CHAPTER VI
SONNETS OF THIS CENTURY
1885 was a year of hard work. It was our desire that such work should be done that should eventually make it possible for my husband to devote himself exclusively to original work—perhaps in a year or two at most. Meanwhile the outlook was satisfactory and encouraging. He held the post of London Art-Critic to the Glasgow Herald, was on the staff of The Academy then under the Editorship of his good friend Mr. James Cotton; and he wrote for The Examiner, The Athenaeum and other weeklies.
On the appearance in The Athenaeum of his Review on Marius the Epicurean the author expressed his satisfaction in a letter:
2 Bradmore Road,
March 1, 1885.
My dear Sharp,
I have read your article in The Athenaeum with very real pleasure; feeling criticism, at once so independent and so sympathetic, to be a reward for all the long labours the book has cost me. You seem to me to have struck a note or criticism not merely pleasant but judicious; and there are one or two important points—literary ones—on which you have said precisely what I should have wished, and thought it important for me, to have said. Thank you sincerely for your friendly work! Also, for your letter, and promise of the other notices, which I shall look out for, and greatly value. I was much pleased also that Mrs. Sharp had been so much interested in my writing. It is always a sign to me that I have to some extent succeeded in my literary aim when I gain the approval of accomplished women.
WALTER PATER
I should be glad, and feel it a great compliment, to have Marius translated into German, on whatever terms your friend likes—provided of course that Macmillan approves. I will ask him his views on this point. As regards the ethical drift of Marius, I should like to talk to you, if you were here. I did mean it to be more anti-Epicurean than it has struck you as being. In one way however I am glad that you have mistaken me a little on this point, as I had some fears that I might seem to be pleading for a formal thesis, or “parti pris.” Be assured how cheering your praise—praise from so genuine and accomplished a fellow-workman—has been to me. Such recognition is especially a help to one whose work is so exclusively personal and solitary as the kind of literary work, which I feel I can do best, must be. I fancied you spoke of bringing your wife to Oxford this term; and wish we had a room to offer you. But I think you know that we have at most only room for a single visitor. It will however give my sisters great pleasure to make the acquaintance of Mrs. Sharp. Only let us know a week or so, if possible, before you come to Oxford, that we may see as much of you as possible: and with our united kind regards, believe me, my dear Sharp,
Very sincerely yours,
Walter Pater.
I hope that in generosity to me you are not wasting too much of the time that belongs to your own original work. I have told Macmillan to send you a properly bound copy of Marius, with only a few misprints.
Mr. Theodore Watts had frequently spoken to us about a romance he had in hand, and partly in print. After much persuasion he sent several chapters of Aylwin to us during our summer holiday, and we read them on the shores of West Loch Tarbert in Argyll with keen enjoyment. An enthusiastic letter from the younger author brought this reply:
Seaford, Sept. 16, 1885.
My dear Sharp,
My best thanks for your most kind and suggestive letter. I am much gratified to know that in you and Mrs. Sharp I have true sympathisers in a story which although it may and I hope will be generally popular, can only deeply appeal to the heart of hearts of here and there one of the true romantic temper. Swinburne, who has read it all, tells me that the interest grows sharply and steadily to the very end and the finest volume is the last.
You are right in your surmise as to the rapidity in which the story was written to dictation. Both its merits and its defects you will find to arise from the fact that the conception came to me as one whole and that my eagerness to pour it out while the imagination was at white heat conquered everything. I doubt if it ever could have been written save to dictation. When do you return?
Kindest regards to Mrs. Sharp,
Yours affectly,
Theo. Watts.
P.S.—I and Swinburne are getting some delicious bathing.
In the article written for The Century Magazine, 1907, on William Sharp and Fiona Macleod, Mr. Ernest Rhys gives a reminiscent description of the young author and of his impressions of him, on their first acquaintance:
“One summer morning, some twenty years ago, in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, I was called down to an early visitor, and found waiting me a superb young man—a typical Norseman, as I should have thought him—tall, yellow-haired, blue-eyed. His cheeks were as rosy as a young girl’s, his manners as frank and impulsive as a boy’s. He had come with an introduction from a common friend (Mrs. William Bell Scott), a would-be contributor to a new periodical; but he soon passed from the discussion of an article on De Quincey to an account of himself that was joyously and consciously exuberant. He told of adventures in Australian backwoods, and of intrigues in Italy that recalled Cellini; and then he turned, with the same rapid flow of brief staccato sentences, to speak of his friend Mr. Swinburne’s new volume of poems, or of the last time he walked along Cheyne Walk to spend an evening with Rossetti. He appeared to know everybody, to have been everywhere. Finally, though he had apparently been sitting up all the night before to write an epic or a ‘Quarterly’ article, he was quite ready to start the same evening for Paris, not only to be present at a new play there, but in order to be able to talk, hours on end in the dark, about the ‘Contes Extraordinaires’ of M. Ernest Hello, or about a very different and still more wonderful being, then little known in London, called Nietzsche.
“It is not easy to avoid extravagance in speaking of one who was in all things an illusionist. Sharp’s sensations, doings, artistic ideas, and performances were not to be counted by rule and measure. He was capable of predicting a new religion as he paced the Thames Embankment, or of devising an imaginary new theatre for romantic drama—whose plays were yet to be written (by himself)—as he rode home from the Haymarket.
“Before we separated, at that first meeting, he had made more plans for events and new great works than the most sanguine of imaginers and writers could hope to effect in a lifetime. And, alas! for his control of circumstance, within a fortnight I was summoned to his sick-bed. He was down with scarlet fever, and it fell to me to write from his notes, or otherwise to complete, more than one essay and review which he had undertaken before he fell ill....
