At length Fiona Macleod was born.  She arose out of nowhere, so far as the reading public could discover.  Really there was a hidden shy self in Sharp, which must find expression impossible except in some secret way.  We knew him as the brilliant critic, the man of affairs, and the wide and experienced traveller.  We did not know him, until we discovered that he was Fiona, in that second life of his in the borderland where flesh and spirit meet.

First there came Pharais in 1893, and that was the beginning of much.  Then came The Children of To-morrow, the forerunner of Fiona Macleod.  It was his first prose expression of the subjective side of his nature, together with the element of revolt against conventionalities, which was always strongly characteristic of him.  It introduced England to the hidden places of the Green Life.

The secret of his double personality was confided only to a few friends, and was remarkably well kept.  When pressed by adventurous questioners, some of these allies gave answers which might have served for models in the art of diplomacy.  So Sharp wrote on, openly as William Sharp, and secretly as Fiona Macleod.  Letters had to reach Fiona somehow, and so it was given out that she was his cousin, and that letters sent to him would be safely passed on to her.  If, however, it was difficult to keep the secret from the public, it was still more difficult for one man to maintain two distinct personalities.  William Sharp of course had to live, while Fiona might die any day.  Her life entailed upon him another burden, not of personification only, but of subject and research, and he was driven to sore passes to keep both himself and her alive.  For each was truly alive and individual—­two distinct people, one of whom thought of the other as if she were “asleep in another room.”  Even the double correspondence was a severe burden and strain, for Fiona Macleod had her own large post-bag which had to be answered, just as William Sharp had his.  But far beyond any such outward expressions of themselves as these, the difficulty of the double personality lay in deep springs of character and of taste.  Sharp’s mind was keenly intellectual, observant, and reasoning; while Fiona Macleod was the intuitional and spiritual dreamer.  She was indeed the expression of the womanly element in Sharp.  This element certainly dominated him, or rather perhaps he was one of those who have successfully invaded the realm of alien sex.  In his earlier work, such as The Lady of the Sea,—­“the woman who is in the heart of woman,”—­we have proof of this; for in that especially he so “identified himself with woman’s life, seeing it through her own eyes that he seems to forget sometimes that he is not she.”  So much was this the case that Fiona Macleod actually received at least one proposal of marriage.  It was answered quite kindly, Fiona replying that she had other things to do, and could not think of it; but the little incident shows how true the saying about Sharp was, that “he was always in love with something or another.”  This loving and love-inspiring element in him has been strongly challenged, and some of the women who have judged him, have strenuously disowned him as an exponent of their sex.  Yet the fact is unquestionable that he was able to identify himself in a quite extraordinary degree with what he took to be the feminine soul.