WILLIAM SHARP (FIONA MACLEOD) A MEMOIR COMPILED BY HIS WIFE ELIZABETH A. SHARP - ELIZABETH A. SHARP (phonics reader TXT) 📗
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missed you there. I shall be delighted to see you here; and can give
you a bed at Brasenose, where I shall reside this term.
Thank you again for the pleasure your book has given, and will give me,
in future reading. Excuse this hurried letter, and
Believe me,
Very sincerely yours,
WALTER PATER.
It had been William Sharp’s intention to rewrite his Study on Rossetti;
for in later years he was very dissatisfied with the early book, and
considered his judgment to have been immature. He had indeed arranged
certain publishing preliminaries; and he wrote the dedicatory chapter;
but the book itself was untouched save one or two opening sentences.
For this project, with many others planned by William Sharp, was laid
aside when the more intimate, the more imperative work put forward
under the pseudonym of “Fiona Macleod” began to shape itself in his
brain. In his dedication to Walter Pater (the only portion of the book
that was finished), the author explains his reasons for wishing to
write a second Study of the painter-poet. He describes the new material
available, and relates that in Rossetti’s lifetime it was planned
that a “Life should be written by Philip Bourke Marston and myself,
primarily for publication in America. Rossetti took a humorous interest
in the scheme, and often alluded to it in notes or conversation as the
Bobbies’ book (a whimsical substitute for the Boston firm of Roberts
Brothers, whom we intended to honour with our great—unwritten—work):
but nothing came of the project.... Rossetti was eager to help Marston;
so he said he was charmed with the idea, and promised to give all the
aid in his power. A week later he told me that ‘there was no good in
it,’ and that ‘it had better drop’: but, instead he suggested that _he_
should write an article upon Marston and his poetry for _Harper’s_, or
_Scribner’s_, if it were more expedient that such an article should
appear in an American periodical, or, if preferred, for some important
Quarterly here.
“But you, cognizant as you are of much of this detail, will readily
understand and agree with me when I say that no really adequate
portrait of Rossetti is likely to be given to us for many years
to come. Possibly never: for his was a nature wrought of so many
complexities, his a life developed perplexedly by such divers elements,
that he will reappear, for those who come after us, not in any one
portraiture but as an evocation from many....
“Of all that has been written of Rossetti’s genius and achievement
in poetry nothing shows more essential insight, is of more striking
and enduring worth, than the essay by yourself, included in your
stimulating and always delightful _Appreciations_. You, more than any
one, it seems to me, have understood and expressed the secret of his
charm. And though you have not written also of Rossetti the painter, I
know of no one who so well and from the first perceived just wherein
lies his innate power, his essential significance.
“Years ago, in Oxford, how often we talked these matters over! I have
often recalled one evening, in particular, often recollected certain
words of yours: and never more keenly than when I have associated
them with the early work of Rossetti, in both arts, but preëminently
in painting: ‘To my mind Rossetti is the most significant man among
More torches will be lit from his flame—or torches lit at hisflame—than perhaps even enthusiasts like yourself imagine.’
“We are all seeking a lost Eden. This ideal Beauty that we catch
glimpses of, now in morning loveliness, now in glooms of tragic terror,
haunts us by day and night, in dreams of waking and sleeping—nay,
whether or not we will, among the littlenesses and exigencies of
our diurnal affairs. It may be that, driven from the Eden of direct
experience, we are being more and more forced into taking refuge
within the haven guarded by our dreams. To a few only is it given to
translate, with rare distinction and excellence, something of this
manifold message of Beauty—though all of us would fain be, with your
Marius, ‘of the number of those who must be made perfect by the love of
visible beauty.’ Among these few, in latter years in this country, no
one has wrought more exquisitely for us than Rossetti.
“To him, and to you and all who recreate for us the things we have
vaguely known and loved, or surmised only, or previsioned in dreams, we
owe what we can never repay save by a rejoicing gratitude. Our own Eden
may be irrecoverable, its haunting music never be nearer or clearer
than a vanishing echo, yet we have the fortunate warranty of those
whose guided feet have led them further into the sunlit wilderness, who
have repeated to us, as with hieratic speech, what they have seen and
heard.
“‘From time to time,’ wrote Rossetti in one of those early prose
passages of his which are so consecrated by the poetic atmosphere—‘from
time to time, however, a poet or a painter has caught the music (of
that garden), and strayed in through the close stems: the spell is
on his hand and his lips like the sleep of the Lotus-eaters, and his
record shall be vague and fitful; yet will we be in waiting, and open
our eyes and our ears, for the broken song has snatches of an enchanted
harmony, and the glimpses are glimpses of Eden.’”
* * * * *
It was during the preparation of this early book that the first volume
of William Sharp’s poems was published—too late however to be welcomed
by either of the two friends who had taken so keen an interest in
its growth: Rossetti, to whom all the poems had been read—and John
Elder to whom it was originally dedicated. It is entitled _The Human
Inheritance; Motherhood; Transcripts from Nature_ (Elliot Stock), and
contains a prefatory poem, and last lines dedicated to myself.