“There was another side to William Sharp. He had a spirit of fun, boyish mischief even, which found the slightest reflection in his work; for his writing is not remarkable for its humour. His extravagance of energy, which vehemently sped his pen, led him, in the course of his earlier life, into a hundred wild exploits. To him a piece of writing was an adventure. He delighted in impossible feats of composition, such as trying to finish a whole romance between sunset and sunrise. It follows that, with all this huge impetuosity, he was a poet who was rather disinclined by temperament for the ‘poetic pains.’ What he wrote in haste he was not always anxious to correct at leisure; and he was happy about what he wrote—at any rate, until a colder mood supervened at some later stage of his development.
“In keeping with this mental restlessness, Sharp was an insatiable wanderer. No sooner did he reach London than he was intriguing to be off again. Some of his devices in order to get work done, and to equip these abrupt expeditions, were as absurd as anything told by Henri Murger. Thanks to his large and imposing presence, his sanguine air, his rosy faith in himself, he had a way of overwhelming editors that was beyond anything, I believe, ever heard of in London, before or since. On one occasion he went into a publisher’s office, and gave so alluring an account of a long-meditated book that the publisher gave him a check for £100, although he had not written a word of it.
“These things illustrate his temperament. He was a romanticist, an illusionist. He did not see places or men and women as they were; he did not care to see them so: but he had quite peculiar powers of assimilating to himself foreign associations—the ideas, the colours, the current allusions, of foreign worlds. In Italy he became an Italian in spirit; in Algiers, an Arab. On his first visit to Sicily he could not be happy because of the sense of bloodshed and warfare associated with the scenes amid which he was staying; he saw bloodstains on the earth, on every leaf and flower.
“The same susceptibility marked his intercourse with his fellows. Their sensations and emotions, their whims, their very words, were apt to become his, and to be reproduced with an uncanny reality in his own immediate practice. It was natural, then, that he should be doubly sensitive to feminine intuitions; that he should be able, even on occasion, thanks to an extreme concern with women’s inevitable burdens and sufferings, to translate, as men are very rarely able to do, their intimate dialect.”
The description given by Mr. Rhys of William Sharp’s method of work as characterised by an impetuosity which made him “disinclined for the poetic pains” belonged to one phase of his development. During the early days of hard work for the bare necessities of life, he had little time to devote to the writing of poetry or of purely imaginative work. His literary efforts were directed toward the shaping of his prose critical writings, toward the controlled exercise of the mental faculties which belonged to the William Sharp’s side of himself. From time to time the emotional, the more intimate self would sweep aside all conscious control; a dream, a sudden inner vision, an idea that had lain dormant in what he called “the mind behind the mind” would suddenly visualise itself and blot out everything else from his consciousness, and under such impulse he would write at great speed, hardly aware of what or how he wrote, so absorbed was he in the vision with which for the moment he was identified. In those days he was unwilling to retouch such writing; for he thought that revision should be made only under a similar phase of emotion. Consequently he preferred for the most part to destroy such efforts if the result seemed quite inadequate, rather than alter them. Later, when that side of his nature found expression in the Fiona Macleod writings—when those impulses became more frequent, more reliable, more coherent—he changed his attitude toward the question of revision, and desired above all things to give as beautiful an expression as lay in his power to what to him were dreams of beauty.
For his critical work, however, he studied and prepared himself deliberately. He believed that the one method of attaining to a balanced estimate of our literature is by a comparative study of foreign contemporary writing.
“The more interested I became in literature,” he on one occasion explained to an interviewer, “the more convinced I grew of the narrowness of English criticism and of the importance to the English critic of getting away from the insular point of view. So I decided that the surest way of beginning to prepare myself for the work of the critic would be to make a study of three or four of the best writers among the older, and three or four among the younger school of each nation, and to judge from the point of view of the nation. For example, in studying French literature, I would try to judge from the point of view of a Frenchman. When this task was done I tried to estimate the literature under consideration from an absolute impersonal and impartial point of view. Of course, this study took a long time, but it furnished me material that has been invaluable to me in my work ever since.”
It was his constant endeavour to understand the underlying motive in any phase of modern literature; and he believed that “what is new in literature is not so likely to be unfit for critics, as critics are likely to be unfit for what is new in literature.” Concerning the art of Criticism he expressed his belief in an unfinished article: “When I speak of Criticism I have in mind not merely the more or less deft use of commentary or indication, but one of the several ways of literature and in itself a rare and fine art, the marriage of science that knows, and of spirit that discerns.”
“The basis of Criticism is imagination: its spiritual quality is sympathy: its intellectual distinction is balance.”
The occasion of his visit to Mr. Ernest Rhys was in connection with a scheme for the publication of two series of cheap re-issues of fine literature—a comparatively new venture five-and-twenty years ago—to be published by Messrs. Walter Scott: The Camelot Classics to be edited by Ernest Rhys and to consist of selected prose writings, and The Canterbury Poets to be edited by William Sharp;—Each volume to be prefaced by a specially written introduction. For the Prose Series William Sharp prepared De Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium Eater, and Mrs. Cunningham’s Great English Painters. For a third series—Biographies of Great Writers edited by Eric S. Robertson and Frank T. Marzial, he wrote his monographs on Shelley in 1887, on Heine in 1888 and on Browning in 1890.
Meanwhile he contributed a volume from time to time to The Canterbury Poets, among others: Collections of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Great Odes, American Sonnets, and his Collection of English Sonnets. In preparing the Edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets he consulted Mr. Edward Dowden on one or two points and received the following reply:
Davos Platz, Dec. 6, 1885.
Dear Mr. Sharp,
The most welcome gift of your Songs, Poems and Sonnets of Shakespeare reached me to-night. I have already looked it quickly through, and have seen enough to know that this volume will be my constant companion in future upon all my wanderings. Comparisons are odious. So I will not make a list of the other travelling companions, which your edition of Shakespeare’s lyrics is destined to supersede.
I will only tell you why yours has the right to supersede them. First and foremost, it is more scientifically complete.
Secondly, it is invaluable in its preservation of the play-atmosphere, by such introductory snatches as you insert e. g. on p. 20. Hitherto, we had often yearned in our Shakespearean anthologies for a whiff of the play from which the songs were torn. You have given this just where it was needed, and else not. That is right.
