ROMANTIC BALLADS

The Children of To-morrow

The three years spent at Wescam were happy years, full of work and interest. Slowly but steadily as health was re-established, the command over work increased, and all work was planned with the hope that before very long William should be able to devote himself to the form of imaginative work that he knew was germinating in his mind. Meanwhile he had much in hand. Critical work for many of the weeklies, a volume of poems in preparation, and a monograph on Heine, were the immediate preoccupations.

Romantic Ballads and Poems of Phantasy was published in the spring (Walter Scott). The poems had been written at different times during the previous five or six years. “The Son of Allan” had met with the approval of Rossetti, whose influence was commented upon by certain of the critics. The book was well received both in England and America. The Boston Literary World considered that in such poems as “The Isle of Lost Dreams,” “Twin Souls,” and “The Death Child” “a conjuring imagination rises to extraordinary beauty of conception.” These three poems are undoubtedly forerunners of the work of the “Fiona Macleod” period. In the Preface the writer stated his conviction that “a Romantic Revival is imminent in our poetic literature, a true awakening of genuinely romantic sentiment. The most recent phase thereof,” however, “that mainly due to Rossetti, has not fulfilled the hopes of those who saw in it the prelude to a new great poetic period. It has been too literary, inherently, but more particularly in expression.... Spontaneity it has lacked supremely.... It would seem as if it had already become mythical 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.... In a sense, there is neither Youth nor Age in Romance, it is the quintessence of the most vivid emotions of life.” And further on he voices the very personal belief “Happy is he who, in this day of spiritual paralysis, can still shut his eyes for a while and dream.”

Concerning the idea of fatality that underlies the opening ballad “The Weird of Michel Scott”—“meant as a lyrical tragedy, a tragedy of a soul that finds the face of disastrous fate set against it whithersoever it turn in the closing moments of mortal life,” he wrote to a friend, “What has always impressed me deeply—how deeply I can scarcely say—is the blind despotism of fate. It is manifested in Æschylus, in Isaiah and in the old Hebrew Prophets, in all literature, in all history and in life. This blind, terrible, indifferent Fate, this tyrant Chance, stays or spares, mutilates or rewards, annihilates or passes by without heed, without thought, with absolute blankness of purpose, aim, or passion....

“I am tortured by the passionate desire to create beauty, to sing something of ‘the impossible songs’ I have heard, to utter something of the rhythm of life that has most touched me. The next volume of romantic poems will be daringly of the moment, vital with the life and passion of to-day (I speak hopefully, not with arrogant assurance, of course), yet not a whit less romantic than ‘The Weird of Michel Scott’ or ‘The Death Child.’”

Many encouraging and appreciative letters reached him from friends known and unknown.

In Mr. William Allingham’s opinion “Michel Scott clothing his own Soul with Hell-fire is tremendous!”

Professor Edward Dowden was not wholly in accord with the poet’s views, as expressed in the Introduction:

Rathmines, Dublin,

July 10, 1888.

My dear Sharp,

It gave me great pleasure to get your new volume from yourself. I think that a special gift of yours, and one not often possessed, appears in this volume of romance and phantasy. I don’t find it possible to particularise one poem as showing its presence more than another, for the unity of the volume comes from its presence. And I rejoice at anything which tends to make this last quarter of the century other than what I feared it would be—a period of collecting and arranging facts, with perhaps such generalisations as specialists can make. (Not that this is not valuable work, but if it is the sole employment of a generation what an ill time for the imagination and the emotions!) At the same time I don’t think I should make any demand, if I could, for Romance. I should not put forth any manifesto in its favour, for this reason—that the leaders of a movement of phantasy and romance will have such a sorry following. The leaders of a school which overvalued form and technique may have been smaller men than the leaders of a romantic school, yet still their followers were learning something; but while the chiefs of the romantic and phantastic movement will be men of genius, what a lamentable crowd the disciples will be, who will try to be phantastic prepense. We shall have the horrors of the spasmodic school revived without that element of a high, vague, spiritual intention which gave some nobility—or pseudo-nobility—to the disciples of the spasmodists. We shall have every kind of extravagance and folly posing as poetry.

