William Sharp’s explanation to myself—­as I believe to others of his friends—­was to the same tenor as this posthumous statement.  He and he only had actually written the “Fiona Macleod” fantasies and poems, but—­yes! there was a real “Fiona Macleod” as well.  She was a beautiful cousin of his, living much in solitude and dreams, and seldom visiting cities.  Between her and him there was a singular spiritual kinship, which by some inexplicable process, so to say, of psychic collaboration, had resulted in the writings to which he had given her name.  They were hers as well as his, his as well as hers.  Several times he even went so far as to say that Miss Macleod was contemplating a visit to London, but that her visit was to be kept a profound secret, and that he intended introducing her to three of his friends and no more—­George Meredith, W.B.  Yeats, and myself.  Probably he made the same mock-confidence to other friends, as a part of his general scheme of mystification.  On one occasion, when I was sitting with him in his study, he pointed to the framed portrait of a beautiful woman which stood on top of a revolving book-case, and said “That is Fiona!” I affected belief, but, rightly or wrongly, it was my strong impression that the portrait thus labelled was that of a well-known Irish lady prominently identified with Home Rule politics, and I smiled to myself at the audacious white lie.  Mrs. Sharp, whose remembrance of her husband goes back to “a merry, mischievous little boy in his eighth year, with light-brown curly hair, blue-grey eyes, and a laughing face, and dressed in a tweed kilt,” tells us that this “love not only of mystery for its own sake, but of mystification also,” was a marked characteristic of his nature—­a characteristic developed even in childhood by the necessity he always felt of hiding away from his companions that visionary side of his life which was almost painfully vivid with him, and the sacredness of which in late years he felt compelled to screen under his pseudonym.

That William Sharp’s affirmation of an actual living and breathing “Fiona Macleod” was, however, virtually true is confided by this significant and illuminating passage in Mrs. Sharp’s biography.  Mrs. Sharp is speaking of a sojourn together in Rome during the spring of 1891, in which her husband had experienced an unusual exaltation and exuberance of vital and creative energy.

There, at last [she says], he had found the desired incentive towards a true expression of himself, in the stimulus and sympathetic understanding of the friend to whom he dedicated the first of the books published under his pseudonym.  This friendship began in Rome and lasted throughout the remainder of his life.  And though this new phase of his work was at no time the result of collaboration, as certain of his critics have suggested, he was deeply conscious of his indebtedness to this friend, for—­as he stated to me in a letter of instructions, written before he went