Thirdly, the Preface (to my mind at least) is more humanly and humanely true about Shakespeare’s attitude in the Sonnets than anything which has yet been written about them.
(I thank you, par parenthèse, for “the vox humana of Hamlet!”) And apropos of p. 11, I think you might have mentioned François Victor Hugo’s translation of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. It is a curious piece of French criticism. But the main thing left upon my mind by this first cursory perusal is that you are one of those who live (as Goethe has for ever put it) in “the whole.” It is the great thing for modern criticism to get itself up out of holes and corners, mere personal proclivities and scholarly niceties, into the large air of nature and of man.
The critic who does this, has to sacrifice the applause of coteries and the satisfaction which comes from “discovering” something and making for his discovery a following.
But I am sure this is the right line for criticism, and the one which will ultimately prevail, to the exclusion of more partial ways.
I therefore, who, in my own humble way, have tried as critic to preserve what Goethe also calls the “abiding relations,” bleibende Verhältnisse, feel specially drawn to your work by the seal of largeness set upon it.
You test Shakespeare in his personal poems as man, from the standpoint of the whole; and this seems to me eminently scientific—right. In a minor point, I can tell you, as no one else could, that your critical instinct is no less acute than generally right. You have quoted one of my sonnets in the notes. This Sonnet was written, to myself consciously, under the Shakespearean influence. The influence was complex, but very potent; and your discernment, your “spotting” of it, appears to me that you have the right scent—fiuto (as Italians) flair (as Frenchmen call that subtle penetration into the recesses of a mind regulated by style).
Thank you from my heart for this gift, which (I hope, if years enough are given me) shall wear itself out in the daily service of your friend,
John Addington Symonds.
In the following letter to Mr. Symonds the Editor explained the intention of his collected Sonnets of this Century:
12: 11: 85.
My dear Mr. Symonds,
I am shortly going to bring out a Selection of the Best Sonnets of this Century (including a lengthy Introductory Essay on the Sonnet as a vehicle of poetic thought, and on its place and history in English Literature)—and I should certainly regard it as incomplete if your fine sonnet-work were unrepresented. I am giving an average of two to each writer of standing, but in your case I have allowed for five. This is both because I have a genuine admiration for your sonnet-work in the main, and because I think that you have never been done full justice to as a poet—though of course you have met with loyal recognition in most of those quarters where you would most value it....
I have taken great pleasure in the preparation of the little book, and I think that both poetically and technically it will be found satisfactory. My main principles in selection have been (1) Structural correctness. (2) Individuality, with distinct poetic value. (3) Adequacy of Sonnet-Motive.
I hope that you are hard at work—not neglecting the shyest and dearest of the muses—? Is there any chance of your being in London in the late Spring? I hope so.
Sincerely yours,
William Sharp.
In the preparation of the volume he received several interesting communications from well-known English sonnet writers from which I select four. The first is from the Irish poet Aubrey de Vere; in the second Mr. George Meredith answers a question concerning his volume of sequent poems, Modern Love:
Curragh Chase, Adare,
Dec. 5, 1885.
Dear Mr. Sharp,
... I am much flattered by what you say about my sonnets, and glad that you like them; but I hope that in selecting so many as five for your volume you have not displaced sonnets by other authors. Sir R. Hamilton’s are indeed, as you remark, excellent, and I rejoice that you are making them better known than they have been hitherto. Wordsworth once remarked to me that he had known many men of high talents and several of real genius; but that Coleridge, and Sir W. H. Hamilton were the only men he had known to whom he would apply the term “wonderful.”
Yours faithfully,
Aubrey de Vere.
Boxhill, Dorking,
Nov. 12, 1885.
Dear Sir,
You are at liberty to make your use of the Sonnet you have named. The Italians allow of 16 lines, under the title of “Sonnets with a tail.”
But the lines of “Modern Love” were not designed for that form.
Yours very truly,
George Meredith.
The third letter is from Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton:
The Pines, Putney Hill,
Jan. 8, 1886.
My dear Sharp,
I sent off the proofs by Wednesday afternoon’s post. I had no idea that the arrangement of the sonnets would give bother and took care to write to you to ask. The matter was not at all important, and I shall be vexed, indeed, if the printers are put to trouble. The printers would, unless the snow storms interfered, get my verses by Thursday morning’s first post.
My theory of the sonnet is exactly expressed in the sonnet on the sonnet. It is that, in the octave, the emotion flows out in a rhythmic billow: that the solidarity of this billow is maintained by knitting the two quatrains together by means of two rhyme sounds only: that in the sestet the billow ebbs back to “Life’s tumultuous sea” and that like the ebb of an ocean-billow it moves backward, not solidly, but broken up into wavelets. This is only the arrangement of the rhymes in the sestet, that not only need not be based upon any given system but that should not be based on any given system, and should be perceived entirely by emotional demands.
Yours affectly,
Theo. Watts.
The fourth letter is from Oscar Wilde:
16 Tite St., Chelsea.
Dear Sir,
It will give me much pleasure to see the sonnets you mention included in your selection. Of the two, I much prefer “Libertatis Sacra Fames”—and if only one is taken, would like to be represented by that. Indeed I like the sonnets on p. 3 and p. 16 of my volume better than the one written in Holy Week at Genoa. Perhaps however this is merely because Art and Liberty seem to me more vital and more religious than any Creed. I send you a sonnet I wrote at the Sale of Keats’s love letters some months ago. What do you think of it? It has not yet been published. I wonder are you including Edgar Allan Poe’s sonnet to Science. It is one I like very much.
I will look forward with much interest to the appearance of your book.
I remain
Truly yours,
Oscar Wilde.
ON THE SALE BY AUCTION OF KEATS’S LOVE LETTERS
These are the letters which Endymion wrote
To one he loved in secret, and apart.
And now the brawlers of the auction mart
Bargain and bid for each poor blotted note.