The way to control or check this is for the men who have a gift for romance to use that gift—which you have done—and to prove that phantasy is not incoherence but has its own laws. And they ought to discourage any and every one from attempting romance who has not a genius for romance.

Sincerely yours,

E. Dowden.

Meanwhile, the author of the ballads was at work preparing two volumes for the Canterbury Series—a volume of selected Odes, and one of American Sonnets, to which he contributed prefaces—and writing critical articles for the Academy, AthenÆum, Literary World, etc. Various important books were published that spring, and among those which came into his hands to write about were Underwoods by R. L. Stevenson, In Hospital by W. Henley; and from these writers respectively he received letters of comment. I am unable to remember what was the occasion of the first of the R. L. Stevenson notes, what nature of request it was that annoyed the older writer. Neither of his letters is dated, but from the context each obviously belongs to 1888.

Dear Mr. Sharp,

Yes, I was annoyed with you, but let us bury that; you have shown so much good nature under my refusal that I have blotted out the record.

And to show I have repented of my wrath: is your article written? If not, you might like to see early sheets of my volume of verse, not very good, but still—and the Scotch ones would amuse you I believe. And you might like also to see the plays I have written with Mr. Henley: let me know, and you shall have them as soon as I can manage.

Yours very truly,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

The notice I had seen already, and was pleased with.

After the appearance of the review of Underwoods, R. L. S. wrote again:

Dear Mr. Sharp,

What is the townsman’s blunder?—though I deny I am a townsman, for I have lived, on the whole, as much or more in the country: well, perhaps not so much. Is it that the thrush does not sing at night? That is possible. I only know most potently the blackbird (his cousin) does: many and many a late evening in the garden of that poem have I listened to one that was our faithful visitor; and the sweetest song I ever heard was past nine at night in the early spring, from a tree near the N. E. gate of Warriston cemetery. That I called what I believe to have been a merle by the softer name of mavis (and they are all turdi, I believe) is the head and front of my offence against literal severity, and I am curious to hear if it has really brought me into some serious error.

Your article is very true and very kindly put: I have never called my verses poetry: they are verse, the verse of a speaker not a singer; but that is a fair business like another. I am of your mind too in preferring much the Scotch verses, and in thinking “Requiem” the nearest thing to poetry that I have ever “clerkit.”

Yours very truly,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

R. L. S. Saranac, New York.

Mr. Henley wrote:

Merton Place, Chiswick, W.,

5: 7: 88.

My dear Sharp,

At Wescam we enjoyed once more the pleasant ways of friendship that had grown about us, and especially our Sunday informal evening gatherings to which came all those with whom we were in sympathy. Among the most frequent were Mrs. Mona Caird, the eager champion of women long before the movement passed into the militant hands of the suffragettes; Walter Pater, during his Oxford vacation; Dr. and Mrs. Garnett; John M. Robertson, who was living the “simple life” of a socialist in rooms close by; Richard Whiteing, then leader-writing for The Daily News, and author of the beautiful idyll The Island. Mathilde Blind—poetess novelist, who in youth had sat an eager disciple at the feet of Mazzini, came frequently, Ernest Rhys was writing poems and editing The Camelot Classics from the heights of Hampstead, and his wife, then Miss Grace Little, lived in the neighbourhood with her sisters, the eldest of whom, Lizzie Little, was a writer of charming verse. W. B. Yeats came in the intervals of wandering over Ireland in search of Folk tales; John Davidson had recently come to London, and was bitter over the hard struggle he was enduring; William Watson was a rare visitor. Another frequent visitor was Arthur Tomson the landscape painter, who came to us with an introduction from Mr. Andrew Lang. A warm friendship grew up between Arthur and ourselves, which was deepened by his second marriage with Miss Agnes Hastings, a girl-friend of ours, and lasted till his death in 1905. Mr. and Mrs. John M. Swan came occasionally, Mr. and Mrs. William Strang, we saw frequently, and Theodore Roussell was an ever welcome guest. Sir George Douglas came now and again from Kelso; Charles Mavor, editor of The Art Review, ran down occasionally from Glasgow. Other frequenters of our Sunday evenings were Richard Le Gallienne, whose Book bills of Narcissus was then recently published; Miss Alice Corkran, Mr. and Mrs. Todhunter, Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert Coleridge, Mr. and Mrs. Frank Rinder, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Pennell. The Russian Nihilist Stepniak and his wife were a great interest to us. I remember on one occasion they told us that Stepniak intended to make a secret visit to Russia—as he had done before—that he was starting the next morning, and though every care would be taken in matter of disguise, the risks were so great that he and his wife always said farewell to one another as though they never would meet again.

