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 Rügen: "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