Ay! for each separate pulse of passion quote
The merchant’s price: I think they love not art,
Who break the crystal of a poet’s heart
That small and sickly eyes may glare and gloat!
Is it not said that many years ago,
In a far Eastern town, some soldiers ran
With torches through the midnight, and began
To wrangle for mean raiment, and to throw
Dice for the garments of a wretched man,
Not knowing the God’s wonder, or his woe.
I wish I could grave my sonnets on an ivory tablet—Quill pens and note-paper are only good enough for bills of lading. A sonnet should always look well. Don’t you think so?
O. W.
The success of the volume was immediate, and a second edition followed quickly. For it I begged that the Editor would include some sonnets of his own. He had refused to do so for the 1st Edition, but he now yielded to my wish and included two, “Spring Wind” and “A Midsummer Hour.” In later editions, however, he took them out again and left only the two dedicatory sonnets to D. G. Rossetti, for he considered that the Editor should not be represented in the body of the book. The volume was generously welcomed by contemporary writers. George Meredith considered it the best exposition of the Sonnet known to him; to Walter Pater the Introductory Essay was “most pleasant and informing,” and “Your own beautiful dedication to D. G. R. seems to me perfect, and brought back, with great freshness, all I have felt, and so sincerely, about him and his work.”
Robert Louis Stevenson expressed his views on the sonnet in a letter to the Editor:
Skerrymore (Bournemouth).
Dear Sir,
Having at last taken an opportunity to read your pleasant volume, it has had an effect upon me much to be regretted and you will find the consequences in verse. I had not written a serious sonnet since boyhood, when I used to imitate Milton and Wordsworth with surprising results: and since I have fallen again by your procuring (a procuration) you must suffer along with me.
May I say that my favourite sonnet in the whole range of your book is Tennyson Turner’s “The Buoy-Bell?” Possibly there is a touch of association in this preference; but I think not. No human work is perfect; but that is near enough.
Yours truly,
Robert Louis Stevenson.
The form of my so-called sonnets will cause you as much agony as it causes me little. I am base enough to think the main point of a sonnet is the disjunction of thought coinciding with the end of the octave: and when a lesser disjunction makes the quatrains and sestets I call it an ideal sonnet; even if it were rhymed anyhow. But the cross rhyme, tears—fear, in the second is, even in my base eyes, a vile flaw.
(Two sonnets were enclosed in the letter.)
THE ARABESQUE
(Complaint of an artist)
I made a fresco on the coronal,
Amid the sounding silence and the void
Of life’s wind-swept and unfrequented ball.
I drew the nothings that my soul enjoyed;
The pretty image of the enormous fact
I fled; and when the sun soared over all
And threw a brightness on the painted tract.
Lo, the vain lines were reading on the wall!
In vain we blink; our life about us lies
O’erscrawled with crooked mist; we toil in vain
To hear the hymn of ancient harmonies
That quire upon the mountains as the plain;
And from the august silence of the skies
Babble of speech returns to us again.
THE TOUCH OF LIFE
I saw a circle in a garden sit
Of dainty dames and solemn cavaliers,
Whereof some shuddered at the burrowing nit,
And at the carrion worm some burst in tears;
And all, as envying the abhorred estate
Of empty shades and disembodied elves,
Under the laughing stars, early and late,
Sat shamefast at this birth and at themselves.
The keeper of the house of life is fear:
In the rent lion is the honey found
By him that rent it; out of stony ground
The toiler, in the morning of the year,
Beholds the harvest of his grief abound
And the green corn put forth the tender ear.
William Sharp offered to include “The Touch of Life” in the body of the book, and “The Arabesque” in the Notes. He received this reply:
Dear Mr. Sharp,
It is very good of you, and I should like to be in one of your pleasant and just notes; but the impulse was one of pure imitation and is not like to return, or if it did, to be much blessed. I have done so many things, and cultivated so many fields in literature, that I think I shall let the “scanty plot” lie fallow. I forgot to say how much taken I was with Beaconsfield’s lines (scarce a sonnet indeed) on Wellington. I am engaged with the Duke, and I believe I shall use them.
I think the “Touch of Life” is the best of my snapshots; but the other was the best idea. The fun of the sonnet to me is to find a subject; the workmanship rebuts me.
Thank you for your kind expressions, and believe me,
Yours truly,
Robert Louis Stevenson.
The Editor was much gratified by an appreciative letter from John Addington Symonds concerning the Edition de Luxe of his Anthology:
Davos Platz, Nov. 28, 1886.
My dear Sharp,
I have just received my copy of the magnificent edition of your Sonnets of this Century to which I subscribed. It is indeed a noble book. Let me say at once how much I think you have improved the Preface. There are one or two things affecting my own share in the Collection to which I should like to call your attention.
I notice that in pp. xxvii-xxix of your Introduction you have adopted the ideas I put forth (Academy, Feb. 13, 1886) about the origin of the Sonnet. But you somewhat confuse the argument by using the word Stornello. If you look at Ancora’s Poesia Popolare Italiana (Livano, Vigo), pp. 175, 313, you will see that Italians regard the stornello (320) as a totally different species from the rispetto. I have explained the matter in my Renaissance in Italy, Vol. A. p. 264. I admit that there may be differences of opinion about these popular species of verse. Yet I have no doubt that every one in Italy, a Stornello being mentioned, would think at once of a single couplet prefaced with Fiore di granata or something of that sort. However, it would be pedantic to insist upon this point. I only do so because I believe I was the first to indicate the probable evolution of the sonnet from the same germ as the Rispetto Sesta Rima, and Ottava Rima; and I am distinctly myself of opinion that the Stornello is quite a separate offshoot.
I doubt whether Sonnets in Dialogue be so rare as you imply on p. 43. I know that I composed one for Lady Kitty Clive in 1875. It is printed on p. 117 of my Vagabunduli Libellus. I do not esteem it, however, and only published it because it was in dialogue....
