Sept. 6, 1882.
Dear Mr. Sharp,
... I came abroad and brought your book with me. I have read it again through among the mountains and have found much to admire and more than like in it; so that the hours I passed in reading it are and will be pleasant hours to remember. If I may venture a criticism it is that nature occupies more than three fourths of the Emotion of the Book, and not Humanity, and even the passion and childhood and youth, and later love and age—and all passions are painted in terms of Nature, and through her moods. It pleases me, for I care more for Nature myself when I am not pressed on by human feeling, than I do for Man, but an artist ought to love Man more than Nature, and should write about Him for his own sake. It won’t do to become like the being in the “Palace of Art.” It will not do either to live in a Palace of Nature, alone. But all this is more a suggestion than an objection, and it is partly suggested to me at first by the fact that the poem in the midst of The Human Inheritance, Cycle III, is the nearest to the human heart and yet the least well written of all the cycles—at least so it seems to me. I like exceedingly “The Tides of Venice.” It seems to me to come nearer the kind of poem in which the Poet’s Shuttle weaves into one web Nature and Humanity and the close is very solemn and noble.
You asked me to do a critic’s part. It is a part I hate, and I am not a critic. But I say what I say for the sake of men and women whom you may help through the giving of high pleasure even more than you help them in this book.
With much sympathy and admiration,
I am yours most sincerely,
Stopford A. Brooke.
Two other deaths occurred in this year, and made a profound impression on the young writer. I quote his own words:
“It was in 1882 also that another friend, to whom Philip Marston had also become much attached—attracted in the first instance by the common bond of unhappiness—died under peculiarly distressing circumstances. Philip Marston and myself were, if I am not mistaken, the last of his acquaintances to see him alive. Thomson had suffered such misery and endured such hopelessness, that he had yielded to intemperate habits, including a frequent excess in the use of opium. He had come back from a prolonged visit to the country, where all had been well with him, but through over confidence he had fallen a victim again immediately on his return. For a few weeks his record is almost a blank. When the direst straits were reached, he so far reconquered his control that he felt able to visit one whose sympathy and regard had stood all tests. Marston soon realised that his friend was mentally distraught, and endured a harrowing experience, into the narrative of which I do not care to enter.
“I arrived in the late afternoon, and found Philip in a state of nervous perturbation. Thomson was lying down on the bed in the adjoining room: stooping I caught his whispered words that he was dying; upon which I lit a match, and in the sudden glare beheld his white face on the blood-stained pillow.