Page:Irish plays and playwrights (IA irishplaysplaywr00weygrich).pdf/331

Rh it means that a poem, when of perfect art, has back of that perfect art a high imaginative quality; but by his own practice Sharp knows that he thought the quality would suffice without the highest art in its expression. It was this belief that made him leave his work incomplete; he read his verses, no doubt, with the glow in which he wrote them recalled to memory, and without the realization that he had not got down on paper for others half of the creative force that was in him as he wrote.

I have found a reason for a lesser success than the early work of "Fiona Macleod" promised to him in his imitativeness, but in some ways he was handicapped, too, by lack of models to follow. Granted he could have blazed other ways for himself than that of the "Seanchas," he lessened the originality of his attainment by imitation, but if he could not have so blazed other ways he just as surely could have gone further had he had models, or rather good models, to follow, models, for instance, in novels of Highland life. The very fact of there being great realistic stories of Highland life might have made it possible for him to have written a Highland "Silence Farm."

But enough of what might have been: what is is good enough, good enough at its best to treasure among those things that are a lasting part of our lives. However great may be the reaction against his work because of the nine days' wonder about the identity of its creator, certain parts of it, certain tales and certain verses and a play, will hold their own against the years. Through such tales