k, 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 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