Believe me very truly yours,
J. A. Symonds.
P. S.—Pater is an old acquaintance of mine. Watts I never met, and I should greatly value the opportunity of knowing him in the flesh—in the spirit, I need hardly say, he has long been known to me.
This postscript reminds me of the fact that Mr. Pater, Mr. Alfred Austin, and Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton met together one evening at our house. I especially remember the occasion because of an incident that occurred, which indicated to us a temperamental characteristic of Walter Pater. During dinner a guest asked to see a necklace I was wearing. It was in the form of a serpent made of silver wire deftly interwoven to resemble scales and to make it sinuous and supple. I unfastened the serpent and as I handed it to Mr. Pater who was nearest me, it writhed in a lifelike manner, and he drew back his hands with a slight movement of dislike. In a flash I remembered the passage in Marius the Epicurean in which the hero’s dislike to serpents is so vividly described, and I realised the description to be autobiographic. Later I had occasion to note the same effect. My husband and I in the early summer went down to Oxford so that I might meet the Misses Pater at their brother’s house. In the morning I had seen Mr. Pater’s study at Brasenose, and was as charmed with the beauty and austerity of the decoration, as with the sense of quiet and repose. In the afternoon it was proposed that I should be shown the Ifley Woods. My husband, always glad to handle the oars, had, however, to consent to being rowed by one of the boat attendants, for Mr. Pater with the timidity of a recluse declined to trust himself to the unknown capabilities of one whom he regarded rather as a townsman. As Mr. Pater and I strolled through the wood I suddenly noticed that my companion gave a little start and directed my attention to what seemed of small interest. When, however, we rejoined our companions Miss Pater asked her brother if he had seen the dead adder lying on one side of the path. “Oh, yes,” he answered, turning his head on one side with a gesture of aversion; “but I did not wish Mrs. Sharp to see it.”
If The Sonnets of this Century gained us pleasant friendships it also brought upon us a heavy penalty. For, within the next year or two we were inundated with letters and appeals from budding poets, from ambitious and wholly ignorant would-be sonneteers, who sent sheafs of sonnets not only for criticism and advice but now and again with the request to find a publisher for them! A large packet arrived one day, I remember, with a letter from an unknown in South Africa. The writer explained his poetical ambitions, and stated that he forwarded for consideration a hundred sonnets. On examining the packet we found one hundred poems varying in length from twelve to twenty lines, but not a solitary sonnet among them!
CHAPTER VII
THE SPORT OF CHANCE
Shelley
In the summer of 1885 we went to Scotland and looked forward to an idyllic month on West Loch Tarbert. While staying with Mr. Pater in Oxford my husband had seen the advertisement of a desirable cottage to be let furnished, with service, and garden stocked with vegetables. He knew the neighbourhood to be lovely, the attraction was great, so we took the cottage for August, and in due time carried our various MSS. and work to the idyllic spot. Beautiful the surroundings were indeed:—An upland moor sloping to the loch, with its opposite hilly shore thickly wooded. The cottage was simplicity itself in its appointments, but—the garden was merely a bit of railed-in grass field destitute of plants; the vegetables consisted of a sack of winter potatoes quite uneatable, and the only service that the old woman owner would give was to light the fires and wash up the dishes and black our boots. Everything else devolved on me, for help I could get nowhere and though my husband’s intentions and efforts in that direction were admirable, their practical qualities ended there! Yet to all the drawbacks we found compensation in the loveliness of the moorland, the peace of the solitude, and in the magnificent sunsets. One sunset I remember specially. We had gone for a wander westward. The sun was setting behind the brown horizon-line of the moor, and the sky was aflame with its glow. Suddenly we heard the sound of the pipes, sighing a Lament. We stopped to listen. The sound came nearer, and we saw walking over the brow of the upland an old man with bag-pipes and streamers outlined against the orange sky. We drew aside into a little hollow. As he neared we saw he was gray haired, his bonnet and clothes were old and weatherworn. But in his face was a rapt expression as he played to himself and tramped across the moor, out of the sunset toward the fishing village that lay yonder in the cold evening light.
The summer was a wet one, and shortly after our return to town the poet developed disquieting rheumatic symptoms. Nevertheless we were both hard at work with the reviewing of pictures and books, and among other things he was projecting a monograph on Shelley. It was about this time I think that he decided to compete for a prize of £100 offered by the Editor of The People’s Friend for a novel suited to the requirements of that weekly, and these requirements of course dictated the sensational style of story. It was my husband’s one attempt to write a novel in three volumes. He did not gain the prize but the story ran serially through The People’s Friend, and was afterward published in 1887 by Messrs. Hurst and Blackett. The scene is laid in Scotland and in Australia, with a Prologue dealing with Cornwall, where he had once spent a few days in order to act as best man to one of his fellow-passengers on the sailing ship that brought him back from Australia.
The following Review from The Morning Post and letter from our poet-friend Mathilde Blind will give an idea of the style and defects of the novel:
“The many who have the mental courage to allow that they prefer the objective to the subjective novel may pass some delightful hours in the perusal of Mr. Sharp’s ‘The Sport of Chance.’ It has primâ facie an undeniable advantage to start with, i. e. it is unlike almost anything hitherto written in the shape of a novel in three volumes. Slightly old-fashioned, the author’s manner is simple and earnest, while he shows much skill in unravelling the tangled skein of a complicated plot. He deals also in sensationalism, but this is of a peculiar kind, and it rarely violates the canons of probability. To southerners his highly-coloured pictures of Highland peasant life, with their accompaniments of visions and second sight, may savour of exaggeration, but not so to those whose youth has been past amidst similar surroundings. Many episodes of the shipwrecks of ‘The Fair Hope’ and ‘The Australasian,’ are as effective as the best of those written by authors who make a specialty of ‘Tales of the Sea.’ Hew Armitage’s ‘quest,’ in Australia, is related with graphic force. The descriptions of the natural features of the country, of life in the bush, and at the outlying settlements, are all stamped with the vivid fidelity that is one of the great merits of the book. Charles Lamb, alias Cameron, is a singular conception. Too consistently wicked, perhaps, to escape the reproach of being a melo-dramatic villain, his misdeeds largely contribute to the interest of this exciting novel.”
