his life, for the two conditions were
equally imperative in their demands upon him.

His preference, naturally, was for the intimate creative work which
he knew grew out of his inner self; though the exigencies of life,
his dependence on his pen for his livelihood, and, moreover, the
keen active interest "William Sharp" took in all the movements of
the day, literary and political, at home and abroad, required of
him a great amount of applied study and work.

The strain must indeed have been enormous, and one cannot but feel that
much of it was a needless, even trivial "expense of spirit," and regret
that, when "Fiona Macleod" had so manifestly come into her own, William
Sharp should have continued to keep up the mystification, entailing as
it did such an elaborate machinery of concealment, not the least taxing
of which must have been the necessity of keeping up "Fiona Macleod's"
correspondence as well as his own. Better, so to say, to have thrown
William Sharp overboard, and to have reserved the energies of a
temperament almost abnormally active, but physically delusive and
precarious, for the finer productiveness of "Fiona Macleod." But William
Sharp deemed otherwise. He was wont to say, "Should the secret be found
out, Fiona dies," and in a letter to Mrs. Thomas A. Janvier--she and her
husband being among the earliest confidants of his secret--he makes this
interesting statement: "I can write out of my heart in a way I could
not do as William Sharp, and indeed I could not do so if I were the
woman Fiona Macleod is supposed to be, unless veiled in scrupulous
anonymity.... This rapt sense of oneness with nature, this _cosmic
ecstasy_ and elation, this wayfaring along the extreme verges of the
common world, all this is so wrought up with the romance of life that
I could not bring myself to expression by my outer self, insistent and
tyrannical as that need is.... My truest self, the self who is below
all other selves, and my most intimate life and joys and sufferings,
thoughts, emotions, and dreams, _must_ find expression, yet I cannot
save in this hidden way...."

Later he wrote: "Sometimes I am tempted to believe I am half a woman,
and so far saved as I am by the hazard of chance from what a woman can
be made to suffer if one let the light of the common day illuminate the
avenues and vistas of her heart...."

At one time, I thought that William Sharp's assumption of a feminine
pseudonym w