y does he foresee such a time, but he foreshadows it, heralds it
in some of his sketches, "Aileen" for one, by attempting it. Perhaps he
has succeeded, perhaps not. To me the attempt is a failure, not, I
think, because he is writing for to-morrow, for that age when the
spiritual awakening he so often prophesied shall have come, but because
he is attempting what cannot be done in any age. If he were seeking only
suggestion, well and good. But he seeks more, and fails, I think, to
attain more. It seems to me impossible that the suggestions he creates
can ever be more than suggestions. They cannot become definite concepts
that will mean the same thing to all men. Suggestion, the opening-up of
vistas, is a high attribute of the art he follows; but he is not content
with suggestion, he would seek more definite expression of what, after
all, is not thought but mood. So it is that he is most successful when
conveying mood and less successful when conveying esoteric thought. As a
critic, of course, on a plane easier for the conveyance of thought,
Sharp is definite enough, completely successful in conveying the ideas
that he intends to convey.

Often, I fear, when Sharp intends "spiritual history," either in a tale
wholly devoted to this purpose, as "The Divine Adventure," or as
explanatory to the incidents of some more tangible tale, he is really
only playing with words, beautiful words, words sometimes so beautiful
that we are apt to forget that words are to be used not alone for
beauty's sake. Often, again, I fear, he will introduce beautiful symbols
simply for their beauty and not because they have a real purpose, not
because they will more intimately convey, even to the initiated, the
intent of his writing. That these practices are the result of
carelessness, sometimes, as well as of his subservience to beauty, the
fascination that words merely as words or visions merely as visions
exert upon him, is, I think, true. It is but seldom, I believe, that the
underlying thought is incoherent. In almost all of his earlier writing,
however, even in the earlier "Fiona" writing, he is very careless. He
contradicts himself in his short stories as to facts, he gets his family
relationships tangled in a way that cannot be explained by any process
of nature, and so, too, I think, he gets his symbols mixed, or deludes
himself into the belief that something that was hastily written "came to
him" that way and so should be preserved in that e