At one time, I thought that William Sharp’s assumption of a feminine pseudonym was a quite legitimate device to steal a march on his critics, and to win from them, thus disguised, that recognition which he must have been aware he had failed to win in his own person.  Indeed, it is doubtful whether, if he had published the “Fiona Macleod” writings under his own name, they would have received fair critical treatment.  I am very sure that they would not; for there is quite a considerable amount of so-called “criticism” which is really foregone conclusion based on personal prejudice, or biassed preconception, and the refusal to admit (employing a homely image) that an old dog does occasionally learn new tricks.  Many well-known writers have resorted to this device, sometimes with considerable success.  Since reading Mrs. Sharp’s biography, however, I conclude that this motive had but little, if any, influence on William Sharp, and that his statement to Mrs. Janvier must be taken as virtually sincere.

A certain histrionism, which was one of his charms, and is perhaps inseparable from imaginative temperaments, doubtless had its share in his consciousness of that “dual nature” of which we hear so much, and which it is difficult sometimes to take with Sharp’s “Celtic” seriousness.  Take, for example, this letter to his wife, when, having left London, precipitately, in response to the call of the Isles, he wrote:  “The following morning we (for a kinswoman was with me) stood on the Greenock pier waiting for the Hebridean steamer, and before long were landed on an island, almost the nearest we could reach, that I loved so well.”  Mrs. Sharp dutifully comments:  “The ‘we’ who stood on the pier at Greenock is himself in his dual capacity; his ‘kinswoman’ is his other self.”  Later he writes, on his arrival in the Isle of Arran:  “There is something of a strange excitement in the knowledge that two people are here:  so intimate and yet so far off.  For it is with me as though Fiona were asleep in another room.  I catch myself listening for her step sometimes, for the sudden opening of a door.  It is unawaredly that she whispers to me.  I am eager to see what she will do—­particularly in The Mountain Lovers.  It seems passing strange to be here with her alone at last....”  I confess that this strikes me disagreeably.  It is one thing to be conscious of a “dual personality”—­after all, consciousness of dual personality is by no means uncommon, and it is a commonplace that, spiritually, men of genius are largely feminine—­but it is another to dramatize one’s consciousness in this rather childish fashion.  There seems more than a suspicion of pose in such writing:  though one cannot but feel that William Sharp was right in thinking that the real “Fiona Macleod” was asleep at the moment.  At the same time, William Sharp seems unmistakably to have been endowed with what I suppose one has to call “psychic” powers—­though the word has been “soiled