bunyan, and a tenderness that we may in vain look for there. They are written in all reverence and simplicity, and it is no wonder we find Mr. Yeats suggesting that "Fiona Macleod" turn them into plays for the Irish Theatre.
I do not care so much for "The Birds of Emar," myths he has rewoven from the "Mabinogion" into Gaelic texture, or the series that purport to be collected among the Isles and are found to be very like certain well-known Greek legends. These, too, seem to me reweavings, and the "Treud-nan-Ron" and "The Woman at the Crossways"; and "The Man on the Moor," though its origin is far from their origins, is also a reweaving. In certain of his writing of this time Sharp passes over virtually into criticism or comparative mythology, as in "Queens of Beauty" and "Orpheus and Oisin," and in many of the papers of "Where the Forest Murmurs." These all have interest; but some smell much of the lamp; and none of them are to be compared to the best of his "Seanchas," to "The Harping of Cravetheen," or "Enya of the Dark Eyes," or "Silk o' the Kine," or "Ula and Urla"; or to his Plays "The House of Usna" and "The Immortal Hour," in which, for all the savagery, there is nobility, the nobility that was in the old legends themselves, that nobility that withstood even the hand of Macpherson, that nobility that has been reproduced most nobly of all in the "Deirdre" of Synge.
I am not so sure that the tone of these old myths is always distinctively Celtic, as it is undoubtedly in "The Annir Choile," and in other "Seanchas" that reveal him at his best. There was viking blood in Sharp, and it comes out, I think, in such tales as "The Song of the Sword." How he came to write these barbaric tales I do not know, though I have sometimes thought that the "Dhoya" (1891) of Mr. Yeats may have suggested them, as the Hanrahan stories may have suggested certain of the more modern tales. But whatever their genesis, the heroes and heroines of the "Seanchas" seem to him like the heroes and heroines of Homer and the Greek tragedians; and his friend whom he thought inspired him to much of the "F. M." work stood, we must remember, as symbolical to him of the women of Greek as well as of Celtic legend.
There are many indications, in his last writing, not only in that unpublished book on "Greek Backgrounds" and in his articles in the magazines on Sicily, all by William Sharp, but in the "Fiona Macleod" work, that he would have come to write of Greek antiquity with an enthusiasm very like that with which he wrote of Gaelic antiquity. "W. S." is speaking with the voice of "F. M." when he says in a letter to Mrs. Sharp, dated Athens, January 29, 1904: "It is a marvelous homecoming feeling I have here. And I know a strange stirring, a kind of spiritual rebirth."
One reason, perhaps, that the best work of Sharp has come out of his consideration of the Celts of antiquity is that the stark stories he has to tell of them restrain his style, a style too flamboyant when there is in what he is writing a large opportunity for description of landscape or exhibition of great emotion in his characters. Another reason is, perhaps, that his tendency to introduce the supernatural is more in harmony with the subject material got out of antiquity than of the subject material got out of to-day. We can accept magic in these old tales, even to the incantations of Bobaran the White that swayed the waves of the sea so that Gaer, the son of Deirdre, was saved from the men of Lochlin. That is as it should be in druidic times. It is impossible, of course, that Bobaran had power over the waves, but in such a story such an episode seems more probable than the possible hypnotic suggestion of Gloom Achanna's pipe-playing that sent Manus MacOdrum to his death among the fighting seals, because to-day we do not often come upon such things. It is even less easy to accept the piping to madness of Alasdair in "Alasdair the Proud." Hypnotic suggestion may drive to death in the sea a man half fey because of sorrow long endured and the superstition that he is descended from seals, but pipe-playing cannot believably in modern tales drive a man insane, whatever it may do in the famous old "Pied Piper of Hamelin" or other folk-tale.
So, too, in the verse of Sharp, whether lyric or dramatic, it is the Celt that inspires him to his best work. Nowhere does his verse win so much of beauty and glamour as when his thought turns to the four cities of Murias and Finias and Falias and Glorias, or when it breaks into a chant on the lips of Etain, in "The Immortal Hour."
Though there is less unevenness of technique, both in the style and in the unfolding of the story, in these "Seanchas" than elsewhere in his writing, the technique breaks down at times here, too, more usually through sins of omission than through sins of commission. Sharp realized the something wanting that so many find in much of his writing, even in much that is most beautiful, realized it so keenly that he felt called upon to explain. He explained not directly, it is true, as if in answer to criticism, but none the less definitely in thus affirming his attitude toward legends in the "Sunset of Old Tales": "We owe a debt, indeed, to the few who are truly fit for the task [the collecting of tales from oral tradition], but there are some minds which care very little to hear about things when they can have the things themselves." This statement explains in part why it is that the life of the people, even that part of their life that fronts the past, has escaped him. He prefers his dream, thinking that it is their dream, or the dream of their ancestors. He has, indeed, the thing itself, the Highlander's dream, and when it is given to him to impart that dream fully we forgive him the proud words I have just quoted. The pity of it is he has not always so succeeded through the way he has chosen, and then it is, of course, that we condemn him for the lack of that humility the great dramatic artist must have whereby he must forget himself and so subordinate himself that tradition or life speaks through him.
