elightful 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,
until he seemed to be two personalities in one. It was a development
which, as it proceeded, produced a tremendous strain on his physical
and mental resources, and at one time between 1897-8 threatened him
with a complete nervous collapse. And there was for a time distinct
opposition between those two natures which made it extremely
difficult for him to adjust