Nov. 6, 1888.
Dear William,
... Your “Sport of Chance” has helped me to while away the hours and certainly you have crammed sensation enough into your three volumes to furnish forth a round dozen or so. The opening part seemed to me very good, especially the description of the storm off the Cornish coast, and the mystery which gradually overclouds Mona’s life, but her death and the advent of a new set of characters seems to me to cut the story in two, while the sensational incidents are piled on like Ossa on Olympus. What seemed best to me, and also most enjoyable to my taste at least, are the personal reminiscences which I recognised in the voyage out to Australia and the descriptions of its scenery, full of life and freshness. Most of all I liked the weird picture of the phosphorescent sea with its haunting spectral shapes. You have probably seen something of the kind and ought to have turned it into a poem; if there had been a description of some scene like it in your last volume I should doubtless remember it.
With best love to Lillie,
Your sincere friend,
Mathilde Blind.
The opening of the new year 1886—from which we hoped much—was unpropitious. A wet winter and long hours of work told heavily on my husband, whose ill-health was increased by the enforced silence of his “second self” for whose expression leisure was a necessary condition. In a mood of dejection induced by these untoward circumstances he sent the following birthday greeting to his friend Eric S. Robertson:
46 Talgarth Road, W.
My Dear Friend,
I join with Lillie in love and earnest good wishes for you as man and writer. Accept the accompanying two sonnets as a birthday welcome.
There are two “William Sharp’s”—one of them unhappy and bitter enough at heart, God knows—though he seldom shows it. This other poor devil also sends you a greeting of his own kind. Tear it up and forget it, if you will.
But sometimes I am very tired—very tired.
Yours ever, my dear Eric,
W. S.
TO ERIC SUTHERLAND ROBERTSON
(On his birthday, 18: 2: 86)
I
Already in the purple-tinted woods
The loud-voiced throstle calls—sweet echoings
Down leafless aisles that dream of bygone springs:
Already towards their northern solitudes
The fieldfares turn, and soaring high, wheel broods
Of wild swans with a clamour of swift wings:
A tremor of new life moves through all things
And earth regenerate thrills with joyous moods.
Let not spring’s breath blow vainly past thine heart,
Dear friend: for Time grows ruinously apace:
Yon tall white lily in its holy grace
The winds will draggle soon: for an unseen dart
Moves ever hither and thither through each place,
Nor know we when or how our lives ’twill part.
II
A little thing it is indeed to die:
God’s seal to sanctify the soul’s advance—
Or silence, and a long enfevered trance.
But no slight thing is it—ere the last sigh
Leaves the tired heart, ere calm and passively
The worn face reverent grows, fades the dim glance—
To pass away and pay no recompense
To Life, who hath given to us so gloriously.
Not so for thee—within whose heart lie deep
As ingots ‘neath the waves, thoughts true and fair.
Nor ever let thy soul the burden bear,
Of having life to live yet choosing sleep:
Yea even if thine the dark and slippery stair,
Better to toil and climb than wormlike creep.
In the early spring my husband was laid low with scarlet fever and phlebitis. Recovery was slow, and at the press view of the Royal Academy he caught a severe chill; the next day he was in the grip of a prolonged attack of rheumatic fever. For many days his life hung in the balance.
During much of the suffering and tedium of those long weeks the sick man passed in a dream-world of his own; for he had the power at times of getting out of or beyond his normal consciousness at will. At first he imagined himself the owner of a gipsy travelling-van, in which he wandered over the to him well-known and much-loved solitudes of Argyll, resting where the whim dictated and visiting his many fisher and shepherd friends. Later, during the long crises of the illness, though unconscious often of all material surroundings, he passed through other keen inner phases of consciousness, through psychic and dream experiences that afterward to some extent were woven into the Fiona Macleod writings, and, as he believed, were among the original shaping influences that produced them. For a time he felt himself to be practically dead to the material world, and acutely alive “on the other side of things” in the greater freer universe. He had no desire to return, and rejoiced in his freedom and greater powers; but, as he described it afterward, a hand suddenly restrained him: “Not yet, you must return.” And he believed he had been “freshly sensitised” as he expressed it; and knew he had—as I had always believed—some special work to do before he could again go free.
The illusion of his wanderings with the travelling van was greatly helped by the thoughtfulness of his new friend Ernest Rhys who brought him branches of trees in early leaf from the country. These I placed upright in the open window; and the fluttering leaves not only helped his imagination but also awoke “that dazzle in the brain,” as he always described the process which led him over the borderland of the physical into the “gardens” of psychic consciousness or, as he called it, “into the Green Life.”
At the end of ten weeks he left his bed. As soon as possible I took him to Northbrook, Micheldever, the country house of our kind friends Mr. and Mrs. Henryson Caird, who put it at our disposal for six weeks. Slowly his strength came back in these warm summer days, as he lay contentedly in the sunshine. But as he began to exert himself new disquieting symptoms developed. His heart proved to be badly affected and his recovery was proportionately retarded.
The Autumn found us face to face with problems hard to solve, how to meet not only current expenses but also serious debt, with a limited stock of precarious strength. At the moment of blackest outlook the invalid received a generous friendly letter from Mr. Alfred Austin enclosing a substantial cheque. The terms in which it was offered were as kindly sympathetic as the thought which prompted them. He had, he said, once been helped in a similar way with the injunction to repay the loan not to the donor but to some one else who stood in need. Therefore he now offered it with the same conditions attached. During the long months of illness it had been a constant source of regret to us that we were unable to see Philip Marston or to read to him as was our habit. We were anxious, too, for in the autumn he had been prostrated by a heat stroke, followed by an epileptic seizure. At last, on Christmas day 1886 William Sharp went to see him and spent an hour or so with him. As he tells in his prefatory Memoir to Marston’s “Song-tide” (Canterbury Poets): “He was in bed and I was shocked at the change—as nearly a year had elapsed since I had seen him I found the alteration only too evident.... Throughout the winter his letters had been full of foreboding: ‘You will miss me, perhaps, when I am gone, but you need not mourn for me. I think few lives have been so deeply sad as mine, though I do not forget those who have blessed it.’”