It is not to be wondered, then, that there is little direct record of folk-lore of his own collecting in his writing, even when he is writing of folk-topics. There are borrowings in plenty, especially in "Where the Forest Murmurs," and even when the collecting seems his own, as it does in "Earth, Fire, and Water," "Children of Water," and "Cuilidh Mhoire," it is diamond dust, not diamonds, to which he gives so beautiful setting.
Just as appealing to Sharp as the old myths themselves are the localities that tradition or the stories themselves assign as background to them. He loves Iona not only for its gray and barren beauty, but because it was here Columba wrought his wonders. "Iona," which fills the major part of the volume "The Divine Adventure" gives title to, is the finest in quality as well as the longest of his writings that may be called, prosaically, topographical. They, in their varying ways, are much more than merely topographical, whether done in the way of "F. M.," as "Iona" is, and as "From the Hebrid Isles" is, and several papers from "Where the Forest Murmurs"; or in the way of "W. S.," as "Literary Geography" is. In this last-named book, Scott and Stevenson, among others, are put against the background that inspired their work, as in "Iona" certain stories are imagined so as to fit their surroundings and certain legendary history narrated that is fitting to these surroundings with an appropriateness almost too exact to be believable. In "Iona," because he loved the island that inspired its writing beyond any other of the places he loved greatly, is to be found some of his very best work, and examples of all kinds of his writing, as I have said; and even when this "topographical writing," as in some of his magazine articles, is evidently of the sort initially intended to "float cuts," it is very well done, done most often with distinction. At times, of course, it suffers from over-emphasis, as do the descriptive portions of his long stories, but generally he attunes his writing to the genius of the place. This is as true of his letters as of what he wrote for the public, especially true of that series on Algiers from which Mrs. Sharp quotes in her "Memoir." Papers of this sort, papers giving the genius of place, Sharp was happier in, I think, than in those which are more definitely the out-of-door essay. Sharp knew much of birds and small mammals, of trees and plants, with a knowledge that evidently began in childhood, but, as with so much else in his life, this knowledge he never had time to fill out and deepen through patient observation. You must not, then, turn to "Where the Forest Murmurs" to find writing of a kind with that in which Thoreau and Jefferies so finely attained, much less that loving intimacy with the personal side of birds and animals that so humanly tempers the scientific spirit in White of Selborne. Nor is there in them the racy earthiness of Mr. Burroughs. Their greatest asset is their enthusiasm over the beauty of the world they are written to praise; the next greatest their power of catching in words the mood of a landscape; their next greatest their distinction of style, though there are several in which the style is wholly without distinction. Now and then, too, they are valuable for their guesses at the whys and wherefores of things. There are to-day many explanations of what is commonly called "The Lure of the Wild." Is not this as revelatory as any?—
Is this because, in the wilderness, we recover something of what we have lost?... Because we newly find ourselves as though surprised into an intimate relationship of which we have been unaware or have indifferently ignored? What a long way the ancestral memory has to go, seeking, like a pale sleuth-hound, among obscure dusks and forgotten nocturnal silences, for the lost trails of the soul! It is not we only, you and I, who look into the still waters of the wilderness and lonely places, and are often dimly perplext, are often troubled we know not how or why: some forgotten reminiscence in us is aroused, some memory, not our own, but yet our heritage is perturbed, footsteps that have immemorially sunk in ancient dusk move furtively along obscure corridors in our brain, the ancestral hunter or fisher awakes, the primitive hillman or woodlander communicates again with old forgotten intimacies and the secret oracular things of lost wisdoms. This is no fanciful challenge of speculation. In the order of psychology it is as logical as in the order of biology is the tracing of our upright posture or the deft and illimitable use of our hands, from unrealizably remote periods wherein the pioneers of man reach slowly forward to inconceivable arrivals.
The weakness of these essays that are like out-of-door essays, but are not out-of-door essays, is their dearth of freshly observed fact. This dearth would not matter so much if there were not so many of them, but a book full of such essays with little original observation will pall, no matter how well written, no matter how interesting the personality of the writer. Thus it is that some of the essays of Jefferies pall, some of those written in his last days, of Jefferies who had in his earlier writing been so objective. In Thoreau there is a happy combination of freshly observed fact with personal comment, and in Mr. Burroughs a personal element greatly subdued, and presented in most of the essays only through the selective art that has preserved the incidents he relates out of many of a vast store of their kind.