Mrs. Caird’s town house was close to us; and she, keenly interested—as my husband and I also were—in the subject of the legal position of women, had that spring written two articles on the Marriage question which were accepted by and published in The Westminster Review in July. Twelve years ago the possibilities of a general discussion on such subjects were very different to what exist now. The sensibilities of both men and women—especially of those who had no adequate knowledge of the legal inequalities of the Marriage laws nor of the abuses which were and are in some cases still the direct outcome of them—were disturbed and shocked by the plain statements put forward, by the passionate plea for justice, for freedom from tyrannous legal oppression, exercised consciously and unconsciously. Mrs. Caird’s articles met with acute hostility of a kind difficult to understand now, and much misunderstanding and unmerited abuse was meted out to her. Nevertheless these brave articles, published in book form under the title of The Morality of Marriage, and the novels written by the same pen, have been potent in altering the attitude of the public mind in its approach to and examination of such questions, in making private discussion possible.

In the autumn of 1888 the monograph on Heine was published in the Great Writers Series (Walter Scott); and the author always regarded it as the best piece of work of the kind he ever did. It seemed fitting that the writer of a life of Shelley should write one of Heine, for there is a kinship between the two poets. To their biographer Heine was the strangest and most fascinating of all the poets not only of one country and one century, but of all time and of all nations; he saw in the wayward brilliant poet “one of those flowers which bloom more rarely than the aloe—human flowers which unfold their petals but once, it may be, in the whole slow growth of humanity.... At his best Heine is a creature of controlled impulse; at his worst he is a creature of impulse uncontrolled. Through extremes he gained the golden mean of art: here is his apologia.”

The book is an endeavour to handle the subject in an impartial spirit, to tell the story vividly, to give a definite impression of the strange personality, and in the concluding pages to summarise Heine’s genius. But, “do what we will we cannot affiliate, we cannot classify Heine. When we would apprehend it his genius is as volatile as his wit.... Of one thing only can we be sure: that he is of our time, of our century. He is so absolutely and essentially modern that he is often antique....

“As for his song-motive, I should say it was primarily his Lebenslust, his delight in life: that love so intensely human that it almost necessarily involved the ignoring of the divine. Rainbow-hued as is his genius, he himself was a creature of earth. It was enough to live.... He would cling to life, even though it were by a rotten beam, he declared once in his extremity. And the poet of life he unquestionably is. There is a pulse in everything he writes: his is no galvanised existence. No parlour passions lead him into the quicksands of oblivion....”

The author was gratified by appreciative letters from Dr. Richard Garnett and Mr. George Meredith:

3 St. Edmund’s Terrace,

Nov 11, 1888.