This was the keynote to each infinitely sad letter.
“On the last day of January 1887 paralysis set in, and for fourteen days, he lay speechless as well as sightless, but at last he was asleep and at peace. Looking at his serene face on the day ere the coffin lid enclosed it, where something lovelier than mortal sleep subtly dwelt, there was one at least of his friends who forgot all sorrow in a great gladness for the blind poet—now no longer blind, if he be not overwhelmed in a sleep beyond our ken. At such a moment the infinite satisfaction of Death seems beautiful largess for the turmoil of a few ‘dark disastrous years.’”
The Spring of 1887 brought a more kindly condition of circumstances to us, in the form of good steady work. Mr. Eric Robertson had then been selected to fill the vacant chair of Literature and Logic at the University of Lahore, and, on accepting, he suggested to Mr. Joseph Henderson that William Sharp should be his successor as Editor of the “Literary Chair” in The Young Folk’s Paper—the boys’ weekly paper for which Robert Louis Stevenson had written his “Treasure Island.” “The Literary Olympic” was a portion of the paper devoted to the efforts in prose and verse of the Young Folk who wished to exercise their budding literary talents. Their papers were examined, criticised; a few of the most meritorious were printed, prefaced by an article of criticism and instruction written by their Editor and critic. The work itself was congenial; and the interest was heightened by the fact that it put us into touch with the youth of all classes, in England, Scotland, and Ireland, in town and country, alike. Several of the popular novelists and essayists of to-day received the chief early training in the “Olympic.” Many were the confidential personal letters to the unknown editor, who was imagined by one or two young aspirants to be white-haired and venerable. This work, moreover, could be done at home, by us both; and it brought a reliable income, a condition of security hitherto unknown to us, which proved an excellent tonic to the delicate Editor.
In August a letter came from Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton suggesting the possibility that an original poem, The Ode to Mother Carey’s Chicken contributed to my little anthology Sea-Music, should be re-printed in The Young Folk’s Paper:
“I do especially want it to be read by boys,” he wrote, “who would understand and appreciate it thoroughly.” The poem appeared; and drew forth an appreciative letter from a young blacksmith who had sent contributions to “The Literary Olympic.” Mr. Watts-Dunton’s acknowledgment to the “Editor” was thus expressed:
“I have seen the poem in the paper and am much gratified to be enabled to speak, thus, to thousands of the boys of Great Britain, the finest—by far the finest—boys in the world as I always think. It was a friendly act on your part and the preliminary remarks are most kind and touching.
“I sincerely hope that your indisposition has, by this time, left you, and shall be glad to get a line to say that it has. The young man’s letter is most interesting. What pleases me most is the manly pride he takes in his business. A blacksmith is almost the only artisan whose occupation is tinged with the older romance as Gabriel[2] often used to say. I love still to watch them at the forge—the sparks flying round them. I hope he may not forsake such a calling for the literary struggle.”
In the early part of the year “The Sport of Chance” had run serially through The People’s Friend. Its success incited the author to write a sensational boys’ story for The Young Folk’s Paper; and accordingly in the Xmas number of that weekly appeared the first installment of “Under the Banner of St. James,” a tale of the conquest of Peru. This story was followed at intervals by others such as “The Secret of the Seven Fountains,” “Jack Noel’s Legacy,” “The Red Riders.” Although the weaving of these sensational plots was a great enjoyment to the writer of them, he at no time regarded them as other than useful pot-boilers.
A letter written about this time to the American poet E. C. Stedman led to a life-long friendship with him of so genial a nature that, on becoming personally acquainted in New York two years later, the older poet laughingly declared that he adopted the younger man from across the seas as his “English son.”
In an article on “British Song” in The Victorian Poets, the Scottish poet was referred to as a Colonial. He wrote to the author to point out the mistake “since you are so kindly going to do me the honour of mention in your forthcoming supplementary work, I should not like to be misrepresented.”
In replying Mr. Stedman explained that no great harm has been done:
Something in your work made me suspect that, despite your Australian tone, etc., you did not hail (as we Yankees say) from the Colonies. So you will find in my new vol. of Victorian Poets that I do not place you with the Colonial poets, but just preceding them, and I have a reference to your Rosetti volume. The limited space afforded by my supplementary chapter has made my references to the new men altogether too brief and inadequate. Of this I am seriously aware, but trust that you and others will take into consideration the scope and aim of the chapter. You see I have learned that “The Human Inheritance” is scarce! Of course I shall value greatly a copy from the author’s hands. And I count among the two pleasant things connected with my prose work—my earlier and natural metier being that of a poet—such letters as yours, which put me into agreeable relations with distant comrades-in-arms.
Beginning, as you have, with the opening of a new literary period, and with what you have already done, I am sure you have a fine career before you—that will extend long after your American Reviewer has ceased to watch and profit by its course.
Very sincerely yours,
Edmund C. Stedman.
A few months later Mr. Stedman wrote again:
New York, March 27, 1888.
My dear Sharp,
Let me thank you heartily, if somewhat tardily, for your very handsome and magnanimous review of the Victorian Poets. It breathes the spirit of fairness—and even generosity—throughout. You have been more than “a little blind” to my faults, and to my virtues most open-eyed and “very kind” indeed. I am sufficiently sure of my own purpose to believe that you have ground for perceiving that the spirit of my major criticisms is essential, rather than merely “technical.” I look more to the breadth and imagination of the poet than to minute details—though a stickler for natural melody and the lasting canons of art. The real value of the book lies, of course, in the chapters on some of the elder poets. You are quite right in pointing out the impossibility of correct proportion in the details of the last chapter. It is added to give more completeness to the work as a whole. For the same reason, the earlier chapters on “The General Choir” were originally introduced; but in them I knew my ground better, and could point out with more assurance the tendencies of the various “groups.” But I write merely to say that I am heartily satisfied with your criticism, and grateful for it; and that I often read your other reviews with advantage—and shall watch your career, already so fruitful, with great interest. A man who comes down to first principles and looks at things broadly, as you are doing, is sure in the end to be a man of mark.
