A PSYCHOLOGICAL PUZZLE.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXXIII, Issue 16034, 14 September 1912, Page 10

A PSYCHOLOGICAL PUZZLE.

Literature has never presented a more obscure or more fascinating problem than tho dual personality of William Sharp and “ Fiona, Macleod.” But instances of a kind of “ possession have been discovorcd in other fields of art, and during tho last ton years a curious case lias been occupying the attention of American psychologists. A man with no previous knowledge of art suddenly began to paint pictures bear ing a remarkable resemblance to those of an artist of marked style who had died a short time before. The man himself believed that ho was under tho control of tho dead painter’s spirit, though it docs not appear that he was identified with tho other’s individuality in any other way. Nor can wc doubt that Du Maurier had some ground for the description of Trilby’s musical obsession, seeing that quite recently French savants have been occupied with tho case of a girl of most moderate musical ability who has developed suddenly a wonderful gift of song under medical suggestion. But “ Fiona Maclcod ” remains tho crowning miracle of literary duality, and to most minds tho publication of a volume of selected poems by tho late William Sharp will invest the problem with added interest and mystery. These poems, according to a careful and not unkindly critic in “The Nation,” though founded on good material, and worked up with scholarly judgment and excellentcraftsmanship, aro essentially undistinguished. Jn no ease do they even suggest the art-magic which breathes through every lino of “ Fiona Macleod.” True, the themes of William Sharp and of “ Fiona Macleod ” wero wholly different. The poot-scliolar dealt gracefully and sincerely with the visible and accepted merchandise of his calling, holding an assured but not unique position in English letters. The mystic Celtic muse, on the other hand, dominated tho most magnetic, most lyrio movement in modern British poetry, the Celtic Renaissance, a thing of wandering lights and eerie shadows and elfin charm. Yet this difference need be of no account. Distinction in verse is not bound to its foundation nor even to tho depth of its impulse, as lovers of Heine well can testify. The English critic accounts for the feminine and artistic individuality of “ Fiona Macleod ” on what wo may call rationalistic lines. She was an artistic creation, he sai'.s, and perfect, as other avowed creations havo been, but her creator was nob perfect, and must needs suffer by comparison with the child of his brain. His creative instinct was, indeed, abnormal, since he became “periodically possessed” by the creature of his imagination. Tho very secrecy on which her dream-life depended became tho spur of difficulty which is needed to draw forth tho highest power of any artist, a spur which some have found in artificial handicaps, such as translation or abstruse study, and others in the naturally untoward circumstances of their lives.

"U'e can easily suppose this line of argument peculiarly comforting to those of the Baconian heresy. The known poetic works of Francis Bacon consist of some Latin hymns of quite exceptional badness. It is surely bordering on the absurd to suppose that tho sn.mo author, under any spur of difficulty, could have produced the songs of Ariel and the dirge of Fidelia : but there is every poetic warrant , ( r the literary temperament finding i, stimulus in tho “silver domino’’ of a safe nom do plume. But so sober a conclusion will hardly satisfy the increasing army of Orientalised philosophers among us. Wo are not certain if the Spiritualists have ever claimed this miracle of double personality as the work of those unseen intelligences with which they have fancifully peopled the globe. But for tho ltcincarnationistr. there have boon few psychological phenomena nioro opportune than tho absolute femininity of “Fiona Macleod.” Here, they may well say, is a soul that remembers the very subtlest aroma of a remote past, a soul that has built itself a poet-templo of memory in which tho alien circumstances of tho present incarnation have neither place nor power. The caso of

“ Fiona Macleod,” indeed, fits in far better with the growing theory of rebirth than with that fantastic theory cf the Uniting soul which was elaborated l>y certain German philosophers during the nineteenth century. Tho Urnung soul is regarded as a woman spirit slipped by mistake into a man’s body or vice versa. Thero is, by the way, a curious development in modern fiction which, on lines less marked, carries cut the same train of speculation as that arising from the literary entity of “Fiona Macleod.” Formerly tho mental atmosphere of men and women writers was as sharply differentiated as the clothes they wore. Richardson set tho fashion of dissecting the female heart on paper, hut all his compeers 'and most of his immediate successors showed their wisdom by staying on familiar ground. Meredith subsequently took all human nature for his province, and mado quito a few feminine blunders with that highhanded air that hushes the ordinary critic, while Mr flail Caine’s guardian angel wept when he left off drawing Icelandic Titans and began drawing Glory Quaylce. But Kingsley had a surer hand, and it would be difficult to account for the unearthly perspicacity of some of- the later novelists, such as Mr Janies Stevens and some of the standard Americans. On the other hand such literary Amazons as George Eliot, Mrs Humphry AVard and Gertrude Atherton havo carried the war into tho enemy’s camp, and flashed the searchlight of intuition on man, both in his mightiness and his “ merencss,’’ in an equally disconcerting fashion. All this shows that ivc are indeed on the border of acquiring a sixth sense that will make short work of our mest pressing social problems by means of a large-hearted sympathy once all but impossible between men and women.