To speak faithfully, it was the comparative mediocrity, and occasional even positive badness, of the work done over his own name that formed one of the stumbling-blocks to the acceptance of the theory that William Sharp could be “Fiona Macleod.”  Of course, his work had been that of an accomplished widely-read man of letters, his life of Heine being perhaps his most notable achievement in prose; and his verse had not been without intermittent flashes and felicities, suggestive of smouldering poetic fires, particularly in his Sospiri di Roma; but, for the most part, it had lacked any personal force or savour, and was entirely devoid of that magnetism with which William Sharp, the man, was so generously endowed.  In fact, its disappointing inadequacy was a secret source of distress to the innumerable friends who loved him with a deep attachment, to which the many letters making one of the delightful features of Mrs. Sharp’s biography bear witness.  In himself William Sharp was so prodigiously a personality, so conquering in the romantic flamboyance of his sun-like vitality, so overflowing with the charm of a finely sensitive, richly nurtured temperament, so essentially a poet in all he felt and did and said, that it was impossible patiently to accept his writings as any fair expression of himself.  He was, as we say, so much more than his books—­so immeasurably and delightfully more—­that, compared with himself, his books practically amounted to nothing; and one was inclined to say of him in one’s heart, as one does sometimes say of such imperfectly articulate artistic natures:  “What a pity he troubles to write at all!  Why not be satisfied with being William Sharp?  Why spoil ‘William Sharp’ by this inadequate and misleading translation?”

The curious thing, too, was that the work he did over his own name, after “Fiona Macleod” had escaped into the freedom of her own beautiful individual utterance, showed no improvement in quality, no marks of having sprung from the same mental womb where it had lain side by side with so fair a sister.  But, of course, one can readily understand that such work would naturally lack spontaneity of impulse, having to be done, more or less, against the grain, from reasons of expediency:  so long as “Fiona Macleod” must remain a secret, William Sharp must produce something to show for himself, in order to go on protecting that secret, which would, also, be all the better kept by William Sharp continuing in his original mediocrity.  Of this dual activity, Mrs. Sharp thus writes with much insight: 

From then till the end of his life [she says] there was a continual play of the two forces in him, or of the two sides of his nature:  of the intellectually observant, reasoning mind—­the actor, and of the intuitively observant, spiritual mind—­the dreamer, which differentiated more and more one from the other, and required different conditions, different environment, different stimuli,