My dear Sharp,

I have now finished your Heine, and can congratulate you upon an excellent piece of biographical work. You are throughout perfectly clear and highly interesting, and, what is more difficult with your subject, accurate and impartial. Or, if there is any partiality it is such as it is becoming in one poet to enlist aid for another. With all one’s worship of Heine’s genius, it must be allowed that he requires a great deal of toleration. The best excuse to be made for him is that his faults were largely faults of race—and just now I feel amiably toward the Jews, for if you have seen the AthenÆum you will have observed that I have fallen into the hands of the Philistines. Almost the only point in which I differ from you is as regards your too slight mention of Platen, who seems to me not only a master of form but a true though limited poet—a sort of German Matthew Arnold. Your kind notice of my translation from the Romanzen did not escape me. Something, perhaps, should have been said of James Thomson, the best English translator.

Believe me, my dear Sharp,

Most sincerely yours,

R. Garnett.

Box Hill, Dec. 10, 1887.

Dear Mr. Sharp,

Your Heine gave me pleasure. I think it competently done; and coming as a corrective to Stigund’s work, it brings the refreshment of the antidote. When I have the pleasure of seeing you we will converse upon Heine. Too much of his—almost all of the Love poems drew both tenderness and tragic emotion from a form of sensualism, much of his wit too was wilful—a trick of the mind. Always beware of the devilish in wit: it has the obverse of an intellectual meaning, and it shows at the best interpretation, a smallness of range. Macmillan says that if they can bring out my book “Reading of Earth” on the 18th I may expect it. Otherwise you will not receive a copy until after Christmas.

Faithfully yours,

George Meredith.

Mr. Meredith wrote again after the publication of his poems:

Box Hill, Feb. 15, 1888.

Dear Mr. Sharp,

Yours very cordially,

George Meredith.

It was the late spring before we could visit Mr. Meredith. The day of our going was doubly memorable to me, because as we went along the leafy road from Burford Bridge station we met Mr. and Mrs. Grant Allen—my first meeting with them—whose home was at that time in Dorking. Memorable, too, was the courteous genial greeting from our host and his charming daughter; and the many delightful incidents of that first week end visit. William and Mr. Meredith had long talks in the garden chalet on the edge of the wood. And in the evenings the novelist read aloud to us. On that occasion I think it was he read some chapters from “One of our Conquerors” on which he was working; another time it was from “The Amazing Marriage” and from “Lord Ormont and his Aminta.” The reader’s enjoyment seemed as great as that of his audience, and it interested me to hear how closely his own methods of conversation resembled, in wittiness and brilliance, those of the characters in his novels. Sometimes he turned a merciless play of wit on his listener; but my husband, who was as deeply attached to the man as he admired the writer, enjoyed these verbal duels in which he was usually worsted. The incident of the visit that charmed me most arose from my stating that I had never heard the nightingale. So on the Sunday afternoon we were taken to a stretch of woodland, “my woods of Westermain” the poet smilingly declared, and there, standing among the tree-boles in the late afternoon sun-glow I listened for the bird-notes as he described them to me until he was satisfied I heard aright.

The Xmas of 1888, and the following New Year’s day we passed at Tunbridge Wells, with Mathilde Blind, in rooms overlooking the common. Many delightful hours were spent together in the evenings listening to one or other of the two poets reading aloud their verse, or parts of the novels they had in process. Mathilde was writing her Tarantella; my husband had recently finished a boys’ serial story for Young Folk’s Paper, with a highly sensational plot entitled “The Secret of Seven Fountains,” and was at work on a Romance of a very different order in which he then was deeply interested, though in later life he considered it immature in thought and expression. The boys’ story was one of adventure, of life seen from a purely objective point of view. The Children of To-morrow was the author’s first endeavour to give expression in prose to the more subjective side of his nature, to thoughts, feelings, aspirations he had hitherto suppressed; it is the direct forerunner of the series of romantic tales he afterward wrote as Fiona Macleod; it was also the expression of his attitude of revolt against the limitations of the accepted social system. The writing of the Monograph on Shelley had rekindled many ideas and beliefs he held in common with the earlier poet—ideas concerning love and marriage, viewed not from the standpoint of the accepted practical standard of morality, nor of the possible realisation by the average humanity of a more complex code of social morality, but viewed from the standpoint held by a minority of dreamers and thinkers who look beyond the present strictly guarded, fettered conditions of married life, to a time, when man and woman, equally, shall know that to stultify or slay the spiritual inner life of another human being, through the radical misunderstanding between alien temperaments inevitably tied to one another, is one of the greatest crimes against humanity. That the author knew how visionary for the immediate future were these ideas, which we at that time so eagerly discussed with a little group of intimate sympathetic friends, is shown by the prefatory lines in the book:

