very original personality, who has all his life wanted to make
beautiful things in words out of his dream of life, has disappointed
himself and his friends. He is suddenly afforded the opportunity, by the
interest in Gaelic subjects that the Celtic Renaissance has awakened, to
gain a hearing for work of a kind he has long wanted to do. He had not
done such work previously, because he had to live by his pen and could
work consistently only at the sort of thing that would sell. He was well
known as a journeyman of letters, so well known for bookmaking, and the
ways of getting commissions from London editors and publishers, that his
knowledge of Highland life would be questioned. All in London knew him
as a Londoner. It would be useless for him to say that the Celtic
Renaissance had brought back his childhood to him, a childhood as
definitely dominated by a Highland nurse as Stevenson's was by the
Lowland Alison Cunningham. It would be useless to tell of his summers in
Argyllshire and among the inner isles, his intimacy with fishermen who
were as elemental as his own dreams of old time. It would have been cast
up to him that the editor of "The Canterbury Poets" could not be an
original writer, and the very nine days' wonder of "Vistas" would have
been pointed to to prove that he might now do well enough, as an
imitator, perhaps of Mr. Yeats, as he was in "Vistas;" successful as an
imitator of M. Maeterlinck, but that an original Highland writer could
not come out of Hampstead. There is no doubt in my mind that it was the
part of wisdom for Sharp to put out the new work under a pseudonym,
worldly wise if you will, but wise, too, with a higher wisdom. If he
could keep the side of him he had never yet exhausted through hackwork
apart from his other work, it would grow as it could not if it were a
part of his daily stint.

Why Sharp chose a woman's name for his pseudonym has troubled many, but
this choice was, I think, as was the assumption of a pseudonym, the part
of wisdom. I do not believe, as he at times liked to believe, that he
attained a woman's standpoint. He had been complimented on all sides for
his composition of the wife's letters in "A Fellowe and his Wife"
(1892), in which Mrs. von Teuffel wrote the husband's. Sharp enjoyed
their writing as a _tour de force_ and he probably believed they were
very womanly. I should say that they showed insight into womanly ways of
looking at things rather than a dramatic identifi