dered as an essay in the art
of letters. There are so many temptations toward writing of it as a
scientific problem,--for who is not interested in "dual
personality"?--or as a "psychic revelation," if one is bitten--and who
is not?--by curiosity about hidden "things"; or as an irritating hoax,
if one has been befooled--and who, for one moment or another has not
been?--into believing that this writing under the pseudonym of "Fiona
Macleod" was the confession of a woman. The romance of it remains, no
matter from what point of view you consider it, and, despite your
preoccupation with this or that phase of it, the beauty of literary art
of parts of it. Parts of it, I say, for to me no writer of our time was
more uneven in his work. My point of view, indicated perhaps brutally,
and with a firstly and secondly is:--

Firstly, that until he was nearly forty, William Sharp was no more than
a skillful literary practitioner, a higher sort of hack, who had done
some better writing of a tenuous kind of beauty but imitative in
substance and art, in "Sospiri di Roma" and "Vistas," and that after
forty, when he was developing one undeveloped side of himself as "Fiona
Macleod," he developed another undeveloped side of himself in "Silence
Farm." That he attained in a sort of writing, and greatly, that he had
not attained in before, in "Silence Farm," has not been acknowledged, so
easy has it been to those interested in his work to lose sight of all
else in their pursuit of the "Fiona Macleod" side of his nature. It is
true of "Silence Farm," as of almost all his other work done under the
name of William Sharp, that it is imitative; but it is equally true that
a large part of the "Fiona Macleod" work is imitative, too. "Silence
Farm" is done under the influence of the later work of Mr. Hardy, but
the material of "Silence Farm" is its author's own, and the color of the
writing is as distinctly of the Lowlands as the color of "Tess" is of
Wessex. That "Silence Farm" is better work in its kind, though that kind
is less original than some of his writing as "Fiona Macleod," I have
been forced against my prejudices to believe. If I did not so believe I
would not have spoken of it side by side with "Tess."

Secondly, that as "Fiona Macleod," William Sharp did much good writing
in almost everything published under the pseudonym, achieving wholeness
of good tissue in certain sketches and tales and verses on rather
varying kinds of subjects, but