“Forlorn the way, yet with strange gleams of gladness;
Sad beyond words the voices far behind.

Yet we, perplext with our diviner madness,
Must heed them not—the goal is still to find!

What though beset by pain and fear and sorrow,

We must not fail, we Children of To-morrow.”

The Children of To-morrow called forth all manner of divergent opinions. It was called depressing by one critic, and out of touch with realities. Another considered the chief interest of the book to consist “in what may be called its aims. It is clearly an attempt toward greater truth in art and life.” All agreed as to the power displayed in the descriptions of nature. The critic in Public Opinion showed discernment as to the author’s intentions when he wrote “To our mind the delightful irresponsibility of this book, the calm determination which it displays that now, at least, the author means to please himself, to give vent to many a pent up feeling or opinion constitutes one of its greatest charms. This waywardness, the waywardness of a true artist, is shown on almost every page.... Mr. Sharp states his case with wonderful power and lucidity; he draws no conclusions—as an artist they do not concern him—he leaves the decision to the individual temperament.”

Mathilde Blind wrote to the author:

1 St. Edmund’s Terrace, N. W., 1889.

Dear Child of the Future,

You have indeed written a strange, weird, romantic tale with the sound of the sea running through it like an accompaniment. Adama Acosta is a specially well-imagined and truthful character of a high kind; and the intermittent wanderings of his brain have something akin to the wailing notes of the instrument of which he is such a master. But it is in your conception of love—the subtle, delicate, ideal attraction of two beings inevitably drawn to each other by the finest elements of their being—that the charm of the story consists to my mind; on the other hand, you have succeeded in drawing a very realistic and vivid picture of the hard and handsome Lydia, with her purely negative individuality, and in showing the deadly effect which one person may exercise over another in married life—without positive outward wrongdoing which might lead to the divorce court. I agree with you in thinking that the end is the finest part of the Romance, especially the last scene where Dane and Sanpriel are in the wood under the old oak tree, where the voice of the rising storm with its ominous note of destiny is magnificently described. Such a passing away in the mid-most fire of passion on the wings of the elements has always seemed to me the climax of human happiness. But I fear the book is likely to rouse a good deal of opposition in many quarters for the daring disregard of the binding sanctity of the marriage relation. If I may speak quite openly and as a friend who would wish you to do yourself full justice and produce the best work that is in you, I wish you had given yourself more time to work out some of the situations which seem, to me at least, to lack a certain degree of precision and consistency. Thus, for example, Dane after discovering that Ford has been trying to murder him, and is making secret love to his wife, rushes off to the painter’s studio evidently bent on some sort of quarrel or revenge, yet nothing comes of it, and afterwards we find the would-be murderer on outwardly friendly terms with the sculptor on board the house boat. I must tell you by the way how powerful I think the scene of the dying horse in Ratho Sands and the murder of Lydia. I should also have liked to have heard a little more of the real aims and objects of “The Children of the Future” and would like to know whether such an association really exists among any section of the modern Jews; we must talk of that this evening or some other time when we meet. I hope to look in to-night with Sarrazin and Bunand who are coming to a little repast here first. Madox Brown has been reading your book with the greatest interest.

Yours ever,

Mathilde Blind.