upon Alasdair M'Ian, playing to
him the Pibroch of the Mad, Alasdair M'Ian, in telling whose story
"Fiona Macleod" revealed--I suppose, by chance--something of the
struggle of William Sharp to succeed in letters. Much more frequently,
however, he uses a supernatural power that is further removed from those
in which modern science is interested, such as the machination of
fairies that made Allison Achanna the "Anointed Man"--that, in plain
speech, had driven him fey; or such as the lure of the serpent goddess
that drove to his death the piper hero of "By the Yellow Moon Rock," or
the exchanging of human child for fairy child that is the burden of
"Faraghaol."

It is much more likely that William Sharp would have made more of this
changeling motive had it not come so near to the question of dual
personality, which it would be dangerous to him to discuss, as would
that question so closely akin, the question of people who are
"away,"--that is, with the fairies,--a kindly explanation of insanity,
chronic or recurrent. As William Sharp he has touched on the question of
dual personality several times in his verses, and very definitely in "A
Fellowe and his Wife." In this last-named book he says, in a letter that
the Countess Ilse writes to her husband in Ruegen: "This duality is so
bewildering. I to be myself, whom you know, and whom I know--and then
that other I, whom you do not know at all and whom I only catch glimpses
of as in a mirror, or hear whispering for a moment in the twilight."
That he could not take up the topic so definitely in his later writings
must have, indeed, been a cross to him, for there was hardly any other
question, unless perhaps that of "ancestral memory," which interested
him more deeply. It might be argued, I suppose, that he did discuss it
in "The Divine Adventure," in considering the relations of Spirit, Will,
and Body. Mrs. Sharp, I take it, so holds when she says in her "Memoir"
that the William Sharp work was that of the Will and the "Fiona Macleod"
work beyond the control of the Will. And it is true that these three,
the Spirit, Will, and Body, though each is given a distinctive
personality, each a memory distinct from the memory of the others, are
all but the component parts of one man. Mrs. Sharp does not, however,
anywhere avow directly a belief in the possession of a real dual
personality by her husband, and she definitely contradicts Mr. Yeats for
his expression of belief that "William Sh