In these "nature studies" of Sharp, as in so much of his writing, there is a great deal of generalization from phenomena superficially observed. He is not so often inaccurate, but he is very often merely repetitive, giving us in beautiful and oftentimes distinguished phrase what others have given us before. Sharp wrote sometimes, I have no doubt, with the thing he describes before him but oftener, it would seem, from notes, and oftenest, I take it, from memory. Sometimes it is best to write thus from memory. The unessential will fade out, the essential remain; but with Sharp the trouble is that the first observation has often been hurried. He was content with the beauty that he saw when he first noticed the incident; he did not wait to observe what in the further actions of the life observed would make that beautiful incident more significant. It may, of course, be said that all he was after was the impression that the passing incident made upon him. Perhaps so, and if so, more is the pity, because, while, as I have said, one out-of-door essay with little or even with nothing but the personality of the writer may interest, or perhaps two such, or even ten, a book full will be monotonous. At its best, however, his writing of "natural romance" is of great beauty. "Still Waters," for one, is almost perfect, as perfect as this sort of thing may be. It is wrought of his own experiences with just enough of mythological data to give it the texture of old and lasting things.
"The Rainy Hyades," on the other hand, is largely a rehash of folk-lore notes, second-hand work with very little added from experience and very little finely imagined or recaptured by way of ancestral memory. At times it would seem that, poor, tired man, he had to feed his flagging invention from a dictionary of quotations. So, it appears, he has done in his "Winter Stars" as well as in "The Rainy Hyades." As I think over the unevenness of these essays, the beauty of "Still Waters," and the obviousness of these others, I am brought back again to wondering what Sharp would have done had all his time been his to do as he would with. Such wonderment is, of course, idle, idle as that as to what Keats would have done had he lived, for a man's art is judged by what it is, with no tempering of the appraisement by what the man's life has been. Fortunately there is inspiring work in plenty in Sharp, in this, as in other phases of his work, to make readers turn to him when interest in him as a phenomenon of current literature has passed away. It is hard to think of the time when writing so beautiful as that of "Still Waters" will not be sought by lovers of beauty in words and by lovers of beauty in landscape, and when the opening of "The Coming of Dusk" will not be turned to, as the opening of Emerson's "Nature" is turned to to-day.
Were I to attempt to enumerate the critical writings of Sharp, from the "Rossetti" of 1882 to "The Winged Destiny" of 1904, I should run up a catalogue that would exceed any even of Walt Whitman's. For years Sharp lived by criticism, as editor of "The Canterbury Poets" and as reviewer for many of the London journals. To me none of this critical work is significant until he came to write of the movement that carried him to fame,—to fame, I say, because "Fiona Macleod" was famous for a decade, and not only as a mystery, but as a revealer of a new beauty in words, and as a widener of horizons.
I have, I think, by this time made clear what to me is the great strength of William Sharp—his power to revisualize the Celtic past of Scotland and to imagine stories of that past that are as native to it as those handed down in Bardic legend or folk-lore. I have emphasized my belief that in other kinds of writing his attainment is less original, though often beautiful in its imitativeness, and this imitativeness I will explain as being due partly to that quality of the play-actor that was in him as in so many of Celtic blood, partly to his lack of time to hew out for himself a way of his own, and partly to his quick responsiveness to any new beauty pointed out by work that he admired. It was not altogether, however, lack of time that prevented his attainment of a larger originality, an originality in other sorts of writing than the "Seanchas." Sharp had an unfortunate disbelief in early life in the value of technique. In the preface to the "Romantic Ballads" (1888), for instance, he expressed the belief that "the supreme merit of a poem is not perfection of art, but the quality of the imagination which is the source of such real or approximate perfection." This, as I interpret it means that a poem, when of perfect art, has back of that perfect art a high imaginative quality; but by his own practice Sharp knows that he thought the quality would suffice without the highest art in its expression. It was this belief that made him leave his work incomplete; he read his verses, no doubt, with the glow in which he wrote them recalled to memory, and without the realization that he had not got down on paper for others half of the creative force that was in him as he wrote.
I have found a reason for a lesser success than the early work of "Fiona Macleod" promised to him in his imitativeness, but in some ways he was handicapped, too, by lack of models to follow. Granted he could have blazed other ways for himself than that of the "Seanchas," he lessened the originality of his attainment by imitation, but if he could not have so blazed other ways he just as surely could have gone further had he had models, or rather good models, to follow, models, for instance, in novels of Highland life. The very fact of there being great realistic stories of Highland life might have made it possible for him to have written a Highland "Silence Farm."
But enough of what might have been: what is is good enough, good enough at its best to treasure among those things that are a lasting part of our lives. However great may be the reaction against his work because of the nine days' wonder about the identity of its creator, certain parts of it, certain tales and certain verses and a play, will hold their own against the years. Through such tales as "The Sad Queen," and such verses as "The Dirge of the Four Cities," and "The House of Usna" even eyes of little vision may see "eternal beauty wandering on her way," leaving about them a glamour as recurrent to the mind as sunset to the skies.
THE END