Page:Irish plays and playwrights (IA irishplaysplaywr00weygrich).pdf/330

 294 exceed any even of Walt Whitman's. For years Sharp lived by criticism, as editor of "The Canterbury Poets" and as reviewer for many of the London journals. To me none of this critical work is significant until he came to write of the movement that carried him to fame,—to fame, I say, because "Fiona Macleod" was famous for a decade, and not only as a mystery, but as a revealer of a new beauty in words, and as a widener of horizons.

I have, I think, by this time made clear what to me is the great strength of William Sharp—his power to revisualize the Celtic past of Scotland and to imagine stories of that past that are as native to it as those handed down in Bardic legend or folk-lore. I have emphasized my belief that in other kinds of writing his attainment is less original, though often beautiful in its imitativeness, and this imitativeness I will explain as being due partly to that quality of the play-actor that was in him as in so many of Celtic blood, partly to his lack of time to hew out for himself a way of his own, and partly to his quick responsiveness to any new beauty pointed out by work that he admired. It was not altogether, however, lack of time that prevented his attainment of a larger originality, an originality in other sorts of writing than the "Seanchas." Sharp had an unfortunate disbelief in early life in the value of technique. In the preface to the "Romantic Ballads" (1888), for instance, he expressed the belief that "the supreme merit of a poem is not perfection of art, but the quality of the imagination which is the source of such real or approximate perfection." This, as I interpret