“The Human Inheritance” is a long poem in four cycles—the Inheritance
of Childhood, Youth, Manhood and Womanhood, and Old Age, and was an
expression of his belief that the human being should fearlessly reach
out to every experience that each period might have to offer. Eager,
and intensely alive, the poet thirsted till his last breath after
whatever might broaden and deepen his knowledge, his understanding, his
enjoyment of life.
The second long poem, “The New Hope: a Vision of the Travail of
Humanity,” was especially connected with John Elder, the outcome
of many talks and letters concerning the purport of the Travail of
Humanity—concerning a belief they both held that a great new spiritual
awakening is imminent that
... “the one great Word
That spake, shall wonderfully again be heard” ...
To “Motherhood” allusion has been made in one or two letters.
Notwithstanding that some of the critics predicted that the new name
was destined to become conspicuous, it was not by these poems, but by
the Life of Rossetti that the real impetus was given to his literary
fortunes and emphasised the fact of his existence to publishers and the
reading public. But to the poet himself—and to me—the publication of
the book of poems was a great event. We looked upon it as the beginning
of the true work of his life, toward the fulfilment of which we were
both prepared to make any sacrifice.
I have a few letters relating to this volume of poems, and append the
three which the recipient especially cared to preserve:
2 BRADMORE ROAD,
July 30th.
MY DEAR SHARP,
Since you have been here I have been reading your poems with great
enjoyment. The presence of philosophical, as in “The New Hope” and
of such original, and at the same time perfectly natural motives as
“Motherhood” is certainly a remarkable thing among younger English
poets, especially when united with a command of rhythmical and verbal
form like yours. The poem “Motherhood” is of course a bold one; but
it expresses, as I think, with perfect purity, a thought, which all
who can do so are the better for meditating on. The “Transcripts from
Nature” seem to me precisely all, and no more than (and just how is the
test of excellence in such things) what little pictures in verse ought
to be.
Very sincerely yours,
WALTER PATER.
DEAR MR. SHARP,
I have really not much to say about your poems. That you are of the
tribe or order of prophets, I certainly believe. What rank you may take
in that order I cannot guess. But the essential thing is that you are
the thing _poet_, and being such I doubt much whether talk about your
gift and what you ought to do with it will help you at all.
In “Motherhood” I think you touch the highest point in the volume.
The “Transcripts from Nature”—some of them—give me the _feel_ in
my nerves of the place and hour you describe, I like the form but
I think you have written a sufficient mass in this form, and that
future _rispetti_ ought to be rare, that is, whenever it is necessary
and right to express yourself in that form. (It is harder to take in
many in succession than even sonnets.) The longer poems seem to me as
decisively the poetry of a poet as the others, but they seem not so
successful (while admirable in many pages and in various ways).
I believe a beautiful action, beautifully if somewhat severely handled,
would bring out your highest. I wish you had some heroic old Scotch
story to brood over and make live while you are in Scotland.
I look forward with much interest to your Pre-Raphaelism and Rossetti.
Very sincerely yours,
EDWARD DOWDEN.
Sept. 6, 1882.
DEAR MR. SHARP,
... I came abroad and brought your book with me. I have read it again
through among the mountains and have found much to admire and more than
like in it; so that the hours I passed in reading it are and will be
pleasant hours to remember. If I may venture a criticism it is that
nature occupies more than three fourths of the Emotion of the Book,
and not Humanity, and even the passion and childhood and youth, and
later love and age—and all passions are painted in terms of Nature, and
through her moods. It pleases me, for I care more for Nature myself
when I am not pressed on by human feeling, than I do for Man, but an
artist ought to love Man more than Nature, and should write about Him
for his own sake. It won’t do to become like the being in the “Palace
of Art.” It will not do either to live in a Palace of Nature, alone.
But all this is more a suggestion than an objection, and it is partly
suggested to me at first by the fact that the poem in the midst of The
Human Inheritance, Cycle III, is the nearest to the human heart and
yet the least well written of all the cycles—at least so it seems to
I like exceedingly “The Tides of Venice.” It seems to me to comenearer the kind of poem in which the Poet’s Shuttle weaves into one web
Nature and Humanity and the close is very solemn and noble.
You asked me to do a critic’s part. It is a part I hate, and I am not a
critic. But I say what I say for the sake of men and women whom you may
help through the giving of high pleasure even more than you help them
in this book.
With much sympathy and admiration,
I am yours most sincerely,
STOPFORD A. BROOKE.
Two other deaths occurred in this year, and made a profound impression
on the young writer. I quote his own words:
“It was in 1882 also that another friend, to whom Philip Marston had
also become much attached—attracted in the first instance by the common
bond of unhappiness—died under peculiarly distressing circumstances.
Philip Marston and myself were, if I am not mistaken, the last of his
acquaintances to see him alive. Thomson had suffered such misery and
endured such hopelessness, that he had yielded to intemperate habits,
including a frequent excess in the use of opium. He had come back from
a prolonged visit to the country, where all had been well with him,
but through over confidence he had fallen a victim again immediately
on his return. For a few weeks his record is almost a blank. When the
direst straits were reached, he so far reconquered his control that he
felt able to visit one whose sympathy and regard had stood all tests.
Marston soon realised that his friend was mentally distraught, and
endured a harrowing experience, into the narrative of which I do not
care to enter.
“I arrived in the late afternoon, and found Philip in a state of
nervous perturbation. Thomson was lying down on the bed
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