Very faithfully yours,
Edmund C. Stedman.
One desirable result of this good fortune was a change of residence to a higher part of the town, where the air was purer, and access to green fields easier. To this end in the Spring of 1887 we took a little house for three years in Goldhurst Terrace, South Hampstead. As it was numbered 17a, much annoyance was caused as our letters frequently were delivered at No. 17. A name therefore had to be found, and we dubbed our new home Wescam, a name made up of the initials of my husband, myself and our friend Mrs. Caird whose town house was within two minutes’ walk of us. There was a sunny study for the invalid on the ground floor, to obviate as much as possible the need of going up and down stairs. The immediate improvement in his health from the higher air and new conditions was so marked that we had every reason to hope it would before many months be practically re-established.
The most important undertaking after the long illness was the monograph on Shelley written for Great Writers’ Series (Walter Scott) and published in the autumn of 1887. It was a work of love, for Shelley had been the inspiring genius of his youth, the chief influence in his verse till he knew Rossetti. He was in sympathy with much of Shelley’s thought: with his hatred of rigid conventionality, of the tyranny of social laws; with his antagonism to existing marriage and divorce laws, with his belief in the sanctity of passion when called forth by high and true emotion. He exclaimed that
“It is my main endeavour in this short life of Shelley to avoid all misstatement and exaggeration; to give as real a narrative of his life from the most reliable sources as lies within my power; to recount without detailed criticism and as simply and concisely as practicable, the record of his poetic achievements. To this end I shall chiefly rely on anecdote and explanatory detail, or poems and passages noteworthy for their autobiographical or idiosyncratic value, and on indisputable facts.”
He proposed merely to give a condensation of all really important material; and based his monograph mainly on Professor Dowden’s memorable work (then recently published). Many statements written by William Sharp about Shelley may be quoted as autobiographic of himself. For instance: “From early childhood he was a mentally restless child. Trifles unnoticed by most children seem to have made keen and permanent impression on him—the sound of wind, the leafy whisper of trees, running water. The imaginative faculties came so early into play, that the unconscious desire to create resulted in the invention of weird tales sometimes based on remote fact in the experience of more or less weird hallucinations.”
Or again: “The fire of his mind for ever consuming his excitable body, his swift and ardent emotions, his over keen susceptibilities all combined to increase the frailty of his physical health.” Or this in particular: “He did not outgrow his tendency to invest every new and sympathetic correspondent (and I would add, friend) with lives of ideal splendour.”
And in explanation of each idealization appearing to him “as the type of that ideal Beauty which had haunted his imagination from early boyhood,” he adds: “No fellow mortal could have satisfied the desire of his heart. Perhaps this almost fantastic yearning for the unattainable—this desire of the moth for the star—is the heritage of many of us. It is a longing that shall be insatiable even in death.” With Shelley he might have said of himself: “I think one is always in love with something or other; the error—and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it—consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is, perhaps, eternal.”
From the many letters the biographer received after the publication of his book I select three:
Brasenose College, Nov. 23d.
My dear Sharp,
I am reading your short life of Shelley with great pleasure and profit. Many thanks for your kindness in sending it. It seems to me that with a full, nay! an enthusiastic, appreciation of Shelley and his work, you unite a shrewdness and good sense rare in those who have treated this subject. And then your book is pleasant and effective, in contrast to a French book on Shelley of which I read reluctantly a good deal lately. Your book leaves a very definite image on the brain.
With sincere kind regards,
Very truly yours,
Walter Pater.
Cimiez, près Nice.
22d Dec., 1887.
My dear Friend,
I wonder how it is with you now, whether you are better, which I sincerely hope, and already in the Isle of Wight? but I suppose you will only go after Christmas. To-day it is so cold here that I wonder what it must be like with you; there is snow on the mountains behind the house and the sea looks iron-gray and ungenial.
I never told you I think how much I liked your “Shelley,” which I think gives a very succinct and fair statement of the poet’s life and works. It is just what is wanted by the public at large, and I thought your remarks on Shelley’s relations with Harriet exceedingly sympathetic and to the point; as well as what you say touching his married life with Mary; the passage on page 98 concerning this disenchantment with all mortal passion struck me as most happily felt and expressed. I have only one fault to find with you, and that you will think a very selfish one (so you must excuse it), to wit that when speaking of The Revolt of Islam you did not mention in a line or so that I was the first writer who pointed out, first in the “Westminster Review” and afterward in my Memoir of the poet, that in Cythna Shelley had introduced a new type of Woman into poetry. I am rather proud of it, and as it was mentioned by several of Shelley’s subsequent biographers I would have been pleased to have seen it in a volume likely to be so popular as yours.
But enough of this small matter.
I wish you and your dear wife health and happiness.
Ever yours,
Mathilde Blind.
Box Hill (Dorking),
Feb. 13, 1888.
Dear Mr. Sharp,
I have read your book on Shelley, and prefer it, matched with the bulky. Putting out of view Matthew Arnold’s very lofty lift of superterrestrial nose over the Godwin nest, one inclines to agree with him about our mortal business of Shelley. We shall be coming next to medical testimony, with expositions. You have said just enough, and in the right tones. Yesterday a detachment of the Sunday tramps under Leslie Stephen squeezed at the table in the small dining-room you know, after a splendid walk over chalk and sand. When you are in the mood to make one of us, give me note of warning, and add to the pleasure by persuading your wife to come with you.
And tell her that this invitation would be more courtly were I addressing her directly.
I am,
Very truly yours,
George Meredith.